As U.S. consumers worry about the rising cost of gas, Nigerians are paying a heavier price. More than 250 villagers in the Niger Delta died in a pipeline explosion yesterday. Police sealed off the scene of Monday’s explosion at Adeje village outside the oil city of Warri and close to Jesse Town, where a thousand people died in a similar disaster in 1998. The Niger Delta is crisscrossed with old, leaky oil pipelines that go unfixed by multinational oil corporations for decades. The companies use them to extract their wealth from Africa’s most populous country.