Former Peace Corps volunteer Will Ruddick and several residents of Bangladesh, Kenya, face a potential seven years in prison after developing a cost-effective way to alleviate poverty in Africa's poorest slums. Their solution: a complementary currency issued and backed by the local community. The Central Bank of Kenya has now initiated charges of forgery.

Complementary currencies can help eradicate poverty.

Proving that may be difficult in complex economies, due to the high number of factors influencing outcomes. But in an African slum with little of the national currency available, supplying residents with an alternative currency has a positive effect that is obvious, immediate and incontrovertible.

This was demonstrated when Will Ruddick, an American physicist, economist and former Peace Corps volunteer, introduced a complementary currency into a Kenyan slum called Bangladesh, near the coastal city of Mombasa. Will's local development organization, Koru-Kenya, worked with over one hundred small business owners in Bangladesh, who agreed to give each other the equivalent of 400 shillings (about €3.5 or $4.60) in mutual credit in the form of business vouchers called Bangla-Pesa. Half of the vouchers would be available for spending on each others' products and services, and half would be spent into the community on public projects such as waste collection and health services. Allocation decisions were democratic and transparent, and the new currency was backed entirely by the community's own resources and insured by a system of group guarantors, not by the Kenyan government or a development agency.

The project was launched on May 11, 2013. The immediate effect was an increase in sales of 22%. That meant increasing incomes and purchasing power by 22%. These exchanges were of goods and services that without the additional currency would have been thrown away or gone to waste, not because they were unmarketable but because potential customers did not have the money to buy them. Introducing Bangla-Pesa worked to move the economy forward at full capacity, connecting the community to its own resources when the only things lacking were those slips of paper called "money." A compelling video on the project is here.

Sacked Environment Minister Delphine Batho

France's Green Party (EELV) are "not far from quitting the government" it said Wednesday, in the wake of the abrupt sacking of Environment Minister Delphine Batho.

French President François Hollande's Socialist government faces a fresh headache Wednesday, after it's Green Party (EELV ) junior coalition partner threatened to quit the government following the abrupt sacking of Environment Minister Delphine Batho.

Batho was fired after she dared to criticise a decision to slash the environment ministry's budget by seven percent - cuts that are part of a wider austerity trim that will see the first drop in overall government spending since 1958.

"It's a bad budget," Batho complained to RTL radio on Tuesday. The 40-year-old, a member of the ruling Socialist Party, was immediately summoned by Prime Minister Jean-Marc Ayrault and given her marching orders. She has been replaced by another Socialist, Philippe Martin.

A former official with Swiss bank Reyl et Cie who claimed he knew of 15 French politicians and "big names" with undeclared bank accounts in Switzerland said Wednesday he had submitted the list to investigators.

Pierre Condamin-Gerbier was a witness before a parliamentary commission investigating former budget minister Jerome Cahuzac, who resigned in disgrace in March over an undeclared foreign bank account said to contain around 600,000 euros ($770,000).

Cahuzac is now facing charges of tax fraud.

"The list and information were transmitted yesterday to French justice," Condamin-Gerbier, who worked at Reyl et Cie between 2006 and 2010, told the commission.

Egyptian President Mohammed Morsi is reportedly under house arrest after the military ultimatum expired Wednesday, reports Al Hayat TV.

Morsi's spokesman denied the report, according to ABC News, but word of the house arrest provoked cheers in Tahrir Square.

This comes as Egypt's military moved to tighten its control on key institutions before their afternoon ultimatum expired.

The military stationed officers in the newsroom of state television on the banks of the Nile River in central Cairo. Troops were deployed in news-production areas.

Officers from the army's media department moved inside the newsroom and were monitoring output, though not yet interfering, staffers said, speaking on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to talk about the arrangements.

A former member of al-Qaeda has said the leader of al-Nusra Front, the primary terrorist group in Syria fighting against the government of President Bashar al-Assad, is a CIA operative.

"I personally believe that the leader of the Nusra Army who declared his support for Ayman al-Zawahiri, is a CIA operative in the al-Nusra," Sheikh Nabil Naiim, who led an al-Qaeda training camp in Egypt, made the revelation in a recent video testimony.

Addressing the al-Qaeda-linked al-Nusra militants, Naiim said, "You are fighting the war in Syria on America's behalf."

Naiim, who has renounced violence, also identified al-Qaeda chief Ayman al-Zawahiri as a U.S. double agent.

Suspected drunk drivers in some metro counties in Georgia are getting a rude surprise when they refuse a breathalyzer test.

Instead of taking no for an answer, officers now obtain a search warrant to forcibly draw blood and get evidence for the case. The key word: forcibly.

This NSA-whistleblower-government-spying scandal is hard for many to digest. On one level, I am an idealist too. I would like to believe that a lone whistleblower can pull a fast one on the NSA/CIA/Mossad axis. But I know that it cannot be. People find it hugely difficult to accept that the world is now so unrelentingly corrupt that the true extent of this corruption cannot be exposed and overturned by any whistleblowing.

Edward Snowden is either consciously playing his part in a deliberate intelligence psy-op to erect a smokescreen about what is really going on, or he has been unwittingly set up by his masters to do this. (The latter is the most likely). One cannot pull a fast one on these people. They know everything and can track everything, since decades ago, and only allow things to become public that they approve of.

They plainly wanted the world to know about PRISM and all that stuff. It works like a kind of bloodletting, to make the public think they still have some say in the running of this thing we call life on Earth, when the exact opposite is the case. They create the leak, sit back and watch the outrage, then some government committee is set up to investigate. Then that committee (which is stuffed full of stooges to make sure it doesn't have teeth) takes a year to carry out its task - after which time most people have forgotten what the fuss was all about. Then the committee finds that certain irregularities have taken place which will be sorted out with some token legislation.

Meanwhile, everything behind the scenes has carried on unhindered and, in fact, deepened. And very few notice or even care.

Anyone who has taken the time to investigate all this will see that what I am saying is true. This isn't "conspiracy theory". It's just the way it is. You see, the people who run the world run both sides of the show. They run the bad guys (which everybody knows) but they also run the good guys who oppose them (which comparatively few realise). They told us a hundred years ago that this is how they would be running things. And that's how they work it today.

For example, they own organisations like Amnesty International. That's why they never really stick their necks out for the real oppressions in the world, nor oppose the serial wars the USA engineers. To make out as if they champion literacy and women's rights (because that's trendy and acceptable to the masses) in a country which is being bombed back to the stone age (and yet say nothing whatsoever about that) is the ultimate smokescreen!

The Company

A federal judge has appointed former FBI Director Louis Freeh to conduct an independent investigation of alleged misconduct by a lawyer who worked for the court-supervised administrator of BP's multibillion-dollar settlement along with a team of private attorneys.

U.S. District Judge Carl Barbier issued an order Tuesday naming Freeh a "special master."

Freeh is a private consultant and recently led a university-sanctioned investigation of the Pennsylvania State University sex abuse scandal.

Claims administrator Patrick Juneau announced last month that his office is investigating allegations that an attorney on his staff received a portion of settlement proceeds for claims he had referred to a law firm before he started working on the settlement program.

BP had called for an independent review of the allegations.

Freeh served as FBI director from 1993 to 2001.