October 14, 2009, the 30th annual awards ceremony of the W. Eugene Smith Memorial Fund took place at the Asia Society in New York City. Lu Guang (卢广) from People’s Republic of China won the $30,000 W. Eugene Smith Grant in Humanistic Photography for his documentary project “Pollution in China.”

Billions spent on this. Billions spent on that. It's all relative right?

In his book ‘A Century of Ebb and Flow’, author Wu Xiaobo argues that entrepreneurs’ problems pre-date the founding of the Communist party 60 years ago. Under the Qing emperors and the Nationalists who succeeded them, he says, the economy was always dominated by state enterprises and that any time a private company became too big or successful its owner was removed and it was gobbled up by a state competitor.

“An authoritarian, centralised state cannot tolerate alternative centres of power,” says one well-connected Chinese businessman. “Until we have meaningful political reform in China, we’ll never be able to overcome these issues and our economy will not be able to move on to the next stage of development.”

There may be 1.6 billion people in the world with Internet access, but fewer than half of them have incomes high enough to interest major advertisers.

About three weeks ago, Facebook and Twitter ended several weeks of serious talks, in which Facebook was offering to acquire Twitter for $500 million of its stock, which also included a cash component. Why did the deal break down? "The Twitter side felt that figure was inflated and the shares should be valued at the lower figures that have also been reported for Facebook's true valuation, more in the $5 billion range. That would have given the deal a $150 million price tag, which was seen as too low, especially since it was in Facebook stock and not cash initially."

Everything you need to know about the global money crisis of 2007-?.

To see which cities in the world were dirtiest, we turned to Mercer Human Resource Consulting’s 2007 Health and Sanitation Rankings. As part of their 2007 Quality of Life Report, they ranked 215 cities worldwide based on levels of air pollution, waste management, water potability, hospital services, medical supplies and the presence of infectious disease.

By Ed Burns, Dennis Lehane, George Pelecanos, Richard Price, David Simon
"Our viewers worry or grieve for Bubbles, Bodie or Wallace, certain that these characters are fictional yet knowing they are rooted in the reality of the other America, the one rare