Taking a break from promoting her upcoming movie Changeling, Angelina Jolie hosted a symposium on international law and justice Friday at the Council on Foreign Relations headquarters in New York. “Over the past seven years, I’ve worked with UNHCR and I’ve traveled around the world trying to bring attention to refugees,” she said. “It’s been a remarkable education.”

Jolie, who has visited dozens of war-torn countries around the world, spoke passionately on behalf of the victims she’s met. “I’ve seen refugees return to live among the same people who attacked them,” she said. “They are returning to the same lawlessness that sent them running in the first place. I’ve seen aid workers tear up as they put ladies on a bus and say, ‘I don’t know what we’re sending them back to.’”

“I don’t know if the ICC is the answer. And I don’t know what type of court is, or what it would need to be to make all of us agree and make it strong enough,” Jolie admitted. “But I do know this: No mother who had her children killed in front of her, no young girl sold into slavery, no boy kidnapped and forced to be a child soldier and no young girl like the 3-year-old I met in Sierra Leone, who had her limbs cut off, should be expected to simply forget. No one should have to choose between peace and justice.”

It’s been a busy couple of days for the Changeling star, beginning with her Today show appearance and her interview with the New York Times.

In addition to the symposium, sponsored by the Jolie-Pitt Foundation, Jolie joined Microsoft Corp and 25 leading law firms to launch KIND, an initiative to provide legal counsel to immigrant childred who enter the U.S. without an adult. Over 8000 children, many of whom do not speak English and are victims of persecution, torture or trafficking, flee to the U.S. each year and are forced to wind their way through the legal system without an attorney. KIND hopes to fill that need completely by the year 2010.

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With six kids in the brood and thoughts of adopting another, Angelina Jolie can only imagine what people must be thinking.

“I mean, I know we seem crazy, just bringing them in one after the other, but we do plan,” she tells the New York Times. “We make sure one is absorbed completely into the family before we add another.”

And as each child grows up and becomes Internet-savvy, Jolie, 33, sees even more challenges ahead for her and partner Brad Pitt, 44. “There’s a lot we’re going to have to explain to them about how public their family is,” she says.

Jolie adds, “They all think I can’t do anything, that I’m just there to snuggle with. But the other day (son) Madd said, ‘Can you do a cartwheel?’ And I said, ‘Yeah, I can.’ And he was like, ‘Wow, Mom.’ And I thought: ‘Oh, yeah. I can do some things. You wait. You’ll find out. I’m capable.’”

The wheels are already turning in Angelina Jolie’s head, the Changeling star admitted in a lengthy Today show interview Thursday: She and Brad Pitt are considering another adoption.

“Soon?” asked host Matt Lauer when the actress and mother of six nodded in the affirmative.

While Jolie, whose twins Vivienne and Knox, are only 3 %26#189; months old, tried to avoid answering further, she did note, “You can’t even start the process until any new children are six months old, to understand how the new family has settled.”

As for how things settled after the most recent additions, Jolie, 33, said that the eldest, son Maddox, 6, was already “the professional big brother” to Pax, 4, Zahara, 3, and Shiloh, 2. “He’s done it so many times.”

“They’re all at that great age that they are not threatened. They’re independent. They don’t need Mommy and Daddy all the time.”

Will Keep Moving

She and Pitt generally see eye to eye when it comes to disciplining the children, she said, admitting, too, that the kids are so cute that it’s difficult to deny their requests to crawl into bed with their parents.

Jolie also said that the family is likely to continue their peripatetic lifestyle and not settle in one place for a while, at least not until the children are older.

“So far,” she says, “we’ve moved them a lot, and they like moving.”

She also likes being with Pitt, she said, when reminded of a quote some years ago in which she declared she was better off on her own. “I met the right person,” she told Lauer on Thursday. “I don’t like being without him.”

• What did you think of the interview? Leave your comments at PEOPLE’s Celebrity Baby Blog

Sex and the City star Cynthia Nixon says Brad Pitt’s recent $100,000 donation to fight a gay marriage ban is “inspiring.”

“I think it’s great,” the actress said Thursday at a DVD premiere party for the Sex and the City movie in New York.

Nixon, who has said she’d marry her longtime girlfriend Christine Marinoni if gay marriage were legal in New York, applauded Pitt’s recent donation to fight Proposition 8 - a ballot initiative that, if passed, would make same-sex marriages illegal in California.

On a more light-hearted note, Nixon confesses that for a Sex and the City sequel, “I’d want Miranda to go with Carrie, Samantha, and Charlotte on a madcap adventure!”

Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt’s Jolie-Pitt Foundation has made a $2 million donation to the Global Health Committee to establish a center to aid children affected by tuberculosis and HIV/AIDS in Ethiopia.

The center will be modeled after the Cambodian Health Committee’s Maddox Chivan Children’s Center in Cambodia, where children receive medical, education and social services.

“Our goal is to transfer the success we have had in Cambodia to Ethiopia where people are needlessly dying of tuberculosis, a curable disease, and HIV/AIDS, a treatable disease,” Jolie said in a statement.

As in Cambodia, where the couple named the center after their eldest child, the Ethiopian branch will be named for Zahara, 3, who was adopted from Ethiopia.

The clinic will also focus on tuberculosis care. The disease causes approximately 2 million deaths yearly, and is the largest cause of death worldwide for children and adults with AIDS.

