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STANFORD, Calif. (AP) -- Tiger Woods will be an honorary captain for Stanford when the 14th-ranked Cardinal take on rival California in the Big Game on Saturday.

Together the world’s 6.8 billion people use land equal in size to South America to grow food and raise livestock--an astounding agricultural footprint. And demographers predict the planet will host 9.5 billion people by 2050. Because each of us requires a minimum of 1,500 calories a day, civilization will have to cultivate another Brazil’s worth of land--2.1 billion acres--if farming continues to be practiced as it is today. That much new, arable earth simply does not exist. To quote the great American humorist Mark Twain: “Buy land. They’re not making it any more.”Agriculture also uses 70 percent of the world’s available freshwater for irrigation, rendering it unusable for drinking as a result of contamination with fertilizers, pesticides, herbicides and silt. If current trends continue, safe drinking water will be impossible to come by in certain densely populated regions. Farming involves huge quantities of fossil fuels, too--20 percent of all the gasoline and diesel fuel consumed in the U.S. The resulting greenhouse gas emissions are of course a major concern, but so is the price of food as it becomes linked to the price of fuel, a mechanism that roughly doubled the cost of eating in most places worldwide between 2005 and 2008.

SINGAPORE (Reuters) - The United States and China sparred over exchange rates at a meeting of Asia Pacific leaders on Sunday, pointing to tricky talks ahead for President Barack Obama when he flies to China to address economic tensions.

Gadget makers often rely on piezoelectricity --the ability that some solids have to produce voltage when pressure is applied to them--to power tiny embedded systems, such as a BlackBerry Storm 2's touch screen or a car's airbag sensor . Whereas lead-based compounds typically have the greatest piezoelectric potential, the heavy metal has fallen out of favor as device-makers push to eliminate it from all electronics in an attempt to reduce toxic waste .

Film Reviews: Writer-director Shin Dong-il once more shows his gift for turning issue-based stories into character-driven entertainment.

Afghan presidential candidate Abdullah Abdullah on Sunday withdrew from the upcoming runoff election with President Hamid Karzai, saying he believes the second round would be as fraudulent as the first.

DOHA, Qatar (AP) -- Venus Williams has reached the semifinals of the Sony Ericsson Championships with a little help from Svetlana Kuznetsova, whose 6-3, 6-2 victory over Elena Dementieva secured the American's passage into the knockout round.