No government measures seem to be stopping the free-fall of the U.S. economy.  Today’s portion of bad economic news goes like this: new claims for unemployment benefits jumped last week to a 16-year high; markets opened weakly this morning, after, yet another disastrous day on Wall Street with the Dow closing below 8000 for the first time since 2003; oil prices fell below $50 per barrel on the expectation of the global recession further dampening the demand for fuel. Demand for commodities across the board is slumping, which is hitting the emerging markets hard, since they are heavily commodities and other exports-oriented. After the wide-spread contamination of Chinese dairy supply with industrial chemical melamine had been exposed, and after foreign governments around the world banned Chinese products containing daily, the Chinese government finally announced that it would implement a range of product safety measures in the agricultural sector.  PRC government acknowledged that “the crisis has put China’s diary industry in peril and exposed major problems existing in the quality control and supervision of the industry.”   The new laws and standards are promised to be in place by next October, and that by 2011, “the goal is to have well-bred cows and a mass-producing dairy industry.” Meanwhile, over Chinese 1,000 babies suffering from their exposure to melamine are still hospitalized and being treated for kidney disease. Door-to-door screening of more than 307,000 Beijing families with children under the age of three found that over 75,000 babies had been fed contaminated milk formula, the official Xinhua news agency said.