Pistachio warning could signal food safety shift

Pistachio warning could signal food safety shift

TERRA BELLA, Calif. — It could take weeks before health officials know exactly which pistachio products may be tainted with salmonella, but they’ve already issued a sweeping warning to avoid eating the nuts or foods containing them.

The move appears to indicate a shift in how the government handles food safety issues — from waiting until contaminated foods surface one-by-one and risking that more people fall ill to jumping on the problem right away, even if the message is vague.

Officials wouldn’t say if the approach was in response to any perceived mishandling of the massive peanut recall that started last year, only that they’re trying to keep people from getting sick as new details surface about the California plant at the center of the pistachio scare.

Chimp victim improves

NEW HAVEN, Conn. — A Connecticut woman nearly killed by a chimpanzee is speaking, asking for her daughter and even responding to fairly complicated commands, her brothers said Tuesday.

Stephen and Michael Nash told The Associated Press by telephone on Tuesday that they are encouraged by test results for brain damage to their sister Charla.

Nash knows that she is in Cleveland at the Cleveland Clinic, but doctors doubt she will ever recall the attack, her brothers said. Stephen Nash said he told his sister she was injured in an accident.

Ex-Argentine president dies

BUENOS AIRES, Argentina — Raul Alfonsin, whose presidency came to symbolize the return of democracy across Latin America from an era of military dictatorship, has died.

Alfonsin’s personal doctor, Alberto Sadler, said former Argentine president died of lung cancer on Tuesday. He was 82.

The presidential inauguration of the burly, mustachioed leader on Dec. 10, 1983, ended more than seven years of a repressive military regime that left at least 12,000 disappeared.

U.S., Iranian diplomats break ice at conference

THE HAGUE, Netherlands — In a cautious first step toward unlocking 30 years of tense relations, senior U.S. diplomat Richard Holbrooke had a brief but cordial meeting with Iran’s deputy foreign minister Tuesday at an international conference on Afghanistan.

The rare diplomatic approach was the first official face-to-face interplay between the Obama administration and the Iranian regime. U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton cautioned that the talks between Holbrooke and Iranian diplomat Mehdi Akhundzadeh were promising but not “substantive.”

House limits Internet sales of cough-medicine drug

WASHINGTON — The House of Representatives passed a bill Tuesday that would tighten bulk Internet sales of a drug known to teenagers as DXM or Dex, an ingredient found in many over-the-counter cough medicines.

Millions of Americans use medicines containing dextromethorphan safely each year, but when taken in extremely large quantities, DXM produces a hallucinogenic high that can cause brain damage, seizures and death.

Nearly one in 10 teens, or about 1.7 million, admitted using cough medicine to get high in the past year, according to a recently released study from the Partnership for a Drug-Free America.

Vatican to probe order

NEW YORK — Pope Benedict XVI has taken the extraordinary step of ordering a Vatican investigation of the Legionaries of Christ, the influential, conservative religious order that has acknowledged that its founder fathered a child and molested seminarians.

Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone, the No. 2 man in the Vatican, said church leaders will visit and evaluate all seminaries, schools and other institutions run by the Legion worldwide.

Expert: N. Korea has many nuclear warheads

SEOUL, South Korea — Nuclear-armed North Korea warned Japan on Tuesday that intervening in Pyongyang’s impending rocket launch would be considered an act of war.

North Korea says it will send a communications satellite into orbit on a multi-stage rocket between April 4 and 8. The U.S., South Korea and Japan think the communist regime is using the launch to test long-range missile technology, and they warn Pyongyang would face sanctions under a U.N. Security Council resolution banning the country from ballistic activity.

Combined dispatches