According to the US Bureau of Justice Statistics, as of the end of 2009 a total of 7,225,800 people were either on probation, in prison or on parole in America. That is a sign of a very, very sick society. Either we have a massive crime problem or the "control grid" that our leaders have erected for us is wildly out of control. Or both. But how in the world are we supposed to have a healthy economy if our entire nation is being turned into one gigantic prison?

Sadly, it is not just hardcore criminals that are being rounded up and abused by authorities these days. The following are 14 of the most ridiculous things that Americans are being arrested for:

#1 A Michigan man has been charged with a felony and could face up to 5 years in prison for reading his wife's email.

#2 A 49-year-old Queens woman had bruises all over her body after she was handcuffed, arrested and brutally beaten by NYPD officers. So what was her offense? The officers thought that her little dog had left some poop that she didn't clean up.

#3 A 56-year-old woman who was once a rape victim refused to let airport security officials feel her breasts so she was thrown to the floor, put in handcuffs and arrested.

#4 In Milwaukee, one man was recently fined $500 for swearing on a public bus.

#5 Several years ago a 12-year-old boy in South Carolina was actually arrested by police for opening up a Christmas present early against his family's wishes.

#6 In some areas of the country, it is now a crime to not recycle properly. For example, the city of Cleveland has announced plans to sort through trash cans to ensure that people are actually recycling according to city guidelines.

#7 A 12-year-old girl from Queens was arrested earlier this year and taken out of her school in handcuffs for writing "Lex was here. 2/1/10″ and "I love my friends Abby and Faith" on her desk.

#8 Back in 2008, a 13-year-old boy in Florida was actually arrested by police for farting in class.

#9 The feds recently raided an Amish farmer at 5 am in the morning because they claimed that he was was engaged in the interstate sale of raw milk in violation of federal law.

#10 A few years ago a 10-year-old girl was arrested and charged with a felony for bringing a small steak knife to school. It turns out that all she wanted to do was to cut up her lunch so that she could eat it.

#11 On June 18th, two Christians decided that they would peacefully pass out copies of the gospel of John on a public sidewalk outside a public Islamic festival in Dearborn, Michigan and within three minutes 8 policemen surrounded them and placed them under arrest.

#12 A US District Court judge slapped a $500 fine on Massachusetts fisherman Robert J Eldridge for untangling a giant whale from his nets and setting it free. So what was his crime? Well, according to the court, Eldridge was supposed to call state authorities and wait for them do it.

#13 Once upon a time, a food fight in the cafeteria may have gotten you a detention. Now it may get you locked up. About a year ago, 25 students between the ages of 11 and 15 at a school in Chicago were taken into custody by police for being involved in a huge food fight in the school cafeteria.

#14 A few years ago a 70 year old grandmother was actually put in handcuffs and hauled off to jail for having a brown lawn.

Why in the world would anyone approve of the police arresting ordinary Americans for such things? Now we get thrown to the floor, handcuffed, beaten and arrested for things that we did not even know were crimes. If America continues to move in this direction it is going to ruin our economy, our reputation in the world and our national spirit.

As Hungary has not adopted the euro, this may already create a problem in terms of economic oversight. Hungary will have its hands full with major players in the currency bloc such as Germany and France, who will claim that as bonafide members of the currency they should exert greater influence. Additionally, Hungary will have to cope with other issues where her position diverges from the European consensus.

The most recent problem to surface in Budapest's relations with the EU was the adoption of a new media law that effectively puts the ruling Fidesz Party in control of state television channels and all other public media outlets. Another law creates a media counsel with authority to regulate print and electronic journalism as well as the Internet.

The Council can impose stiff fines for "unbalanced" coverage or reporting that offends "human dignity". Not surprisingly, the members of the new Council will be associates of Prime Minister Viktor Orban. The Hungarian Prime Minister's approach to the media has been compared within the EU and outside it to the emasculation of the Russian media under Vladimir Putin. The Washington Post has urged that Secretary of State Hillary Clinton boycott the European Union summit meeting in Budapest scheduled for May unless Orban rescinds the law. Neelie Kroes, a vice president of the European commission, has already asked the Hungarian justice minister, Tibor Navracsicsto, to forward the text of the law to her to see that it complies with the pertinent European law on press freedom.

Hungary's stewardship over the EU may increase economic controversy. In July, Hungary broke off talks with the International Monetary Fund over the issue of loan repayments although it promised to repay by 2012. It thereby broke agreements with the IMF that were made by its previous Socialist government. As the ratings companies do not sympathize with governments that abrogate economic agreements, Hungary's credit rating is a tad above junk bonds. Given the continued financial instability of EU members, the European Union needs the IMF in case its financial resources become overly strained. To say that the Hungarian presidency is unhelpful in fostering good relations may be an understatement.

