Way back in May 2009 the Guardian reported that:

The Obama administration took on the powerful farming interests in America's heartland today, making clear it does not see corn-based ethanol as part of the long-term solution to climate change.

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In an interview on CNBC this morning Texas oil billionaire and wind energy advocate T. Boone Pickens blamed "lack of leadership" from George W. Bush and "that speech" from Nancy Pelosi for the vote against the Bail-Out plan in the House yesterday:

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Another day dawns, and the list of failed banks grows ever longer.  Congress has renamed the Bail-Out as The Emergency Economic Stabilization Act.  The House has just rejected the latest draft by 228 votes to 205. George W. Bush said he was "very disappointed". Whilst Congress were extending the new act to a total of 109 pages over the weekend, banks around the world were dropping like flies as the virus spread.

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Just over a week ago I found myself once again on EasyJet flight EZY6167 heading from Bristol to Amsterdam.  I asked the head of the cabin crew if he knew Dawn, who operated the camera on one of our previous internet videos.  He said he did.  I showed him one of our "Water Connects Us" leaflets, and I asked him if it would be OK if I handed some out to his passengers.  He said that would be fine as long as I didn't get in the way of the cabin crew as they went about their duties.

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In a report on the UNFCCC climate change conference in Bali last December, David B. Sandalow of the Brookings Institution, the influential Washington based think tank, pointed out that:

The most important outcomes of the Bali climate change conference didn’t make the headlines… yet Bali produced three important outcomes. First, developing countries stepped up to the table… Second, a new consensus on deforestation emerged… Finally, “adaptation” moved toward center stage. Today the world faces a sobering reality: even the most aggressive plans will not prevent some amount of global warming in the decades ahead. The consequences for poor developing countries are predicted to be most severe.

Mr. Sandalow quoted Nobel peace prize-winner Al Gore as saying in Bali:

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Over the last few days T. Boone Pickens has held meetings with both John McCain and Barack Obama.

Yesterday Mr. Pickens was interviewed by Neil Cavuto of Fox News about those talks. Here's what he had to say:

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A couple of days ago Mikhail Gorbachev, last head of state of the former Union of Soviet Socialist Republics and winner of the Nobel Peace Prize in 1990, wrote an article for the Washington Post. Mr. Gorbachev opened that article by saying:

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According to a report in the International Herald Tribune Poland has agreed to a long-stalled deal to place an American missile-defense base on Polish territory. Commenting on the agreement Polish prime minister Donald Tusk said that:

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In an article in the New York Times yesterday Jad Mouawad said that:

Energy experts say that the hostilities between Russia and Georgia could threaten American plans to gain access to more of Central Asia’s energy resources at a time when booming demand in Asia and tight supplies helped push the price of oil to record highs.

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Josef Stalin was born Iosef Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili in Gori, Georgia on December 18th 1878.

Yesterday a "ceasefire" was announced in the Georgian war, but the killing continued in Gori. According to the Daily Telegraph:

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