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Cars queued at petrol stations — 40 percent of which had run out of fuel in the worst affected area of Catalonia — and supplies of fresh food began to run low in some markets, Spanish media reported.

Police motorbike riders escorted fuel tankers to some petrol stations to break picket lines and prevent attacks, after some strikers slashed lorry tires on Monday.

“I heard all the petrol stations were running out of fuel so I came to fill up, otherwise I worried I won’t be able to get to work tomorrow,” said a Madrid driver who gave his name as Raul.

Oil company Cepsa said 45 percent of its deliveries had failed to get through to stations due to strikers blocking their path at fuel deposits, although Spain’s biggest oil firm Repsol said deliveries were getting through with “relative normality.”

Half the normal number of tankers picked up fuel at deposits on Monday, distribution firm CLH said, though the spokesman added that many oil companies had taken on extra supplies in previous days in anticipation of the strike.

Truckers caused traffic chaos in Madrid by slowing almost all roads into the capital, while others blockaded wholesale food markets.

I can feel it, too. Over the past few years I’ve had an uncomfortable sense that someone, or something, has been tinkering with my brain, remapping the neural circuitry, reprogramming the memory. My mind isn’t going—so far as I can tell—but it’s changing. I’m not thinking the way I used to think. I can feel it most strongly when I’m reading. Immersing myself in a book or a lengthy article used to be easy. My mind would get caught up in the narrative or the turns of the argument, and I’d spend hours strolling through long stretches of prose. That’s rarely the case anymore. Now my concentration often starts to drift after two or three pages. I get fidgety, lose the thread, begin looking for something else to do. I feel as if I’m always dragging my wayward brain back to the text. The deep reading that used to come naturally has become a struggle.

I think I know what’s going on. For more than a decade now, I’ve been spending a lot of time online, searching and surfing and sometimes adding to the great databases of the Internet. The Web has been a godsend to me as a writer. Research that once required days in the stacks or periodical rooms of libraries can now be done in minutes. A few Google searches, some quick clicks on hyperlinks, and I’ve got the telltale fact or pithy quote I was after. Even when I’m not working, I’m as likely as not to be foraging in the Web’s info-thickets—reading and writing e-mails, scanning headlines and blog posts, watching videos and listening to podcasts, or just tripping from link to link to link. (Unlike footnotes, to which they’re sometimes likened, hyperlinks don’t merely point to related works; they propel you toward them.)

Like Betsy Hartman’s pioneering critique Reproductive Rights and Wrongs: The Global Politics of Population Control, Connelly’s principal narrative is the tension between those who focused on women’s empowerment through birth control and those who wanted to control the fertility of populations with financial incentives and coercion. “The great tragedy of population control, the fatal misconception,” Connelly says, “was to think that one could know other people’s interests better than they knew it themselves.”

The narrative starts in the 19th century with the rising concern in the UK and US about the higher fertility rates of the developing world, sure to produce a flood of non-Anglos across borders and the decline of Anglo hegemony. Racial eugenicists emerged in many countries, determined to increase the birth rate of worthy whites in the affluent North and to control the fertility of the rest.

Connelly describes the rise of the global population control movement, from Delhi and Beijing to London, Geneva and New York, with astonishing breadth. In his account, population control reached its final act in the 1970s and 1980s when Club of Rome pessimism about the “population bomb” coincided with massive sterilisations in India and the imposition of the one-child regime in China. By the mid-1980s population control had been tarnished politically by these excesses, while dramatic declines of fertility worldwide had demonstrated that government coercion has only a marginal influence on childbearing compared with improving women’s education and employment prospects.

American corn and soybean farmers are suffering from too much rain, while Australian wheat farmers have been plagued by drought.

“The planting has gotten off to a poor start,” said Bill Nelson, a Wachovia grains analyst. “The anxiety level is increasing.”

Randy Kron, whose family has been farming in the southwestern corner of Indiana for 135 years, should have corn more than a foot tall by now. But all spring it has seemed as if there were a faucet in the sky. The rain is regular, remorseless.

Some of Mr. Kron’s fields are too soggy to plant. Some of the corn he managed to get in has drowned, forcing him to replant. The seeds that survived are barely two inches high.

At a moment when the country’s corn should be flourishing, one plant in 10 has not even emerged from the ground, the Agriculture Department said Monday. Because corn planted late is more sensitive to heat damage in high summer, every day’s delay practically guarantees a lower yield at harvest.

“This is pushing my nerves to the limit,” Mr. Kron said one recent morning, the sky as dark as the unplanted earth.

Last winter, as the full scope of the global food crisis became clear, commodity prices doubled or tripled, provoking grumbling in America, riots in two dozen countries and the specter of greatly increased malnutrition.