Chancellor Angela Merkel faces a marathon of seven key state elections in 2011 that could determine the fate of her center-right coalition, which has suffered a slide in popularity over the last year. There is a chance that her conservative Christian Democratic Union (CDU) could lose every one of the votes, which would deal her authority within the party a stinging blow and could even scupper her chances of standing for a third term in 2013.

The CDU's junior coalition partner, the pro-business Free Democratic Party (FDP), has slumped so badly in opinion polls that it may crash out of a number of state parliaments altogether. It is unclear whether Guido Westerwelle, the foreign minister, would be able to hold on to his post as FDP leader if the party were to suffer such humiliation at the ballot box.

The outcome of the elections in seven of Germany's 16 states will determine the makeup of the Bundesrat, the country's upper legislative chamber, and thus have a direct effect on Merkel's ability to conduct policy. But the psychological impact in terms of the potential damage to her political standing could be even greater.

China, which produces about 97 percent of the global supply of rare earth minerals, cut its export quotas by 35 percent for the first half of 2011 versus a year ago, saying it wanted to preserve ample reserves, but warned against basing its total 2011 export quota on the first half figures.

The US Trade Representative's office was "very concerned" about China's export restraints on rare earths and had raised its concerns with China, a spokeswoman said on Tuesday. US makers of high-tech products such as Apple Inc's iPads, along with Japanese companies have been scrambling to secure reliable supplies of the minerals outside of China as Beijing steadily reduces export allocations.

Japan's Sony Corp said China's move to cut export quotas was a hindrance to free trade and that it would work to reduce its reliance on Chinese supplies. Lynas Executive Chairman Nick Curtis said in a statement. "The growth in the Chinese domestic market coupled with a decrease in production of rare earths in China is a likely cause for the tightening of export regulations," said Curtis, whose company is aiming to start production in about a year and has already forged supply contracts with Japanese traders.

World demand for rare earths at present is about 110,000 tonnes a year, with China accounting for about 75 percent of total demand with the remainder split between Japan, the United States and Europe, in descending order.

At Sheremetyevo where Russia's flagship carrier is based, Aeroflot personnel were now scared of dealing with agitated passengers, saying the airport did not have enough security guards, state-run RIA quoted an airline employee as saying. Police told Reuters they were not involved in the reported violence at Sheremetyevo and declined to comment.

On Monday a group of passengers stormed passport control at Moscow's Domodedovo, Russia's biggest airport, where OMON riot police have since been dispatched. "People are desperate. Fights have broken out. It feels like there is no air in here," one woman at Domodedovo told Vesti 24 television on Tuesday. Russia's transport minister issued blistering criticism of the management of the country's largest airport, Domodedovo, saying it should have shut because of the power cuts instead of keeping passengers hostage waiting for their flights.

"With all the cancellations and delays, it'll be two to three days before the airlines are at a regular schedule," said Thomas Bosco, general manager of New York's LaGuardia Airport. By early Tuesday evening, LaGuardia was still operating well below its normal 70 flights per hour, he said. John F Kennedy Airport, in the New York City borough of Queens, and Newark Liberty International, in northern New Jersey, opened to incoming and departing traffic at 6 pm Monday, Port Authority spokeswoman Sara Joren said.

"This storm was one of the most challenging storms we've had in a decade or two," Bosco said Monday. Jeras said the onslaught of snow had stopped, but the storm's impact was still being felt. "The strong winds will be prevalent today," she said Tuesday morning.

Other travel - by rail and road - was snarled as well. Hundreds of people were left stranded at New York's Pennsylvania railroad station after Long Island Railroad canceled trains. Amtrak said it would resume normal service Wednesday between Boston and Washington, but passengers could see some delays.

By Tuesday, police had removed more than 1,000 abandoned vehicles from New York's Van Wyck Expressway and Cross Bronx Expressway, according to Bloomberg, who called the operation 'the biggest effort to clear snow our city has ever seen'. "Because the snow fell so quickly and in such great amounts, and because the wind blew so forcefully - creating whiteouts - many motorists got stuck and abandoned their vehicles in the middle of streets," the New York mayor said Tuesday.

The government has declared Theodore and two other towns in the region to be disaster zones, and forecasters say the floods have not yet peaked. The cost of the damage is expected to top AU$1 billion (650 million pounds), including massive losses of sunflower and cotton crops, badly hitting an industry which was already suffering the effects of a lengthy drought

The town's river has risen more than 50cm (20 in) above its previous recorded high, Emergency Management Queensland spokesman Bruce O'Grady told Australia's ABC News. "We're in unchartered territory in that area," he said. "The [weather] bureau is indicating it could go higher."

