We didn't intend that this would be our headline for today, but shit happens.

Alexander Solzhenitsyn died last week. So it goes.

War has broken out on the border between East and West…. again.

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Barack Obama gave a speech on Monday in Lansing Michigan, an area very familiar with the decline in the US automobile industry. He took the opportunity to outline his current energy policy, and he started out by laying his cards on the table:

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Whilst the Group of Eight and the World Trade Organization chatter away to little effect, and Bill Gates ponders how to tweak capitalism so that the "one billion people [who] live on less than a dollar a day" can benefit from it, you may be wondering if there isn't a better way to organize society. In the 20th century the alternative most often put forward was communism. That doesn't seem to have worked out terribly well either though.

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In a speech at Constitution Hall in Washington yesterday former Vice President Al Gore put forward his new vision of how the climate change crisis has deteriorated to the point that:

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Texas oil billionaire T. Boone Pickens announced yesterday that he intends to spend $58 million of his own money on a multimedia advertising campaign promoting alternative energy as a way of reducing United States imports of foreign oil by at least a third over the next ten years. The "Pickens Plan" will include a significant online presence, including Facebook and YouTube, as well as more traditional radio, television and newspaper advertisements. Here's the video from the Plan home page:

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