Snow fault

A research company has exposed the unscrupulous practice of many United States restaurants along the coast of the Gulf of Mexico.

SeaD Consulting, a food safety technology company, revealed the results of its tests on the source of shrimp served by randomly chosen restaurants in Baton Rouge, Louisiana; Biloxi, Mississippi; Galveston, Texas; and Tampa Bay, Florida, USA Today reports.

The firm found that only two of the 44 restaurants it sampled were serving shrimp caught in the Gulf of Mexico. However, these establishments were passing off the seafood as Gulf-caught when it was actually imported, according to USA Today.

In Galveston, all 44 restaurants sampled served imported shrimp while claiming it was caught locally. Meanwhile, more than 30 percent of the 24 restaurants sampled in Baton Rouge claimed to be serving Gulf shrimp.

“Consumers come to the coast expecting the finest, freshest Gulf seafood, but what they’re being served often falls far short of that,” Erin Williams, chief operations officer of SeaD Consulting, told USA Today.

Meanwhile, Chengdu Snow Village in Sichuan province, China, offered snow tours of its fields and log cabins during the Lunar New Year.

However, complaints poured in after the expected snowfall did not materialize, according to staff.

Visitors took to Chinese social media to express their anger over the large sheets of cotton stapled onto the roofs of log cabins and wisps of cotton strewn across fields or caught in the branches of small bushes, CNN reports.

Officials of the village reportedly admitted that cotton was purchased to create a snowy atmosphere but failed to achieve the expected effect, according to CNN. They issued an apology to disappointed visitors and announced refunds on social media.

CNN quotes Chengdu’s culture and tourism bureau as saying that images of the snow village have been removed from its official social media channels. The village has since closed down as market regulation authorities investigate the tourist attraction for suspected false advertising.