Further south, in New South Wales, about 175 people who had spent the night in evacuation centres have returned home. But 800 people in the towns of Urbenville and Bonalbo are expected to be cut off for another 24 hours. While the rain is now easing, water is continuing to flow from sodden land across central and southern Queensland into already swollen rivers, adds our correspondent.

Australia's Emergency Services Minister Neil Roberts told ABC the worst was yet to come. "Over the next 48 hours rain will be easing but the real impact in some communities won't be felt for a couple of days when floodwaters begin to recede," he said.

Some people have been without water for eight days. The disruption could continue for several more days. The Scottish Executive has offered to supply bottled water if required. NI Water said an unprecedented number of leaks caused by the thaw had "big pressure" on its systems. The company said it was alternating supplies from reservoirs in a bid to give every area a limited supply, causing more interruptions.

Many people have complained about not being able to get through to a helpline (08457 440088). Among the worst hit areas are Belfast, Armagh and Coleraine. Deputy First Minister Martin McGuinness said it was not good enough that some people had been left without water for so long.

On Tuesday afternoon, NI Water said: "We would strongly urge all customers and property owners to check their premises, including vacant buildings, outbuildings and animal drinking troughs for any leaks and arrange for them to be isolated immediately and repaired as soon as possible. We are noticing that the majority of the leaks in the water system are currently on the customers' private water supply side.

If an austerity program can be successfully imposed on Southern Europe, establishing a pan-European economic "model" patterned on Germany, the euro will remain advantageous for Germany. But strong resistance is expected from Greece and other countries. If expensive transfer payments cannot be avoided, it may become necessary "to think the unthinkable" of Germany "leaving the monetary union" writes the business press. In the long run, Germany's withdrawal from the euro zone is, in fact, highly probable, the Swedish economics scholar Stefan de Vylder tells german-foreign-policy.com. The first insinuations about the probable consequences indicate that serious tensions can be expected in Europe.

The passage of a 750 billion euro bailout package is being very angrily commented in Germany. According to the German media, the bailout package was part of France's plan and should not be limited to German resources being transferred to Southern Europe, but should also be a first step in the direction of creating a European economic governing body. Influential circles are demanding that a stand be taken against these efforts and that resistance be put up against French pressure. Beyond this, a debate of principles has begun around the question of the euro's utility for Germany.

If long-term transfer payments cannot be avoided, experts have come to see Germany's withdrawing from the monetary union as a probability. "If year after year, billions are not available for the German public infrastructure, because of weathering the storm for the Southern European bankruptcies," the press speculates, then "the unthinkable must be thought: a politically and economically weakened Germany, must at some time, leave the monetary union and create with France and the Benelux countries a new kernel monetary zone."

The system, by far the largest and most technologically sophisticated in the nation's history, collects, stores and analyzes information about thousands of US citizens and residents, many of whom have not been accused of any wrongdoing. The government's goal is to have every state and local law enforcement agency in the country feed information to Washington to buttress the work of the FBI, which is in charge of terrorism investigations in the United States.

Other democracies - Britain and Israel, to name two - are well acquainted with such domestic security measures. But for the United States, the sum of these new activities represents a new level of governmental scrutiny. This localized intelligence apparatus is part of a larger Top Secret America created since the attacks. In July, The Washington Post described an alternative geography of the United States, one that has grown so large, unwieldy and secretive that no one knows how much money it costs, how many people it employs or how many programs exist within it.

Today's story, along with related material on The Post's website, examines how Top Secret America plays out at the local level. It describes a web of 3,984 federal, state and local organizations, each with its own counterterrorism responsibilities and jurisdictions. At least 934 of these organizations have been created since the 2001 attacks or became involved in counterterrorism for the first time after 9/11.

As a playwright, Rolf Hochhuth knows how to use timing to achieve the greatest possible impact. In the 1960s, he criticized the pope for remaining silent about the Holocaust. When everyone in the world was talking about globalization, he took to the theater stage and unmasked consulting companies like McKinsey as exploitation machines.

Now Hochhuth is campaigning against the euro - and his stage is Germany's Constitutional Court. "Why should we help rescue the Greeks from their sham bankruptcy?" he asks. "Ever since Odysseus, the world has known that the Greeks are the biggest rascals of all time. How is it even possible - unless it was premeditated - for this highly popular tourist destination to go bankrupt?"

In the spring, he joined a group led by Berlin-based professor Markus Kerber that has filed a constitutional complaint against the billions in aid to Greece and the establishment of the European stabilization fund, which was set up in May 2010. Hochhuth wants the deutsche mark back. "I don't know if this is possible. I only know that Germany lived very well with the mark." It's an opinion that suddenly places this nearly 80-year-old man in a rather unusual position, at least for him: on the side of the majority of Germans.

