Last weekend I attended the World MoneyShow in London. On the night before the event it was confirmed that significant numbers of people had died from cholera in Port-au-Prince.  I've been blogging about this issue for over two years, and in my opinion that means many thousands more will die from the same cause in the not too distant future.

More on A Black Day in Haiti and at the World MoneyShow

Update 11:35 GMT on January 20th 2010

Haiti just endured another aftershock. This one was apparently 5.9 on the moment magnitude scale.

Synchronicity struck at the opening of the Art, Ecology and the Economy exhibition at CCANW. Several musicians from South West England have now donated a track to our forthcoming "Water Connects Us" album in aid of Haiti:

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Another long video, but essential watching nonetheless. This is a lecture given at UCLA's Hammer Museum by William K. Black. He investigated the 1980s Savings and Loan crisis when he was at the Federal Home Loan Bank Board. In this talk he discusses how more money was recently lost by one single bank, IndyMac, than during that entire crisis:

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Here's a video (over an hour long!) which was recorded at the Edge "Reflections on a crisis" event held in Munich earlier this year. In it Daniel Kahneman, psychologist and winner of the Nobel Prize for economics, and Nassim Nicholas Taleb, ex derivatives trader and now Professor of Risk Engineering and author, discuss how a toxic combination of corporate greed and human failings created the current economic crisis:

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The remnants of Hurricane Hanna arrived on the shores of South West England last weekend. Hanna still packed a bit of a punch, as you can see in this video that we shot at Woolacombe on Sunday:

More on Hurricane Hanna Helps Out in Our EcoDriving Video

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:

More on T. Boone Pickens Comments on the War in Georgia

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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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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Vladimir Putin left China yesterday, and arrived in Vladikavkaz, the capital of North Ossetia:

Mr. Putin said he:

Wanted to discuss the influx of refugees. Russia's actions in South Ossetia are legally totally legitimate.

In an interview with the BBC Georgian President Mikhail Saakashvili said that:

More on Thousands of Innocents Died Yesterday – So It Goes

The spectacular opening ceremony of the 2008 Beijing Olympic games took place yesterday. The four-hour event was choreographed by celebrated Chinese film director Zhang Yimou. The finale was in the style of a martial arts movie, and involved former Olympic gymnastics champion Li Ning "running" along the rim of the roof of the Bird's Nest stadium, before using his Olympic torch to light the huge Beijing cauldron, home of the Olympic flame for the next few days.

More on Beijing Olympic Games Open – Smog Closes In