As the world clamors for more corn, wheat, soybeans and rice, farmers are trying to meet the challenge. Millions of acres are coming back into production in Europe. In Asia, planting two or three crops in a single year is becoming more common.

American farmers are planting 324 million acres this year, up 4 million acres from 2007. Too much of the best land is waterlogged, however. Indiana and Illinois have been the worst hit, although Iowa, Wisconsin and Minnesota were inundated last weekend.

Bob Biehl, whose farm is near St. Louis, has managed to plant only 140 of the 650 acres he wanted to devote to corn. Some farmers in his area “haven’t even been able to take the tractor out of the shed,” he said.

United States soybean plantings are running 16 percent behind last year. Rice is tardy in Arkansas, which produces nearly half the country’s crop. “We’re certainly not going to have as good a crop as we had hoped,” said Harvey Howington of the Arkansas Rice Growers Association. “I don’t think this is good news for anybody.”

Harvests ebb and flow, of course. But with supplies of most of the key commodities at their lowest levels in decades, there is little room for error this year. American farmers are among the world’s top producers, supplying 60 percent of the corn that moves across international borders in a typical year, as well as a third of the soybeans, a quarter of the wheat and a tenth of the rice.

“If we have bad crops, it’s going to be a wild ride,” said the Agriculture Department’s chief economist, Joseph Glauber. “There’s just no cushion.”

As every farmer knows, trouble can come at any point before the harvest is complete. Danny and Karen Smith get up in the middle of the night at their wheat farm in Milton, Kan., whenever they hear thunder.

In a few weeks, the wheat they planted last fall will be ripe. A bad storm or, worse, a tornado could destroy it. Last year, the Smiths lost nearly all their wheat to a late freeze compounded by too much rain.

This year, the weather has been perfect: cool and moist. “See how plump these berries are?” Mr. Smith said, standing in the middle of one of his fields. “This will feed a lot of people.”

The world wheat harvest is forecast to rise more than 8 percent this year, because of better weather and more acreage under cultivation. But even this bright spot is tentative. Australia was expected to emerge from a two-year drought, but that prediction is looking somewhat doubtful.

With the exception of southwestern Australia and a small corner of southeastern Australia, little rain has fallen in recent months. Many wheat farmers have been unable to plant at all, said Bob Iffla, the chairman of the country’s Wheat Growers Association.

As a result, the harvest is likely to be below average: 5 million to 15 million tons of wheat available for export, compared with 17 million or 18 million tons in an average year.

China also faces trouble: the agriculture ministry issued an urgent notice to wheat and rice farmers in southern China on Sunday, telling them to harvest as much of their crop as possible immediately in the face of unseasonable torrential rains expected to rake the region for the next 10 days.

In the American corn belt, the issue has also been getting the rain to stop. After heavy rains and flooding last weekend, the price of corn on the commodity markets rose Monday to a record $6.57 a bushel.

“We can’t snap our fingers and make high yields,” said Emerson D. Nafziger, a professor of agronomic extension at the University of Illinois. “We still depend on the weather.”

A universal saying among farmers is that high prices never last, because they encourage production that fills the demand and drives down the prices. The current crisis is testing that theory. With costs soaring for fertilizer and diesel, the expenses of farming are so high that the urge to plant more is battling, in some places, with the temptation to plant nothing.

Prajoub Suksapsri in Ayutthaya, Thailand, is among the farmers going all-out this year. For the first time in two decades of farming, Mr. Prajoub is preparing to plant a second crop of rice on his land, which usually does not have irrigation.

He and his neighbors have risked their savings to set up a system to pump water into their fields. If rice prices stay high, Mr. Prajoub could make the biggest profit he has seen in years from his two-acre farm. But if prices fall, he could face heavy losses.

“Sometimes I lie awake at night, worrying about it,” he said, watching his new Honda generator chug steadily, running the pumps. The landlord for the fields that he rents is charging him more than triple the usual amount just for the right to plant an extra harvest.

“He is sucking my blood,” Mr. Prajoub said.

Helen Gabriel’s farm in south-central Luzon Island in the Philippines also measures two acres and lacks irrigation. Faced with soaring costs for diesel, fertilizer, rice seed and insecticide, she has made a different decision from Mr. Prajoub.

“We will have no crop this year,” Mrs. Gabriel said as she waited in a three-hour line for the right to buy 4.4 pounds of government-subsidized rice.

World stockpiles of rice are likely to shrink slightly this year, excluding Chinese food security reserves that are not available for world trade, after already dwindling markedly in six of the last eight years, said Concepcion Calpe, a Food and Agriculture Organization rice specialist in Rome.

That estimate does not take into account the turmoil in Arkansas. Last year, the rice crop in Arkansas yielded a record 160 bushels an acre. This year, experts there say, 150 bushels will be an achievement.

