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Sir John Holmes, undersecretary general for humanitarian affairs and the UN’s emergency relief coordinator, told a conference in Dubai that escalating prices would trigger protests and riots in vulnerable nations. He said food scarcity and soaring fuel prices would compound the damaging effects of global warming. Prices have risen 40% on average globally since last summer.

“The Department of Justice is preparing economic sabotage or plunder charges that carry a life sentence against traders found to be hoarding rice, the price of which has risen sharply amid a tight global supply,” The Inquirer reports. “Although the country has yet to experience a shortage, Justice Secretary Raul Gonzalez Thursday vowed to hale to court hoarders and other unscrupulous rice traders for acts ‘inimical to the public interest.'”

President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo reiterated the warnings during a speech today, but also pledged to increase imports of the staple.

“Those who seek to take advantage of our people must be stopped,” she says, according to The Inquirer. “I am leading the charge to crack down on any form of corruption by public or private officials who would divert supplies or pervert the price of this essential commodity in any way.”

“Anyone caught stealing rice from the people will be thrown in jail,” she adds.

Bloomberg News reports that the price of rice, a key staple in the global food supply, keeps hitting record highs. It’s now twice as expensive as it was at this time in 2007.

The margin may erode further in coming weeks. Credit ratings on $704 billion of bonds have been cut this year following the collapse of the U.S. housing market. Sheila Bair, chairman of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp., said last week that the downgrades may compromise bank capital ratios enough that some of the largest institutions will no longer be considered well capitalized.

Falling below a regulatory benchmark that is intended to maintain a minimum level of capital to protect depositors against losses would subject banks to more scrutiny from regulators than they have ever experienced.

“This is a nightmare for the country,” said William Isaac, who was chairman of the FDIC from 1981 to 1985. Banks will “raise what capital they can, then they’ll slow down their growth and stop lending, and what should be a mild recession becomes a much more serious one.”

The biggest danger to the economy is that to preserve their ratios, banks will cut off the flow of credit, causing a decline in loans to companies and consumers. Banks have already raised $136 billion in capital, based on data compiled by Bloomberg, and cut dividends. More stock sales and payout reductions are likely to follow, says analyst Meredith Whitney at Oppenheimer & Co.

`Institutional Panic’

The credit crunch has already cost the world’s biggest financial companies about $232 billion and forced a government bailout of New York-based Bear Stearns Cos., the fifth-largest U.S. investment bank. The International Monetary Fund said last week that banks were in the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression.

“Who’s there? Who’s there?” she whispers. I look around but can’t figure out where it’s coming from. It seems to emanate from inside my skull.

Was I going nuts? Nope. I had simply encountered a new advertising medium: hypersonic sound. It broadcasts audio in a focused beam, so that only a person standing directly in its path hears the message. In this case, the cable channel A&E was using the technology to promote a show about, naturally, the paranormal.

I’m a geek, so my first reaction was, “Cool!” But it also felt creepy.

We think of our brains as the ultimate private sanctuary, a zone where other people can’t intrude without our knowledge or permission. But its boundaries are gradually eroding. Hypersonic sound is just a portent of what’s coming, one of a host of emerging technologies aimed at tapping into our heads. These tools raise a fascinating, and queasy, new ethical question: Do we have a right to “mental privacy”?

A growing work force of home-office laborers and entrepreneurs, armed with computers and smartphones and wired to the hilt, are toiling under great physical and emotional stress created by the around-the-clock Internet economy that demands a constant stream of news and comment.

Of course, the bloggers can work elsewhere, and they profess a love of the nonstop action and perhaps the chance to create a global media outlet without a major up-front investment. At the same time, some are starting to wonder if something has gone very wrong. In the last few months, two among their ranks have died suddenly.

Two weeks ago in North Lauderdale, Fla., funeral services were held for Russell Shaw, a prolific blogger on technology subjects who died at 60 of a heart attack. In December, another tech blogger, Marc Orchant, died at 50 of a massive coronary. A third, Om Malik, 41, survived a heart attack in December.

Other bloggers complain of weight loss or gain, sleep disorders, exhaustion and other maladies born of the nonstop strain of producing for a news and information cycle that is as always-on as the Internet.

To be sure, there is no official diagnosis of death by blogging, and the premature demise of two people obviously does not qualify as an epidemic. There is also no certainty that the stress of the work contributed to their deaths. But friends and family of the deceased, and fellow information workers, say those deaths have them thinking about the dangers of their work style.

The pressure even gets to those who work for themselves — and are being well-compensated for it.

“I haven’t died yet,” said Michael Arrington, the founder and co-editor of TechCrunch, a popular technology blog. The site has brought in millions in advertising revenue, but there has been a hefty cost. Mr. Arrington says he has gained 30 pounds in the last three years, developed a severe sleeping disorder and turned his home into an office for him and four employees. “At some point, I’ll have a nervous breakdown and be admitted to the hospital, or something else will happen.”

“This is not sustainable,” he said.

It is unclear how many people blog for pay, but there are surely several thousand and maybe even tens of thousands.

The emergence of this class of information worker has paralleled the development of the online economy. Publishing has expanded to the Internet, and advertising has followed.

…

Speed can be of the essence. If a blogger is beaten by a millisecond, someone else’s post on the subject will bring in the audience, the links and the bigger share of the ad revenue.

