Dear Yahoo! GeoCities customer,

We're writing to let you know that Yahoo! GeoCities, our free web site building service and community, is closing on October 26, 2009.

On October 26, 2009, your GeoCities site will no longer appear on the Web, and you will no longer be able to access your GeoCities account and files.

Best regards,

The Yahoo! GeoCities team

Yahoo Inc. said Thursday that it would shut down its GeoCities free Web-hosting service after paying about $3 billion for the unit in 1999.

Yahoo pointed GeoCities users to its paid Web-hosting service. The company will give users more details on saving GeoCities' data later this year.

U.S. visitors to GeoCities dropped 25% to 12 million in March from the year-ago period, according to research firm ComScore Inc. in Reston, Va.

China Monday unveiled a blueprint for health-care over the next decade, kicking off a much-anticipated reform to fix the ailing medical system and to ensure fair and affordable health services for all 1.3 billion citizens.

The core principle of the reform is to provide basic health care as a "public service" to the people, which requires much more government funding and supervision.

The reform is aimed at "solving pressing problems that have caused strong complaints from the public," the document said, referring to long-standing criticism that medical services are difficult to access and increasingly unaffordable.

Many factors were blamed for causing problems - huge development gap between cities and rural areas, low government funding, weak health-care facilities at grassroots level, and increasing disease burdens - despite the country's effort to double the average life expectancy over the past 60 years.

Soaring medical bills further strained China's social security network, already burdened by expensive education, fast population ageing and unemployment. This forces many ordinary Chinese to save money, instead of spending, as precautionary measures.

After the founding of the People's Republic of China in 1949, governments covered more than 90 percent of medical expenses for urban residents, while rural people enjoyed simple but essentially free health care.

But when China began its economic reforms in the early 1980s, the system was dismantled as the country attempted to switch to a market-oriented health care system.

Due to low government funding, doctors at state-run hospitals were forced to "generate" incomes for the hospitals through prescribing highly-profitable, sometimes unnecessary drugs and treatment. In many places this could account for 90 percent of a hospital's income.

Soaring fees plunged many into poverty and made medical services less affordable to ordinary citizens.

Statistics from the Ministry of Health show that the personal spending on medical services has doubled from 21.2 percent in 1980to 45.2 percent in 2007, while the government funding dropped to 20.3 percent from 36.2 percent in 1980.

Health care reform could be prescription for employment