“There’s no doubt about it, we’re not going to have the rice to export,” said Carl Frein of Farmers Marketing Service in Brinkley, Ark. “Poor countries like Haiti, I don’t know what they’re going to do.”

For all the apprehension this year, the growing season is still young, with plenty of time for the situation to improve — or for crops to fail.

“I’ve seen mediocre starts get a bit better, and mediocre starts get a whole lot worse,” said Mr. Nelson, the grains analyst.

Mr. Kron, the Indiana farmer, gave up on corn last week after managing to plant — and in some cases replant — only about half of his 1,200 acres.

Last year, his corn yielded 150 bushels an acre. This year, he will be happy to get 130 bushels. He has warned his processor, Azteca Milling, which makes flour for tortillas and chips, that he will be short.

Mr. Kron’s prospects are deteriorating. He was hoping to plant soybeans on some of his unused corn ground, but hundreds of those acres adjoin the swollen Wabash River. On Monday, the fields started flooding.

Scientists at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory in Golden are testing a spruced-up Toyota Prius, a plug-in hybrid sedan complete with a solar panel attached to its oval roof and a bigger battery in the trunk to supply power in lieu of the gasoline-fueled engine.

The result: A spunky Prius that runs the initial 60 miles mostly on battery, adding up to a fuel mileage of 100 miles per gallon.

“The stored power in the battery does a great job of displacing petroleum,” said Tony Markel, a senior engineer at NREL who has been working on the 2006 model Prius for the past two years. “For most people, their daily commute is about 30 miles, so this car would run virtually on battery and only need to be recharged at night.”

Displacing petroleum is a desirable virtue today, as the nation battles global warming and skyrocketing fuel prices.

On Monday, Colorado’s average price for regular, unleaded gasoline hit a record high at $3.943 a gallon, nearly 70 cents higher than the $3.258 a year earlier.

But the spruced-up Prius doesn’t come cheap.

The lithium-ion battery, which can be recharged using a standard electrical outlet at home or even at the workplace, has a price tag of $40,000. And the solar panel on the roof cost $2,500.

The CCC is a federal government-owned and operated entity that was created to stabilize, support, and protect farm income and prices. CCC is also supposed to maintain balanced and adequate supplies of agricultural commodities and aids in their orderly distribution.

“This lack of emergency preparedness is the fault of the 1996 farm bill which eliminated the government’s grain reserves as well as the Farmer Owned Reserve (FOR),” explained Matlack. “We had hoped to reinstate the FOR and a Strategic Energy Grain Reserve in the new farm bill, but the politics of food defeated our efforts. As farmers it is our calling and purpose in life to feed our families, our communities, our nation and a good part of the world, but we need better planning and coordination if we are to meet that purpose. AAM pledges to continue our work for better farm policy which includes an FOR and a Strategic Energy Grain Reserve.”

AAM’s support for the FOR program, which allows the grain to be stored o­n farms, is a key component to a safe grain reserve in that the supplies will be decentralized in the event of some unforeseen calamity which might befall the large grain storage terminals.

Charles Ernest “Chuck” Grassley, a senior United States Senator from Iowa, launched a congressional investigation to determine whether research psychiatrists were receiving drug money payments and failing to disclose that information to the federal government and university departments.

But even as they work to provide temporary shelter, officials are looking ahead to an even more formidable problem: When the ground stops shaking and the dust settles, this county alone will have 250,000 people who will need new homes.

It is not just a question of rebuilding what was here. Some towns lost not only their buildings but also the land they were standing on and scarce cropland when landslides hit from both sides, said Xiang Zhichun a young public affairs worker.
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“A lot of crops were buried, polluted and spoiled,” said Xiang. “After the earthquake there is not enough flat area to live.”

Investors fretted about the impact of the latest round of anti-inflation measures announced over the weekend.

Shanghai’s Composite Index plunged 7.7% to 3,072.33, its lowest closing level since March 22. Tuesday’s trading was the first since the People’s Bank of China announced it would lift the ratio of reserves banks must set aside as deposits by 1 percentage point. The adjustment comes ahead of consumer-price index data for May due out Thursday.

The benchmark index for the Shenzhen stock market was down 8% at 928.20.

Hong Kong’s Hang Seng Index slipped 4.2% at 23,375.52 and the Hang Seng China Enterprises Index gave up 5.4% to 12,789.87.

Chinese banking and property shares were among leading decliners amid concerns about the outlook for corporate earnings, given higher oil prices and the impact of the macroeconomic controls.

By the end of this year prices will be down by 10% and by a further 10.5% in 2009, according to the index. Prices will keep dropping through 2010 and cut values by 23.5% when they hit rock bottom in 2011. House prices will then begin a slow climb back to current market values over a period of about six years.