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“Once the typhoon hits those areas, the crop will be affected,” Agriculture Undersecretary Antonio Fleta said in a phone interview from Manila. “Even if farmers harvest the damaged rice, they’d have a hard time drying the grain. There may not be much left to sell.”

About 157,000 hectares of land planted to rice in Cagayan and Isabela provinces may be in the path of the typhoon, Fleta said. Megi has sustained winds of 270 kilometers (168 miles) per hour, the U.S. Navy Joint Typhoon Warning Center said, making it a Category 5 storm capable of catastrophic damage.

Half of the planted areas in the two provinces are ready for harvest and the rest are in the reproductive stage, leaving them susceptible to damage, Fleta said.

Damage to Philippine crops would come amid production losses in other countries, further curbing the global harvest and potentially sustaining a rally in prices.

Siegfried Rotthaeuser and his brother-in-law have come up with a legal way of importing and distributing 75 and 100 watt light bulbs — by producing them in China, importing them as “small heating devices” and selling them as “heatballs.”

To improve energy efficiency, the EU has banned the sale of bulbs of over 60 watts — to the annoyance of the mechanical engineer from the western city of Essen.

Rotthaeuser studied EU legislation and realized that because the inefficient old bulbs produce more warmth than light — he calculated heat makes up 95 percent of their output, and light just 5 percent — they could be sold legally as heaters.

On their website (heatball.de/), the two engineers describe the heatballs as “action art” and as “resistance against legislation which is implemented without recourse to democratic and parliamentary processes.”

Costing 1.69 euros each ($2.38), the heatballs are going down well — the first batch of 4,000 sold out in three days.

The former secretary of state and onetime national security adviser met one-on-one with President Obama at the White House on Friday afternoon, after a week of television appearances promoting “Extraordinary, Ordinary People,” her memoir about her parents. The White House said Obama wanted to discuss a range of foreign policy issues with her.

Later, at an evening appearance at the Aspen Institute, Rice said she and Obama “covered the waterfront.” “Despite the fact there are changes and tussles, there is still a foreign policy community that believes that foreign policy ought to be bipartisan,” she said. “It was really great that he reached out in that way.”

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The greenback extended a rebound that started late last week, with the euro retreating further from an eight-month high and the Australian dollar backing off from Friday’s peak above parity that was the highest since it was floated in 1983.

Airlines advised pilots to refuel abroad and UFIP, the country’s oil industry association, said that if strikes continued at all 12 of France’s refineries, then national shortages would follow.

Christine Lagarde, France’s finance minister, said 230 of the country’s 13,000 stations were out of fuel and Total, the French oil company, said 350 to 400 petrol stations were suffering disrupted supplies. Shortages looked set to worsen as lorry drivers pledged to halt road transport of fuel to filling stations from last night.

“We have found the means to cope with the worst moments of the crisis so far, but we cannot hold out forever,” warned Jean-Louis Schilansky, UFIP’s president.

Striking workers continued to block the Fos-Lavera fuel terminal near Marseille, where 61 ships and 47 petrol tankers are unable to offload.

Emergency

“We ran out of gas yesterday already. There’s nothing left,” said Alpha Sysavane, a worker at a BP station in Paris. “All we have left are a few litres of diesel fuel.”

The government has authorised oil companies to use emergency stocks, but has not yet touched its three-week strategic reserves.

One motorist from a village near Fontainbleau said she had driven 30 miles to Paris in order to buy fuel. “At home, the filling stations are closed,” said Emilia Scoubel (30), an office worker.

On Saturday, the ecology ministry warned that Roissy Charles de Gaulle, France’s main international airport, could run out of fuel today. But yesterday Dominique Bussereau, the transport minister, insisted the pipeline to the airport was now working. However, planes had been advised to fill up before returning to France, he said.

The CGT union complained that the pipeline feeding Paris’s airports had been reopened by “untrained executives”, warning their action “posed a serious security threat” and was an “unacceptable breach of the right to strike”.

President Nicolas Sarkozy is trying to rush through a law raising the legal retirement age from 60 to 62 by Wednesday, but unions hope to strong-arm him into revoking or at least suspending the bill.

On Saturday, more than 825,000 protesters hit the streets in the fifth such demonstrations in a little over a month, though the government suggested that the movement was losing steam.

Natasha Lakaev’s Universal Knowledge organisation was offering courses until last year that prophesied the world would end in December 2012 and almost everyone except her devotees would die.

A former member of her inner circle, Carli McConkey, has told The Sunday Age that Ms Lakaev was physically violent and psychologically manipulative, and had persuaded her followers that she was the Queen of Atlantis, a reincarnation of Jesus Christ, and one of 12 members of the Intergalactic Council of the Universe.
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