No longer seen on TV: breast enlargement equipment

• The Beijing News reports that Chinese TV infomercials for breast enlargment treatments and other health products have been banned, starting from today. The order was issued together by the Commercial & Industrial Bureau and SARFT (State Administration of Radio, Film and TV). The ban may be temporary and is intended to give administrators a chance to regulate the chaotic and often fraudulent advertising of medical products and services.

• Yesterday Danwei reported that police in Moding, Yunnan Province were planning to kill 50,000 dogs after three people died of rabies there. The news has caused some controversy on China's Internet forums: MOP has a post with a lot of comments titled The "violent solution" to the dogs: why it disturbs people; it has been reproduced on other BBS boards, including at the BBS aggregator Daqi (Both links above in Chinese).

• Netease's BBS has post operative photos of China's first recipient of a face transplant.

• The Wall Street Journal has published a piece by Jonathan Anderson, the chief economist for Asia at UBS titled China's Economy is Hot, Not Overheated (subscription required). Anderson argues that recent talk of China's economy growing too quickly is exaggerated. The money quote:

Still, recent economic data offer no evidence to suggest that China's economy is spinning out of control.

• The Financial Times has a story by Geoff Dyer called China’s Jinan and Laiwu in merger talks, about a planned consolidation merger that would create the world’s sixth biggest steel company by production, and China's second biggest after Baosteel.

• Also in the FT: United Airlines gets ready for China rush

United Airlines plans to consolidate its position as the largest carrier between the US and Asia by shifting aircraft from transatlantic service ahead of an expected scramble for additional flights to China next year...

...The airline also hopes to capture some of the additional flights to China being allocated next year by the US transportation department. American, Northwest and Continental, which also operate US-China passenger services, are expected to launch fierce bids for the seven extra passenger flights a week.

That's excellent news for people who travel betweenNorth America and China: further price wars are on the way, despite the price of oil.

• There's a new Asian news website up, called Asia Sentinel. This is what they say about themselves:

We are Asia's most professional regional Internet-based newsmagazine, focusing on politics, economics, business, leisure and the arts.

Founded and edited by experienced traditional media editors, the website seeks "to fill the vacuum left by the abandonment of the region by the western traditional print media."

It seems they are speaking of Pan Asian print media like FEER. About which ESWN recently paraphrased Hong Kong media mogul Jimmy Lai:

Specifically, he points out the reason why pan-Asian media have been disappearing is that the notion of Asia is remote and detached for most Asians (that is, people in Hong Kong really don't care too much about what happens in Cambodia and so on), and this was obviously related to the quoted statement of mine above. The most important media nowadays are local media.