A couple weeks back, news about limited rice exports from India gave my husband and I -- both raised on rice-heavy diets -- pause. We briefly mulled over the idea of buying an extra bag of rice just in case, but then let it slide.

Last week, our weekly groceries bill leaped from an average of $40-$60 to $90+. Whoa! What did we just buy?

Or is it the food crisis that we hear about? So it's here?

Arab Women's Network

Laurel Papworth, an Australian who blogs at Laurel Papworth - Social Networks is an online community strategist. She teaches social media at the Univerity of Sydney and is a social networks trainer. It's her role as a social networks trainer that landed her a job in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, teaching blogging tools and techniques to Arab women.

I wasn't going to write about the game of cricket, a) because it's being written to death in India and Australia, and b) not many of my readers follow the game in America; but the intensity with which a disastrous tour by the Indian team down under is being blogged about, I can't but talk about it.

Sometimes I suspect news stories must be generated by anti-feminist forces to further foment resentment against feminist causes and arguments, because who on earth would otherwise be so ridiculous? A prime example of one of these suspicious events took place last week in Sydney, Australia. According to Agence France-Presse (AFP), prospective Santa Clauses have been warned not to say, "Ho ho ho," as some women may deem it offensive:

Ever wonder how different your life is from that of a woman half a world away, or how similar? The UNFPA has created a new web tool, called Lifelines, to give us a bit of insight into our common, and very different, milestones. Am

I have always felt a special connection to my grandmother, Emily Priest McKhann. I was named after her, I've often been told I look like her, and I was born in the same hospital where she died a few weeks after giving birth to my Dad.