“The fact that poor people continue to die in our world today of TB, a curable disease, because of lack of access to drugs and care is unacceptable,” Pitt said.

The Jolie-Pitt foundation was established in Sept. 2006, when the couple donated $1 million to the Global Action for Children organization and $1 million to Doctors Without Borders.

Tr%26#232;s Jolie, indeed.

Angelina Jolie is no casual Francophile. In fact, the actress - who has been studying the language for years and is now living outside of Nice - says she’s interested in starring in a French movie.

“When I can really speak it, then maybe I’ll audition for a French film in a few years,” Jolie (whose last name means “pretty” in French) tells the new issue of the German magazine Focus. “I truly am interested - more and more fantastic films are coming out of Europe and other cultures.”

So why hasn’t she worked in Europe already?

“No one has asked me yet!” Jolie said.

“It’s simply hard for me to sit still for two hours,” she admitted. “I would rather read something, or study or travel to experience something new.”

Pitt is the family’s hardcore movie buff, she added. “When we watch together, then I usually nod off or press pause so that I can take care of the kids.”

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With six kids to care for and movies to launch, it’s a wonder Brad Pitt also managed to fit charity work and a recent photo shoot - from behind the camera - into his hectic schedule.

The star, spotted with sons Maddox and Pax on the Venetian waterfront Tuesday, is joining forces with costar and pal George Clooney for a fund-raiser preceding Wednesday’s Venice Film Festival premiere of their new Coen Brothers’ comedy, Burn After Reading.

The dapper duo are scheduled to hit the red carpet on behalf of their charity Not On Our Watch, the Associated Press reports.

Photographer Pitt

Before arriving in Venice, Pitt added professional photographer to his ever-expanding resumé. He snapped Jolie for the November cover of W, PEOPLE has confirmed.

The photo shoot, first reported by Fashion Week Daily, took place at Chateau Miraval in Provence, France, where the Pitt-Jolies have been since Jolie gave birth July 12 to twins Knox Léon and Vivienne Marcheline.

It was a homecoming of sorts for the couple, who appeared on the cover of W in June 2005 to promote their film Mr. and Mrs. Smith. In that cover, the couple lounged while three kids - not their own - played in a pool.

In the Pitt-Jolie household Mommy doesn’t just stay home and make pancakes - she makes movies, too.

Angelina Jolie is in talks to replace Tom Cruise in the new espionage thriller Edwin A. Salt, Variety reports. (Cruise had long been interested in the project, but recently dropped out of the running, the paper adds. Writers are now reportedly reworking the lead character to be female.)

If the pieces drop into place, Jolie - who gave birth to twins in July with Brad Pitt - will portray a CIA officer falsely accused of being a Russian agent.

The BBC reports that Alison Carroll - a 23-year-old Brit with 12 years experience as a professional gymnast - will be the face of the iconic character for the new game, Tomb Raider: Underworld, out this fall.

One Hollywood star being hotly pursued - not only by movie producers, but also by Presidential hopefuls John McCain and Barack Obama - is Angelina Jolie.

Only, the new mom and United Nations goodwill ambassador has a message for both parties: Not so fast.

“I have not decided on a candidate,” Jolie says in a statement provided by political adviser Trevor Neilson to Variety managing editor Ted Johnson, for the trade publication’s Wilshire %26 Washington column.

“I am waiting to see the commitments they will make on issues like international justice, refugees and how to address the needs of children in crisis around the world,” says Jolie, 33.

Jolie’s bottom line - which some viewed as more in keeping with the proposed stay-the-line policy of John McCain - was to say, “What we cannot afford, in my view, is to squander the progress that has been made.”

Additionally, Variety reports, in June Jolie told Entertainment Weekly that when she and Clint Eastwood (director of her upcoming The Changeling - and a Republican) discuss politics, “Actually, we don’t disagree as much as you’d think. I think people assume I’m a Democrat. But I’m registered independent and I’m still undecided. So I’m looking at McCain as well as Obama.”

Oprah’s and Paris’s Choices

Much, obviously, is at stake. With Oprah Winfrey’s personal endorsement of Obama being credited with bringing the now-presumptive Democratic candidate some one million votes in this year’s primaries and caucuses, the blessing of a celebrity on a candidate is considered worth its weight in, well, oil.

In a lighter vein, even Paris Hilton has jumped the political bandwagon this year, though after being dissed by the McCain camp in a recent anti-Obama online spot, the hotel heiress has made her candidate choice clear: herself.

Two paparazzi in camouflage tangled with security for Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie Thursday near the couple’s French chateau, leaving a guard and a photographer bloodied.

Both sides filed legal complaints accusing the other of battery and causing injury, and one of the photographers also filed complaints for illegal detention and arrest, the Associated Press reports.

No arrests were made. A judge will rule on whether the complaints will be pursued.

The photographers, identified as freelancers Luc Goursolas and Marianne Saint-Arroman, clashed with the Pitt-Jolie security in the woods around Chateau Miraval, where the couple have been staying following the birth of their twins.

Goursolas confirms to the AP that he fought with guards, saying he broke one guard’s finger and bit another, drawing blood. A guard, he claims, bloodied by hitting him on the head with a walkie-talkie.

“I was pouring blood. I threw myself at them, put blood all over them, and told them that I had HIV so they would stop hitting me,” Goursolas told the AP.

But both sides conflicted on whether the guards were actually on the Pitt-Jolie’s property.