Unnerved by shaky, debt-ridden countries and bailout packages worth billions, the majority of Germans want the mark back. In a survey conducted in early December by the polling firm Infratest dimap, 57 percent of respondents agreed with the statement that Germany would have been better off keeping the mark than introducing the euro. Germans, it seems, are gripped once again by their historic fear of inflation: According to the Forschungsgruppe Wahlen polling institute, 82 percent of the population is worried about the stability of their currency.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel of the conservative Christian Democratic Union (CDU) faces a dilemma as to how to deal with ordinary Germans' concerns about the euro. If she takes their fears seriously, she will have to assume a hard-line stance toward countries that are drowning in debt like Greece and Portugal. But if she plays the iron chancellor, she will have no choice but to break with the Europe-friendly traditions of former CDU chancellors like Konrad Adenauer and Helmut Kohl.

Increasingly, there are signs of rising social pressures. Many Western European countries are only just embarking on multi-year deficit-reduction packages, a hard sell in states where expectations have risen for generations. Greek protesters clashed with police in central Athens on Wednesday as tens of thousands marched against austerity measures aimed at pulling the country out of a debt crisis.

On Tuesday, Italian rioters and police fought battles in Rome after Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi won a no-confidence vote. Britain saw its worst clashes in two decades last week as students demonstrated over tuition fee rises, with Prince Charles and wife Camilla caught up in the melee. More unrest is expected next year as unions protest against much broader cuts.

"It's almost inevitable that there will be more protest in 2011 than 2010, particularly in countries such as Greece and the UK where there are real public divisions over how much austerity is necessary," said Carina O'Reilly, European security analyst at IHS Jane's. "It's going to get nastier. We could well see deaths or serious injuries. We could well have seen deaths in the London riots last week. We were just lucky."

None of the European protests have so far had a major policy impact. But in some countries at least, particularly those with upcoming elections, worries over further unrest will deter the government from more aggressive reforms.

Admiral Robert F Willard, commander of the US Pacific Command, disclosed to a Japanese newspaper on Sunday that the new anti-ship ballistic missile (ASBM) is now in the early stages of deployment after having undergone extensive testing. The new weapon, the "D" version of China's DF-21 medium-range missile, involves firing the mobile missile into space, returning it into the atmosphere and then maneuvering it to its target.

Richard Fisher, a China military-affairs specialist, said the new ASBM is only one part of a series of new Chinese weapons that threaten the region. "When we add the ASBM to the PLA's [People's Liberation Army's] growing anti-satellite capabilities, growing numbers of submarines, and quite soon, its fifth-generation fighter, we are seeing the erection of a new Chinese wall in the western Pacific, for which the Obama administration has offered almost nothing in defensive response," Mr. Fisher said.

"Clearly, China's communist leadership is not impressed by the administration's ending of F-22 production, its retirement of the Navy's nuclear cruise missile, START Treaty reductions in US missile warheads, and its refusal to consider US space warfare capabilities. Such weakness is the surest way to invite military adventurism from China," he added.

Mark Stokes, a retired Air Force officer who has written extensively on the new missile, said the new deployment is a concern. "China's ability to place at risk US and other nations' maritime surface assets operating in the western Pacific and South China Sea is growing and closer to becoming a reality than many may think," Mr Stokes said.

They provided no details about the surrogacy arrangement. "We are overwhelmed with happiness and joy at this very special moment," the couple told the website in a statement. They said the boy weighed 7lb 15oz (3.6kg). A representative for the couple said they intended to protect and respect the privacy of the surrogate mother, and would not be discussing any details relating to the surrogacy arrangements.

Last year, the couple, who were married in 2005 after 12 years together, tried to adopt an orphan in Ukraine. However, Ukrainian officials said Sir Elton, 62, was too old and his civil partnership with Mr Furnish, 48, would not be recognised as a marriage by Kiev.

The state capital, Brisbane, has recorded its wettest December in more than 150 years. Cyclone Tasha, which hit Queensland on Saturday, also brought torrential rain to the state. "We're in unchartered territory in that area. The bureau is indicating it could go higher," he said.

Inland towns such as Chinchilla and Dalby are all under water; the nearby town of Warra, and the towns of Alpha and Jericho, west of Emerald, have also been declared disaster zones. Officials said although the rain was easing in some areas, more flooding was expected as the water drained through towns to the sea.

Brent Finlay, president of the farmers' lobby group AgForce, said the floods could cause up to $403 million (261 million pounds) in damage to crops. "It's just devastating. This was going to be the crop that got a lot of farmers back on their feet after the drought," Mr Finlay said.