The Chinese government has run a highly publicized campaign against what officials said were banned smutty and lewd pictures overwhelming the country’s Internet and threatening the emotional health of children.

Chinese police said late on Thursday the crackdown on Internet pornography had brought 5,394 arrests and 4,186 criminal case investigations in 2009 — a fourfold increase in the number of such cases compared with 2008.

The announcement on the Ministry of Public Security’s website (www.mps.gov.cn) said the drive would deepen in 2010.

via China says 5,394 arrested in Internet porn crackdown | Reuters.

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Delta Air Lines’ chief is upset the 278 passengers and 11 crew members aboard Flight 253 were put at risk by a suspected terrorist despite the carrier’s compliance with government security measures.

CEO Richard Anderson told employees in a recorded message Thursday that airlines have done everything the government has asked since 9/11 to follow advanced passenger notification requirements and heightened screening measures.

He says that should have brought a better result than the peril those aboard the Christmas flight from Amsterdam to Detroit faced. Delta will insist Washington do a better job.

via Delta CEO: Flight 253 threat despite all security – BusinessWeek.

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Construction, which began in 2004, is estimated to have cost one billion dollars (694.7 million euros).

It was carried out by South Korea’s Samsung Engineering & Construction, Belgium’s BESIX group and the United Arab Emirates’ Arabtec.

The skyscraper is the centrepiece of a 20-billion-dollar new shopping district, Downtown Burj Dubai, which includes 30,000 apartments and the Dubai Mall, which says its space for 1,200 shops makes it the world’s largest indoor shopping centre.

via Dubai to open world’s tallest building.

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The Mayo Clinic, praised by President Barack Obama as a national model for efficient health care, will stop accepting Medicare patients as of [today, January 1, 2010] at one of its primary-care clinics in Arizona, saying the U.S. government pays too little.

More than 3,000 patients eligible for Medicare, the government’s largest health-insurance program, will be forced to pay cash if they want to continue seeing their doctors at a Mayo family clinic in Glendale, northwest of Phoenix, said Michael Yardley, a Mayo spokesman. The decision, which Yardley called a two-year pilot project, won’t affect other Mayo facilities in Arizona, Florida and Minnesota.

…Mayo’s move to drop Medicare patients may be copied by family doctors, some of whom have stopped accepting new patients from the program, said Lori Heim, president of the American Academy of Family Physicians, in a telephone interview yesterday.

“Many physicians have said, ‘I simply cannot afford to keep taking care of Medicare patients,’” said Heim, a family doctor who practices in Laurinburg, North Carolina. “If you truly know your business costs and you are losing money, it doesn’t make sense to do more of it.”

via Mayo Clinic in Arizona to Stop Treating Some Medicare Patients – Bloomberg.com.

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The Chinese economy has rolled into the new year at a scorching pace, as the country’s most respected business news team re-emerged from political exile to warn that inflation was stalking “like a tiger”.

The official purchasing manager’s index rose to 56.6 last month, signalling China’s manufacturing sector expanded at the fastest pace since being temporarily smashed by the financial crisis in late 2008.

via Inflation stalks China’s growth boom.

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Experts who have studied bouts of inflation, most common in poor or developing countries, say the makings of an inflationary psychology are already in place in the United States. It begins, they say, when unfathomably large figures are bandied about as if they were mere change.

A cascading series of government bailouts certainly fits into that category. The Treasury spent nearly $800 billion on a stimulus package that has helped ease the pace of job losses but not yet begun to reverse them. The Fed committed to buy more than $1.7 trillion in Treasury and mortgage bonds and expanded credit in the banking system to over $2.2 trillion.

“There is an unprecedented amount of latent inflation represented by the $2 trillion monetary base,” said Michael Pento, senior market strategist at Delta Global Advisors. “Unless the Fed can sell those holdings and raise interest rates in a timely manner, intractable inflation will be in our future.”

via FED FOCUS-The coming Great Inflation, real or imagined | Reuters.

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