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For food producers who sell directly to consumers, credit cards are both a blessing and a curse.

They're a way to do business with cashless customers, but 3 percent of every credit card sale is usually charged to the farmer as a transaction fee. That adds up in a high-volume, low-profit business like agriculture.

The extra fee has farmers looking for a solution to save money. A few are finding one in bitcoin.

Bitcoin is a type of cryptocurrency: digital money that doesn't exist in the physical world. There are almost 12 million bitcoins worldwide — worth about $4 billion — that can be sent to or received from anyone with a bitcoin wallet.

A bitcoin wallet, just like a home, has a unique address. For a farmer accepting bitcoin, customers with the currency would type in the amount to send (yes, the wallet is accessible through smartphones) to the farmer's wallet address and hit send.

One farm open to the idea is La Nay Ferme in Provo, Utah.

Owner Clinton Felsted says he began using bitcoin when a crew for the documentary Life on Bitcoin approached him about accepting the currency. Now he's working on a more user-friendly bitcoin payment method that should be up and running by February for consumers buying his fruits and vegetables.

It's the invisible nature of the currency, he says, that interested him.

"Taking money with you is a real risk and it's a real security problem," he tells The Salt. "With bitcoin you can take it anywhere with no risk. If I ever need my money I don't need to find an ATM machine."

But with few other businesses accepting bitcoin, Felsted converts it back into U.S. currency for a lower fee than he'd be charged accepting credit cards.

Bitcoin is most popular in the U.S., but farmers outside the U.S. are warming to it as well. One of the first to sell greens in exchange for virtual currency lives in Argentina.

Two years ago, organic farmer Santiago Zaz started the Tierra Buena Network to deliver produce to customers from his and his neighbors' farms. That got him interested in creating a website for online purchases.

With the help of his friend and software developer Nubis Bruno, they created one of the first produce-for-bitcoin websites, Tierra Buena. Bruno says to date a steady one in 10 sales comes in the form of bitcoin.

Just like Felstad converting his bitcoins in the U.S. dollars, Bruno says the farmers using the Tierra Buena site are converting it into Argentinean pesos.

Garrick Hileman with the London School of Economics, agrees that bitcoin makes sense for farmers reliant on credit card transactions for sales. Using bitcoins over credit, he says, equals to keeping that 3 percent revenue per sale otherwise lost.

And it could actually be more than that. Last week, one bitcoin was worth almost $240. Today it's worth $345.

A few big tech companies, like OkCupid and Foodler, accept bitcoin. But good luck paying utility bills or go mall shopping with it. The currency's volatility tends to scare big companies with more to lose than small companies, Hileman says.

"Small businesses can take the risk with an emerging alternative currency," he says.

The upcoming documentary Life On Bitcoin shows farmers at a Salt Lake City market willing to take a risk with bitcoin. In this YouTube video clip, many agree to accept it as payment right away. (A farmers market in San Diego accepts it, too.)

Philippines, Philippines Daily Inquirer

The devastation from Typhoon Haiyan could cost the Philippines economy $14 billion, according to one estimate.

"This will have a major punch on the fourth quarter GDP this year, but it will have its full impact lag into 2014," Joey Salceda, the governor of Albay province, a hard-hit area, said in a statement. He's also an economist who was recently elected chairman of the U.N. Green Climate Fund.

The numbers, he said, were based on Bloomberg estimates.

In a separate story, the newspaper reported that the regional economies of the areas worst affected by Haiyan (which is known as Yolanda in the Philippines) could shrink by as much as 8 percent next year. National economic growth could be hit by as much as 1 percent. Both those figures are preliminary estimates, the country's finance secretary said.

The Philippines economy has until recently bucked the regional slowdown, growing by 7.6 percent in the first quarter of this year.

Russia, Kommersant

Russia's Foreign Ministry has demanded an apology from Poland after rioters in Warsaw attacked the Russian Embassy.

The Foreign Ministry summoned Polish Ambassador Wojciech Zaionchkovskii over Monday night's March of Independence in which far-right protesters set fire to parked cars and threw fireworks in the center of Warsaw.

The Russian Embassy was among many targets. Rioters set fire to an empty booth at the fence around the embassy. They threw flares, stones and bottles at nearby parked cars, and onto the embassy ground and buildings.

Fifty people were arrested, and Polish officials condemned the rioters.

Russia accused Polish police of "passivity" during the incident.

The Polish Foreign Ministry expressed "deep regret" at the attack, which it blamed on ultra-nationalists.

Egypt, Ahram Online

An Egyptian soccer player is in trouble for displaying a four-fingered hand signal, which is associated with ousted President Mohammed Morsi, after scoring a goal on Sunday.

The Al-Ahly team said it would suspend striker Ahmed Abdel-Zaher for displaying the so-called Rabaa salute in Sunday's final of the African Champions League against South Africa's Orlando Pirates.

