An article by Geoff Colvin, Senior Editor at CNN Money.Com, states that the expected arrival of China as the world’s dominant economic superpower is a bit ahead of schedule. As a matter of fact, they are expected to reach that pinnacle not in 2050 as originally predicted, but in 2015. That means you have 7 years to learn Mandarin.

Read the full article detailing the implications of this shifting trend here at the CNNMoney.Com website.

Warren Buffett, the world's richest person, said on Monday the U.S. economy is in a recession that will be more severe than most people expect.   "This is not a field of specialty for me, but my general feeling is that the recession will be longer and deeper than most people think," Buffett said. "This will not be short and shallow.”

Nomura Holdings, the largest Japanese brokerage company, on Friday posted a surprise quarterly loss of $1.5 billion on its exposure to bond insurers and warned that it could still be at risk for further losses related to the credit crisis.

Read the full article here on the International Herald Tribune website.

In an article from Insurance Journal authored by David Caruso, the current case of the Harry Potter fan with plans to publish his on-line encyclopedia of all things Hogwarts and compete directly with J.K. Rowling’s interests gives an excellent example of the new frontier of copyright liability.

“The Web is awash with fan-produced material that could be the subject of a copyright fight, from remixed pop songs, to new fiction based on existing characters from books and TV shows, to countless tribute videos cut together with clips from TV shows or films.

"There is almost a parallel universe,'' said Alan Behr, an intellectual property lawyer in New York. "On the Internet, people basically do things you would never do in print.''

In a Washington Post Article written by Jeffrey Birnbaum, there is a rift within the industry about having a new federal overseer of insurance.

In the article he states "The split, in its simplest terms, is between big and small companies. Most of the large, national firms back the proposal, which calls for a single, central regulator instead of the current state-run system. Small, regional insurers are generally happy to continue to deal with their own nearby overseers and do not want the extra layer of oversight that a new federal regulator would bring."

Read the full article here on the WashingtonPost.Com website.

Sutter Health will greatly improve accessibility and patient care for people with disabilities at its hospitals and other health care facilities under a settlement to a class-action lawsuit announced Friday.

The agreement calls for sweeping changes in hospital policies, architecture, equipment, staff and contractor training and outreach at 28 Sutter Health hospitals located across Northern California. The changes are tailored for patients with mobility, visual, hearing and speech disabilities.

The class-action suit filed in 2005 by the nonprofit Disability Rights Advocates asserted that the Sutter network of hospitals and medical foundations failed to provide access for disabled people as required by the Americans with Disabilities Act.

Hospital Corporation of America has agreed to settle 11 lawsuits that accuse a former West Virginia physician of harming patients, a lawyer for the plaintiffs said.

The lawsuits were filed by former patients and their families against Dr. John A. King, HCA and the former Putnam General Hospital, where King practiced from November 2002 to June 2003.

In an article by Bloomberg reporter Dan Levy, More than 234,000 properties were in some stage of foreclosure, or one in every 538 U.S. households, Irvine, California-based RealtyTrac Inc., a seller of default data, said today in a statement. Nevada, California and Florida had the highest foreclosure rates. Filings rose 5% from February.

"We're not near the bottom of this at all," said Kenneth Rosen, chairman of Rosen Real Estate Securities LLC, a hedge fund in Berkeley, California and chairman of the Fisher Center for Real Estate at the University of California at Berkeley. "The foreclosure process will accelerate throughout the year."

Read the full article here on the Financial Post website.

New allegations have been added to a class action suit pending against Countryside Financial Corporation.

The complaint has been amended to include allegations that Countrywide "distorted industry definitions of prime and subprime borrowers and mortgages to mislead uninformed investors" about the nature of its business. The suit also contends that Countrywide executives engaged in insider trading, selling shares while simultaneously encouraging other investors to buy or hold the stock.

Learn more about the additional allegations here on the Nashville Business Journal Website.

No one really disputes that Chad Hudgens was waterboarded outside a  Provo office park last May 29, right before lunch, by his boss.

There is also general agreement that Hudgens volunteered for the "team-building exercise," that he lay on his back with his head downhill, and that co-workers knelt on either side of him, pinning the young sales rep down while their supervisor poured water from a gallon jug over his nose and mouth.

And it's widely acknowledged that the supervisor, Joshua Christopherson, then told the assembled sales team, whose numbers had been lagging: "You saw how hard Chad fought for air right there. I want you to go back inside and fight that hard to make sales."

What's at issue in the lawsuit Hudgens filed against his former employers -- just as in the ongoing global debate over the CIA’s waterboarding of terrorism suspects -- is the question of intent.

Prosper Inc. maintains that what the supervisor did, while unauthorized, overzealous and misguided, falls far short of torture, and in fact was not nearly as bad as Hudgens makes out in his quest for damages.

Some 15 times a year, Warren Buffett invites a group of business students for an intensive day of learning. Fortune Magazine was there.

A Chancery Court judge on Tuesday approved the settlement of a shareholder lawsuit against directors and executives of Tyson Foods but reserved judgment in a dispute over attorney's fees.

The settlement approved by Chancellor William Chandler III calls for Don Tyson and Tyson Limited Partnership, the company's largest shareholder, to pay the company $4.5 million.

Read the full article here on ArkansasBusiness.Com.

Illinois doctors will get a refund collectively worth $11 million from the state's largest medical malpractice insurer.

The Illinois State Medical Insurance Exchange says claims are down. That means doctors will get credits when they renew their policies. Individual doctors will get around $500 to $1,000.

Read the full article here on the KWQC TV6 Website.

