… in 1991, black motorist Rodney King was savagely beaten by LAPD officers. The beating was captured on amateur video and later provoked a national outcry. You might call it the beginning of citizen journalism.

Wow! I never thought I would read this.

WARREN BUFFETT admitted yesterday that he did “some dumb things” in 2008, as the world’s richest investor announced that Berkshire Hathaway, his company, had its worst year on record.

In his annual letter to shareholders, Buffett said his investments lost $11.5 billion (£8 billion) last year.

He also offered a gloomy outlook for the year ahead. “The economy will be in shambles throughout 2009 – and for that matter, probably well beyond,” Buffett wrote.

The firm was hit by the deteriorating economy, the collapse of the credit markets and share prices and the second-worst hurricane season on record…

You have to hand it to ‘Sir’ Fred Goodwin over his refusal to contemplate giving some of his £16million pension pot back to the taxpayer. This is a guy who doesn’t care about winning friends and influencing people. It’s bad PR and might even be dangerous for him in the long term: a lot of people are very pissed off about rich bankers walking away unscathed from the wreckage that they engineered of other people’s lives and pensions. The chances of Mr Goodwin being able to walk around unscathed are, I’d say, pretty poor, even in a law-abiding country like Britain. At the very least he could use the services of Max Clifford.

Gordon Brown & Co are beginning to look not just foolish but pathetic. The Prime Minister is reduced to asking Goodwin to do the decent thing and muttering vague threats of retribution if he refuses. But if Goodwin remains adamant and there turns out to be no legal way of forcing him to disgorge some of his ill-gotten gains, Brown will be left looking silly, and his threats will be unmasked as empty rhetoric.

So here’s a modest proposal. For starters, why not strip Goodwin of his knighthood? (He got it for “services to banking”, if you please.) After all, it’s a privilege, not a contractual right.

UPDATE: Just watching Newsnight on BBC2 and knighthood-stripping is now under discussion. But I suggested it on Twitter this morning.

… in 1991, President George Bush Snr. declared that “Kuwait is liberated, Iraq’s army is defeated,” and announced that the allies would suspend combat operations at midnight.

I’m reading Elizabeth Bowen’s letters (scrupulously edited by Victoria Glendinning) and came on this passage from a letter dated 30th September 1959:

“I’m quite sorry to be going back to London tomorrow. Next weekend, that is, Saturday, I’m going to stay the weekend with Cyril Connolly… I must discover whom he’s living with now, before I get there. — I don’t know whether he’s again settled down with Barbara since George Weidenfeld traded her back to him.”

At this stage there’s a footnote. It reads:

“Barbara Skelton married Cyril Connolly in 1950. He divorced her in 1956 citing the publisher George Weidenfeld as co-respondent. She married Weidenfeld in 1956, and he divorced her in 1961 citing Cyril Connolly as co-respondent.”

This is the same Cyril Connolly who famously observed (in Enemies of Promise) that “there is no more sombre enemy of good art than the pram in the hall.”

… in 1993, a bomb exploded in the garage of New York’s World Trade Center, killing six people and injuring more than 1,000 others. Turned out to be just a dry-run for the main event.

“I will not spend a single penny for the purpose of rewarding a single Wall Street executive, but I will do whatever it takes to help the small business that can’t pay its workers or the family that has saved and still can’t get a mortgage.”

Barack Obama, addressing the US Congress yesterday. Wouldn’t it be nice to hear something as unequivocal from Broonie?

It’s the first day of Lent. I thought of giving up work but decided that I can’t afford it.

Poor little Harvard. According to a NYT report its endowment (which pays for a third of its operating costs)

is on the verge of posting its biggest loss in 40 years. With much of its money tied up for the long term, it is scrambling to meet some obligations.

Harvard has frozen salaries for faculty and nonunion staff members, and offered early retirement to 1,600 employees. The divinity school has warned it may not be able to cover tuition for all its students with need, the school of arts and sciences is cutting its billion-dollar budget roughly 10 percent, and the university president said this week than the unprecedented drop in the endowment was causing it to delay its planned expansion, starting with a $1 billion science center, into the Allston neighborhood of Boston.

The school has even added to its debt by issuing $1.5 billion in new bonds, its largest such offering ever.

It seems that the endowment, the largest of any university in the world, has shrunk by at least $8 billion, to $29 billion, since July. Couldn’t happen to a nicer university.

Interesting footnote. The article says that part of Harvard’s current problem is that it became highly ‘leveraged’ on the advice of Larry Summers, its former president.

The endowment was squeezed partly because it had invested more than its assets, a leveraging strategy that can magnify results, both good and bad. It also had invested heavily in private equity and related deals, which not only lock up existing cash but require investors to put up more capital over time.

What’s interesting about that? Er, Larry Summers is now one of Obama’s leading economic advisers!