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Kelly, who says one of his hobbies is making movies, had his camera rolling last month when the pickup truck he was riding in was pulled over by a Carlisle police officer for traffic violations. About 20 minutes into the police stop, the officer noticed that Kelly had a camera pointed at him and told him to turn it off, which he did. Kelly was then charged with felony wiretapping, which carries a penalty of up to seven years in state prison. The young man spent 26 hours in Cumberland County Prison before his mother posted her house to bail him out.

He is just one of the estimated 1.5 million residents of Beijing who will be displaced or evicted from their homes – many of them against their will – before next year’s Olympics, the Geneva-based Centre on Housing Rights and Evictions (COHRE) said this week.

“The prospect of being forcibly evicted can be so terrifying that it is not uncommon for people to risk their lives in an attempt to resist; or even more extreme, to take their own lives when it becomes apparent that the eviction cannot be prevented,” said a report compiled by COHRE following an investigation into the alleged harassment and physical violence to which those residents who resist eviction, known as dingzihu, are subjected.

China has denied the criticisms. Beijing’s Olympic organising committee and China’s foreign ministry said the figures were vastly inflated, with only 6,037 people displaced since 2002 for the construction of Olympic stadiums.

“During the process, the citizens have had their compensation property settled,” said a foreign ministry spokeswoman Jiang Yu. “No single person was forced to move out of Beijing.”

Jolie, 32, was nominated and recommended for approval by members of the Council on Foreign Relations and joins the likes of presidents Bill Clinton, Jimmy Carter, and the US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice at the CFR.

Spokeswoman Lisa Shields said: “Angelina Jolie is accomplished in her field and has demonstrated serious interest in issues such as Darfur, international education and refugees.

The story dates back to the Clinton administration and February 2000, when one frightened Russian scientist walked Vienna’s winter streets. The Russian had good reason to be afraid. He was walking around Vienna with blueprints for a nuclear bomb.

To be precise, he was carrying technical designs for a TBA 480 high-voltage block, otherwise known as a “firing set”, for a Russian-designed nuclear weapon. He held in his hands the knowledge needed to create a perfect implosion that could trigger a nuclear chain reaction inside a small spherical core. It was one of the greatest engineering secrets in the world, providing the solution to one of a handful of problems that separated nuclear powers such as the United States and Russia from rogue countries such as Iran that were desperate to join the nuclear club but had so far fallen short.

The Russian, who had defected to the US years earlier, still couldn’t believe the orders he had received from CIA headquarters. The CIA had given him the nuclear blueprints and then sent him to Vienna to sell them – or simply give them – to the Iranian representatives to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA). With the Russian doing its bidding, the CIA appeared to be about to help Iran leapfrog one of the last remaining engineering hurdles blocking its path to a nuclear weapon. The dangerous irony was not lost on the Russian – the IAEA was an international organisation created to restrict the spread of nuclear technology.

The Russian was a nuclear engineer in the pay of the CIA, which had arranged for him to become an American citizen and funded him to the tune of $5,000 a month. It seemed like easy money, with few strings attached.

Beijing’s move underlines concerns that ethanol production is driving up rapidly the costs of corn and grain. It appears to reflect a growing reality about food-based alternative fuel: it is far more expensive both economically and environmentally, than Western politicians are likely to admit.

Calls for biofuels are politically attractive for European and US politicians, amid rising petrol prices and concerns about global warming and an overreliance on Middle Eastern oil.

Communist officials in Beijing, however, who do not have the political concerns of democratically elected leaders in the West, have reacted to a rapid rise in food prices and an intense demand on farm land that threatens to make ethanol production unsustainable.

President Bush, who with Britain wants to see a huge increase in corn-based ethanol, called in January for the annual production of 35 billion gallons of corn-based ethanol in the US.

Although that is a hugely popular rhetoric in the Mid-west wheat belt states — the heart of America’s political battleground — environmentalists soon pointed out that such a goal would require an additional 129,000 square miles of farmland, an area the size of Kansas and Iowa combined.

The rush to corn-based ethanol is causing food-price inflation in the US, as it increases the cost of corn grain feedstock and the availability of the crop for such staples as cereal and corn syrup. The ethanol boom has created mass planting of corn at the expense of other crops, which helps to drive up prices, too. Futures prices for corn in the US have nearly doubled in eight months.

In China grain security has for decades been at the top of the party’s political priority list, and a 43 per cent increase in the price of China’s staple meat — pork — over last year to recent record highs as a result of rapidly rising feed prices is certain to have triggered concern at the highest level of the party.

Get ready to hear this phrase whenever you cash a check at Walmart (which you shouldn’t do anyway, but that’s another post.) Walmart has launched a prepaid debit card, issued from the same bank that also issues their credit cards.

Why is Walmart doing this? They’re going after the “unbanked” market, the same group of people who get screwed with payday loans, income tax advance refund loans, prepaid debit card fees, auto-title loans and every other awful “service” that this website warns you about.

Check our Walmart’s awesomely evil deal: Cashing your check costs $3.00, but if you put the money on a Walmart MoneyCard, they’ll waive the $4.64 “loading” fee. Neat! After that it’s only $4.94 a month to keep your money on the card.

Mr Putin said the world needed to create a new international financial architecture to replace an existing model that had become “archaic, undemocratic and unwieldy”.

His apparent challenge to western dominance of the world economic order came at a forum in St Petersburg designed to showcase the country’s economic recovery. Among 6,000 delegates at the biggest business forum ever held in post-Soviet Russia were scores of international chief executives including heads of Deutsche Bank, BP, Royal Dutch Shell, Nestlé, Chevron, Siemens and Coca-Cola.

New Zealand’s record 8 percent benchmark interest rate has helped the currency, known as the kiwi, gain 7 percent this year. The highest borrowing costs after Iceland’s among AAA-rated countries, and the chance of further increases, is helping the local dollar pare losses after the central bank said those gains were “unjustified” and announced its had sold the currency.

“We regard current levels of the exchange rate as exceptional and unjustified in terms of the economic fundamentals,” Reserve Bank of New Zealand Governor Alan Bollard said in a statement in Wellington. The sales were the first announced by the central bank since it set up a NZ$7 billion ($5.3 billion) fund to stabilize the market in 1990.

“People now know that the New Zealand dollar has a limit,” said Michael Gordon, currency strategist at Westpac Banking Corp. in Wellington. “It’s a lesson on how high the currency can go without consequences.”

Traders may be discouraged from buying New Zealand’s bonds and bills using borrowed yen, known as carry trades. The New Zealand dollar climbed 19 percent against the U.S. currency in the past year, causing exporters to shift manufacturing jobs overseas.

Pentagon officials on Friday confirmed to CBS 5 that military leaders had considered, and then subsquently rejected, building the so-called “Gay Bomb.”

Edward Hammond, of Berkeley’s Sunshine Project, had used the Freedom of Information Act to obtain a copy of the proposal from the Air Force’s Wright Laboratory in Dayton, Ohio.

As part of a military effort to develop non-lethal weapons, the proposal suggested, “One distasteful but completely non-lethal example would be strong aphrodisiacs, especially if the chemical also caused homosexual behavior.”

The documents show the Air Force lab asked for $7.5 million to develop such a chemical weapon.

“The Ohio Air Force lab proposed that a bomb be developed that contained a chemical that would cause enemy soliders to become gay, and to have their units break down because all their soldiers became irresistably attractive to one another,” Hammond said after reviwing the documents.

“The notion was that a chemical that would probably be pleasant in the human body in low quantities could be identified, and by virtue of either breathing or having their skin exposed to this chemical, the notion was that soliders would become gay,” explained Hammond.