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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Back in January Bill Gates spoke about what he called "Creative Capitalism" at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. This week he has written an article for Time magazine entitled "How to Fix Capitalism". It's interesting that Bill, once the richest man in the world, thinks that capitalism is broken. As he puts it:

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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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Yesterday afternoon United States President George W. Bush lifted the executive ban on drilling for oil on the Outer Continental Shelf, which was signed by the first President Bush in 1990. Here's the video:

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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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On January 4th we drove to Putsborough Beach on the Atlantic Coast of North Devon to check out what the forecasts suggested would be some excellent surf.  We also took along our Sony Handycam to see how it performed when trying to film moving targets.  You can see the results in the video below.

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