A Canadian judge ruled that a group of almost 2,000 Canadians alleging they were implanted with defective defibrillators can sue the company, according to media reports.

Guidant, which was purchased by Natick, Mass.-based Boston Scientific in 2006, has operations in Arden Hills, Minnesota.

Prior to the acquisition, Guidant had begun a recall of 100,000 potentially defective implantable cardioverter defibrillators (ICDs). But the lawsuit claims that Guidant didn't tell doctors about the defects until years after the problems were discovered.

Until a few weeks ago, Sonia Deravedisian had never heard of the subprime-mortgage market. Nevertheless, she lost her life savings because of it.

The $55,000 she saved over 35 years as a self-employed tailor is gone. Ms. Deravedisian, now 74 and disabled, is one of the earliest victims of the mortgage crisis, in a case that has drawn the attention of federal investigators over the role some of the biggest names on Wall Street may have played.

You can read the full article here on the Wall Street Journal website.

The International Monetary Fund said Tuesday that financial losses stemming from the U.S. mortgage crisis might approach $1 trillion, citing a "collective failure" to predict the breadth of the crisis.

Falling U.S. house prices and rising delinquencies may lead to $565 billion in mortgage-market losses, the IMF said in its annual Global Financial Stability report, released in Washington. Total losses, including the securities tied to commercial real estate and loans to consumers and companies, may reach $945 billion, the fund said.

The forecast signals the worst of the credit crunch may be yet to come, because banks and securities firms so far have posted $232 billion in asset writedowns and credit losses. Policy makers, concerned that lenders' deteriorating balance sheets will hobble economic growth, are pushing companies to raise capital.

Read the full article here on the International Herald Tribune website.

A class-action lawsuit against Deutsche Telekom opened Monday with thousands of disgruntled shareholders seeking up to $126 million from Europe's biggest telecom operator. Some 16,000 investors are seeking compensation in the case for what they claim were falsehoods regarding the company's third initial public offering tranche in June, 2000.

One of the complaints is that at the time of the offering, Bonn-based Deutsche Telekom had already started negotiations with U.S. mobile phone company Voicestream, now T-Mobile USA. German giant Telekom bought Voicestream in 2001 for about 34 billion euros ($53.4 billion) in a move highly criticized at the time. The unit has since become a key driver of growth. Another complaint is that the value of some of Telekom's real estate assets had been inflated in pamphlets sent to shareholders before the offering.

Read the full story here on CNN.Com’s World Business Site.

Citigroup Inc. on Friday confirmed it agreed to pay $33 million to about 2,500 current and former female brokers at its Smith Barney unit to settle a class-action gender discrimination lawsuit.

The agreement also requires the largest U.S. bank to change how it awards bonuses and assigns accounts, and to adopt measures to help retain and promote women, papers filed Wednesday with the U.S. District Court in San Francisco show.

The plaintiffs had accused Smith Barney in the original March 2005 complaint of preventing female brokers from competing fairly for new accounts, promotions and pay, and of depriving women of equal training and sales support. They also accused Smith Barney of using past performance as a means to award business and pay -- putting women who had been discriminated against in the past at a disadvantage.

A state court jury in Bridgeport has awarded more than $4 million to a doctor who was fired from a health care lab in Stratford after he complained that one of its tests could jeopardize patients' health.

The six jurors found on Friday that Dianon Systems Inc.'s firing of Trumbull doctor G. Barry Schumann in April 2005 violated his free speech rights. The verdict could increase to nearly $7 million when lawyers' fees and interest are added in.

Dianon spokeswoman Donna Schuetz says the company disagrees with the verdict and intends to appeal.

Read the full article here on Boston.Com.

In an article written by Peter Biging, a Partner in the New York office of Lewis Brisbois Bisgaard & Smith LLP, he notes that Courts considering agent and broker errors and omissions claims are relying more and more on a presumption that agents and brokers are—and present themselves as—experts in insurance coverage.   This trend means that more juries may be charged with deciding whether a very general request for coverage from a customer can form the basis of a claim for negligence or breach of contract against his or her agent or broker when it turns out the customer doesn’t have sufficient insurance to cover a specific loss.

For quite some time, the largest retailer of Music in the United States has been Wal-Mart.   That is no longer the case.  The leader in this category is now…Apple.  That’s correct.  On-line retailing of music has just become the number one way to buy songs in the United States.

It puts an interesting spin on what comes next for the record industry.  Read about that spin here on The Motley Fool website.

A Pittsburgh couple is suing Google for invasion of privacy. Not for the untold amounts of information that can be dug up using the Google search logarithms, but instead for the “Street View” feature of the Google Maps.

(Street View is a tool used when looking on maps of various neighborhoods that show actual pictures of locations when you use Google Maps. Want to see the PLUS Office? Type in 5353 Wayzata Boulevard, 55416 in the search box here on Google Mapsand then click “Street View”)

Aaron and Christine Boring have accused Google of an intentional and/or grossly reckless invasion of seclusion and privacy. The larger question is what technology will be the first to cross the line and give insurers fits? You can read the full article (and see copies of the pleading) here on the Smoking Gun website.

The subprime-mortgage mess will likely tighten the coverage and cost of the insurance policies that cover executives, corporations, and corporate boards for losses and legal fees in securities lawsuits, an attorney predicts.

Indeed, directors' and officers' liability insurance coverage could cost more and be harder to get as the number of subprime-related lawsuits wend their way through the federal courts, according to Koorosh Talieh, a lawyer who represents corporate D&O insurance policyholders.

Read the full article here on CFO.Com.