“There’s no time ever — including when you’re sleeping — when you’re not worried about missing a story,” Mr. Arrington said.

“Wouldn’t it be great if we said no blogger or journalist could write a story between 8 p.m. Pacific time and dawn? Then we could all take a break,” he added. “But that’s never going to happen.”

All that competition puts a premium on staying awake. Matt Buchanan, 22, is the right man for the job. He works for clicks for Gizmodo, a popular Gawker Media site that publishes news about gadgets. Mr. Buchanan lives in a small apartment in Brooklyn, where his bedroom doubles as his office.

He says he sleeps about five hours a night and often does not have time to eat proper meals. But he does stay fueled — by regularly consuming a protein supplement mixed into coffee.

But make no mistake: Mr. Buchanan, a recent graduate of New York University, loves his job. He said he gets paid to write (he will not say how much) while interacting with readers in a global conversation about the latest and greatest products.

“The fact I have a few thousand people a day reading what I write — that’s kind of cool,” he said. And, yes, it is exhausting. Sometimes, he said, “I just want to lie down.”

It is not that of Barton M. Biggs, the former chief global strategist at Morgan Stanley. Yet in Mr. Biggs’s new book, “Wealth, War and Wisdom,” he says people should “assume the possibility of a breakdown of the civilized infrastructure.”

“Your safe haven must be self-sufficient and capable of growing some kind of food,” Mr. Biggs writes. “It should be well-stocked with seed, fertilizer, canned food, wine, medicine, clothes, etc. Think Swiss Family Robinson. Even in America and Europe there could be moments of riot and rebellion when law and order temporarily completely breaks down.”

Survivalism, it seems, is not just for survivalists anymore.

Faced with a confluence of diverse threats — a tanking economy, a housing crisis, looming environmental disasters, and a sharp spike in oil prices — people who do not consider themselves extremists are starting to discuss doomsday measures once associated with the social fringes.

IMF Managing Director Dominique Strauss-Kahn applauded the board’s decision to propose a new framework designed to close a projected $400 million income- expenditure gap within a few years.

It’s “a landmark agreement that will put the institution on solid financial footing and modernize the IMF’s structure and operations,” he said in a statement, noting that the board agreed on a medium-term budget proposal with sharp spending cuts of $100 million over the next three years.

Still, the IMF can’t kick off its gold-sale program – a key element of the its plan to diversify its revenue stream and boost income – until it receives a green light from the U.S. Congress.

A senior IMF official confirmed the board can’t make a decision Monday to actually start the sales because the U.S. executive director for the fund can’t vote for the sales because he doesn’t yet have congressional backing.

Under the plan, the IMF would sell the 403 tons, or nearly 13 million ounces, of gold for about $11 billion over several years, according to the senior IMF official. The IMF official said the fund would keep $4.4 billion on its books and put the remaining $6.6 billion into its investment account.

Additionally, IMF would coordinate the sales with central banks in an effort to prevent any market disruptions, the official said.

“Gold sales would be conducted in a transparent manner with strong safeguards to ensure that they do not add to official sales and avoid any risk of market disruption,” the IMF said in a notice Monday afternoon.

While a senior U.S. Treasury Department official has signaled his support for the limited gold sales as a way to ensure the IMF’s long-term funding capabilities, it is unclear how Congress will respond. Congress, in 1999, rejected a previous proposal for the IMF to sell gold.

In addition to creating an endowment from the gold sales, the IMF also plans to expand its investment authority, which is currently very narrow.

Academics at Southampton University, who carried out an official study into seven additives for the Food Standards Agency (FSA), said children’s intelligence was being significantly damaged by E-numbers. After receiving the advice last month, officials at the FSA have advised their directors to call for the food industry to remove six additives named in the study by the end of next year.

The advice, which will be put before the FSA board next week, would be voluntary. However, manufacturers would be expected by the regulator to remove the additives, replacing them with natural alternatives if possible. Some sweetmakers have unilaterally agreed to remove the suspect colours following the latest scientific evidence.

Researchers have linked E-numbers to behavioural problems since the 1970s but the debate has intensified after the Southampton study, published last September, found that seven additives such as sunset yellow (E110) and tartrazine (E102) were causing temper tantrums among normal children.

The FSA, which funded the £750,000 study, was criticised by health groups for failing to ban the additives after taking the advice of the Committee on Toxicology, which said they had only a moderate effect on some children.

Instead, the FSA said it would work with manufacturers to see if they would remove the additives and awaited an assessment of its research by the European Food Safety Agency (Efsa).

While conceding there was “limited” evidence that the additives caused the children problems, Efsa decided the study was not a good enough reason to change the safe limits of the E-numbers.

Apparently stung by the failure to act, Professor Jim Stevenson, who led the Southampton study, wrote to the FSA demanding immediate action.

His letter dated 20 March is included in the bundle of documents forwarded to the board, which were published yesterday.

In an 18-page rebuttal of criticism of his study, Professor Stevenson and three colleagues wrote: “The position in relation to AFCs [Artificial Food Colours] is analogous to the state of knowledge about lead and IQ that was being evaluated in the early 1980s … Needleman [a researcher] found the difference in IQ between high and low lead groups was 5.5 IQ points … This is very close to the sizes obtained in our study of food additives.”