Al-Ahly said the striker would be left out of next month's FIFA Club World Cup in Morocco. He'll also be investigated by the Egyptian Football Association.

Egyptian Sports Minister Taher Abou-Zeid downplayed the incident Sunday, saying all that mattered was that Al-Ahly had won the African Championship.

On Tuesday, Abedel-Zaher's agent said the striker would apologize for flashing the symbol that expresses support for Morsi.

The ousted Egyptian president, who drew his support from the Muslim Brotherhood, was removed from office in a coup in July. Since then, the military-backed government has cracked down on his supporters.

The incident is the latest involving the Rabaa salute and an Egyptian athlete.

Last month, kung fu champion Mohamed Youseef was banned from representing his country's in the world championship after he wore a T-shirt with the symbol. On Sunday, he was banned from all competition for a year.

Brazil was the last place in the Americas to abolish slavery — it didn't happen until 1888 — and that meant that the final years of the practice were photographed.

This has given Brazil what may be the world's largest archive of photography of slavery, and a new exhibition in Sao Paulo is offering some new insights into the country's brutal past.

One image at the exhibition, for example, has been blown up to the size of a wall. "Things that you could never see, suddenly you see," says anthropologist Lilia Schwarcz, one of the curators of the new exhibition called Emancipation Inclusion and Exclusion.

In its original size and composition, the image from photographer Marc Ferrez, one of the most impressive photographers from 19th century Brazil, shows a wide shot of a group of slaves drying coffee in a field. Their faces are indistinct but the overall impression is one of order and calm. But once the picture is blown up, the expressions become distinct and details emerge. A female slave is breastfeeding a child in the field; clothes that look neat are seen to be tattered.

"Expanding the photos, we can see a lot of things we couldn't see and the state didn't want to see," Schwarcz says. "We do not want to show slaves only like victims."

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Many Filipinos living in the United States are frantically trying to get in touch with loved ones in some of the areas hardest hit by the typhoon. California, with about a million Filipino immigrants, is the center for a large fundraising effort.

Los Angeles is home to one of the largest concentrations of Filipino immigrants in the U.S. Many across this city are glued to the local Asian TV stations' nightly news broadcasts. Some are turning their worry and stress into action, pounding the pavement to raise money for typhoon victims.

Caren Mempin is clutching a can full of coins and dollar bills, going from table to table at a fast food franchise from the Philippines called Chow King. It's in a bustling shopping mall home to other Filipino chains and a massive supermarket in L.A.'s Eagle Rock neighborhood.

Her pitch in Kigali isn't a hard one. The typhoon is on everyone's minds here and everyone wants to help. Like Mempin, so many people know friends or family affected.

"I just talked to my Mom and they said that they're all okay, but we have also relatives from Tacloban, especially my mom's brothers and sisters, they don't have any response so we're still waiting for that," she says.

Mempin was born in Tacloban, one of the hardest hit cities.

I'm always keeping in touch with my Mom, she's always crying about that, because my mom is very close to her family."

The Los Angeles area is home to an estimated 400,000 Filipinos. The first wave of immigrants to come in droves in the 1930s settled in what's now called Historic Filipino Town, about six miles south of the shopping mall, as the crow flies.

On Union Avenue is the modest, but well-kept Filipino Christian Church, the oldest Filipino church in the city. It's not much bigger than the apartment buildings it shares this quiet block with. Upstairs, in a small room, there are black trash bags full of donated clothes and other supplies.

"These are the part of the rummage sale," says pastor Einstein Cabalteja. He says they've raised close to $800 so far through the rummage sales and online donations to the church's website.

"We are not very rich, and we are not a very big congregation. We have on average 60 on a regular Sunday, so we're not really a big congregation but I believe our hearts are big," he says.

Cabalteja, who came to the U.S. and this church in 2006, says his heart aches. He wishes he could hand deliver these things.

"Here in America, we enjoy a lot of good things but back there, there are less fortunate people, I wish, I wish I could be there," he says.

For now, relief organizations say what's needed most is cash. Shipping food and other supplies is expensive and there's no guarantee it will land in the right people's hands.

Alex Montanaces, of the National Alliance for Filipino Concerns, says as of late Monday, the group had raised about $50,000 for relief. Inspiring, he says.

In Filipino, we call it 'Bayanihan,' and it's like a sense of Filipinos like, the community coming together to help one another. So there's really a sense of Bayanihan spirit I think among the Filipino community here in this area.

Back at the shopping mall in Eagle Rock, people came to swap stories and check in with friends to see if they'd heard any more news.

For fundraiser Caren Mempin, no word yet on her extended family in Tacloban.

"Hopefully they're okay, because it's so sad when we cannot see and contact them," she says.

For now, while she waits, Mempin says she's praying.