High gas prices are bad, but as the Wall Street Journal reminds us, it could be a lot worse. At least I have a kitchen full of groceries and the ability to keep it that way.
For the world’s poor, the situation is getting worse.
Surging commodity prices have pushed up global food prices 83% in the past three years, according to the World Bank — putting huge stress on some of the world’s poorest nations. Even as the ministers met, Haiti’s Prime Minister Jacques Edouard Alexis was resigning after a week in which that tiny country’s capital was racked by rioting over higher prices for staples like rice and beans.
Rioting in response to soaring food prices recently has broken out in Egypt, Cameroon, Ivory Coast, Senegal and Ethiopia. In Pakistan and Thailand, army troops have been deployed to deter food theft from fields and warehouses. World Bank President Robert Zoellick warned in a recent speech that 33 countries are at risk of social upheaval because of rising food prices. Those could include Indonesia, Yemen, Ghana, Uzbekistan and the Philippines. In countries where buying food requires half to three-quarters of a poor person’s income, “there is no margin for survival,” he said.
One month ago, gas was $3.73 a gallon at the midprice gas station that I pass by pretty much every single day. Here’s what prices were like earlier today:
That’s right … $3.91 a gallon on the low end. *sigh*
Some enterprising hackers have put together a scheme whereby they hack a number of blogs, so that they can create their own network pages and links back to a few select blogs, to pages that are not easily visible. It takes advantage of the organic and real page rank of all of the sites in question, and probably makes some bucks for the hacker involved.
Why is this bad for *you*?
Other than the knowledge that someone is profiting off of your back, what can happen is that if you’re running Adsense, Google might notice all the hidden text and penalize you and pull you right out of the Index.
It’s unclear right now what exactly is going on — for example, whether this is a possible WordPress exploit, or something at the webhost level — but if you have a WordPress blog, please click through to Tony’s article and do a little checking to make sure your blog is not one of the affected.
…if you are running any version of WordPress older than 2.3.3, you need to upgrade now. Seriously. WordPress 2.3.2 and older have security holes that are being actively exploited by hackers to inject spam links into blogs which are not maintained.
Nothing looks different out here, but WP 2.5 is running now. That was pretty easy.
The new admin interface will take a little getting used to, though. I like most of the changes, but I do kind of miss having the ‘”Categories” option to my right when creating a new post. It’s not a showstopper, though. I’ll adjust.
Audio historians have found a set of French “phonautogram” recordings from 1860 that predate Thomas Edison’s recordings by more than 10 years.
On a digital copy of the recording provided to The New York Times, the anonymous vocalist, probably female, can be heard against a hissing, crackling background din. The voice, muffled but audible, sings, “Au clair de la lune, Pierrot répondit” in a lilting 11-note melody — a ghostly tune, drifting out of the sonic murk.
What’s even cooler, you can download the clip yourself and listen to it. The quality’s not great, but it’s clearly a woman singing. Very neat.
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