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Allie Brosh's humorous, autobiographical blog, Hyperbole And A Half, has a huge following. In 2011, an editor of PC World included it in a list of the 10 funniest sites on the Internet, and this year, Advertising Age included Brosh in its annual list of the year's most influential and creative thinkers and doers.

That's pretty amazing considering that, as Brosh describes it, she lives like a recluse in her Bend, Ore., bedroom, where she writes stories about her life and illustrates them with brightly colored, intentionally crude drawings.

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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