P90x

One of the most talked about products in the fitness world today. Have the body you have always wanted in under 90 days! Fitness expert Tony Horton guides you through the whole process.

Leno to America: Goodbye! I'm Not Going Anywhere!

"We're not really leaving," Jay Leno told the studio audience on his last Tonight Show. And he was right. So how do you throw yourself a goodbye when you're not going anywhere? TV has a history of lugubrious farewells for longtime personalities, and while Jay Leno may not have stuck around as long as Johnny Carson, at 17 years, he's been there long enough to earn such a send-off.

The problem is, of course, that Jay is going to be back on NBC in three months, nightly, at 10 p.m. E.T. every weeknight. He's like the high-school big man on campus who's graduating, but will be enrolling in the local community college next fall.

Susan Boyle comes up short - Finishes second on 'Britain's Got Talent'

Internet senstation Susan Boyle came up short, coming in second during "Britain's Got Talent" finale on Saturday.

Boyle was upset by winner Diversity, a 10-person dance group from Essex and East London, England, ranging in age from 12 to 25 years old. The group won 100,000 British pounds ($161,000) and will perform for Queen Elizabeth II in the Royal Variety Show.

"The best people won," Boyle said.

Boyle wowed the crowd Saturday night with an encore performance of the song that first made her so famous around the world -- "I Dreamed a Dream," from the musical "Les Miserables."

After her performance Saturday, the crowd and judges gave Boyle, who wore a floor-length gown, a standing ovation.

Banks target checking fees to find new ways to raise cash

As people shift from using credit cards to debit cards, banks need to find new ways to sock it to them. And it looks like they may have found one: higher checking fees. If you're not careful, these fees can add up to hundreds of dollars before you even know they hit you. To wit:

* Bank of America (BAC) will increase its monthly account maintenance fee on its MyAccess checking from $5.95 to $8.95 per month in June. It will also start charging a one-time fee of $35 if your account is overdrawn for five business days. And that's on top of the overdraft fees, the maximum number of which has also been raised. Last year, they would never ding you more than five times in one day; now, they can whack you up to 10 times.

* Citigroup (C) began charging 3 percent of the transaction for some debit card purchases and ATM withdrawals made outside the U.S. last year, up from 2 percent before. That now matches the cost of using credit cards. Citi also increased its overdraft fee to $34 per incident. It had been $30.

* SunTrust (STI) is charging a higher fee on its basic checking if customers overdraw multiple times. The bank also raised its overdraft fees on other accounts.

* Wachovia/Wells Fargo (WFC) is doubling to $10 its fee to transfer money to checking to cover insufficient funds on some accounts. It will also start charging that fee to a credit card rather than taking it from a linked bank account, so you could end up paying interest on that charge as well.

"They are supposed to act in the interest of shareholders, so they're gouging consumers," Sam Johnson, a former chief economist for the International Monetary Fund, told USA Today. He thinks banks are raising account fees because of a "mix of market power and opportunism."

While the U.S. government bails out these banks because they are "too big too fail," banks choose to use this power to take advantage of consumers who are struggling. The same consumers who are taxpayers that helped to bail out these banks.

Banks defend their choices by saying say consumers have become riskier customers with the higher unemployment rate. In addition, banks say their borrowing costs are higher -- which I really have to wonder about, given the trillions the government has pumped into the loan markets at this point. 

The Fed is thinking about cracking down on some of these fee increases, but the weak rule now being discussed does not cap overdraft fees, does not require banks to disclose the overdraft interest rate and does not prevent them from manipulating the order of checks to maximize overdraft fees. (Banks commonly will clear the largest checks first, so the customer ends up with overdraft fees on lots of smaller checks.)

Bankrate.com says ATM fees, monthly service fees and balance requirements for interest checking accounts all hit record highs in 2008 before inflation. Bankrate predicts consumers should expect more of the same in 2009.

Have your fees gone up on your accounts? Are you thisclose to throttling the people who run your bank?

Wikipedia Bans Church of Scientology From Editing Entries

Wikipedia, which characterizes itself as "the free encyclopedia that anyone can edit," might need to tack a slight addendum on to the end of that description: "unless that anyone happens to log in from a computer owned by the Church of Scientology." According to the Register, the administrators of Wikipedia have decided to ban all editors who log on to the site from IP addresses owned by the Church of Scientology. Some of those administrators have claimed, according to the Register, that those spunky Scientologists have been "damaging Wikipedia's reputation for neutrality" by delving into biased self-promotion. Scientology, a 55-year-old religion founded by science fiction writer L. Ron Hubbard, has gained both notoriety and criticism in recent years as celebrity members like Tom Cruise and John Travolta have become increasingly vocal.

This does not mark Wikipedia's first attempt to quelch zealots in the Scientology debate. In the past, site administrators have banned several determinedly anti-Scientology accounts from editing entries related to the religion. Due to the prohibitively time-consuming nature of identifying specific editors and banning them from specific pages, though, Wikipedia has elected to prohibit any and all editorial action taken via Church IPs. While many Web philosophers are bound to woundedly cry "Free speech!" in response to such an issue as this, we must take a different stance. Whether or not Wikipedia was right in taking such broadly prohibitive measures, Wikipedia certainly has the right to do so. The more dependent on massive media companies we become, the more we need to accept that such companies -- at the end of the day -- are companies, after all, and are beholden to themselves, not the people.