In a letter to the newspaper, Esnard wrote that although he includes himself in the population earning more than $250,000 a year:

My family isn't wealthy. I have no funded retirement plan save Social Security, if it is there when I need it. I have no guarantee of permanent health care. I am paying off school loans for our three children. A meaningful number of my friends have lost their jobs, and all who are still employed, including my family, have taken significant pay reductions... This is a classless recession, at least in my experience. It is hitting everyone.

Yet those of us who make $250,000 or more are vilified and held accountable for solving our government's penchant for spending more than it takes in so that politicians can buy votes. We already pay more in taxes than 98% of the population, particularly the nearly 50% of eligible voters who pay no federal income tax. The president wants us to pay more, and he frames it in a way that casts us as not yet carrying our fair share of the burden.

He then goes on to say that the $250K+ class might just vote with their feet:

Apparently our president thinks that living in America is so wonderful that we will never leave, despite being directly attacked and held responsible for the political class's inability to constrain its desire to buy votes with our money. He should think again.

Questions, which are described as a 'twist' on those routinely asked of homosexuals, include 'What do you think caused your heterosexuality?', 'Is it possible your heterosexuality stems from a neurotic fear of others of the same sex?', and 'If you've never slept with a person of the same sex, how do you know you wouldn't prefer it?' The course, which encourages staff to 'have a better understanding' of the challenges faced by lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender colleagues, includes a film which follows the experience of four fictitious employees.

The film is said to 'build in intensity' and can provoke a variety of reactions. Trainers' notes state: 'Initial reactions to the stories vary widely, with heterosexual (straight) people often dismissing the stories as exaggerated or rare and homosexual (gay people) immediately recognising the issues and emotions explored here as honest and relevant.' The Buckinghamshire council course is just one of a series of publicly funded equality and diversity sessions uncovered in a series of Freedom of Information requests by The Mail on Sunday.

Matthew Sinclair, director of the TaxPayers Alliance, said: 'With huge pressure on the public finances, and council tax nearly doubled over the last decade, it is vital that councils show they can start cutting back on waste to keep down taxes and avoid unnecessary pressure on services. To see councils wasting money on such a ludicrous, politically-correct exercise in that environment is disgusting. Ensuring that councils don't discriminate doesn't require such insane attempts at a superficial understanding of different communities.'

Last week, The Mail on Sunday revealed that managers at Brighton and Hove City Council had taken part in a diversity seminar called 'Adventures in Lesbian-and-gayland' which invited them to imagine they had now woken up in a world where homosexuality was dominant.

Speaking at the British Science Festival in Birmingham, Dr Consolmagno also dismissed Creationism and claimed that the revival of 'intelligent design' - the controversial theory that only God can explain gaps in the theory of evolution - was 'bad theology'.

Dr Consolmagno, one of a team of 12 astronomers working for the Vatican, said the Catholic Church had been supporting and funding science for centuries. A self-confessed science fiction fan, he said he was 'comfortable' with the idea of alien life. Asked if he would baptise an alien, he replied: 'Only if they asked.'

He added: 'I'd be delighted if we found life elsewhere and delighted if we found intelligent life elsewhere. But the odds of us finding it, of it being intelligent and us being able to communicate with it - when you add them up it's probably not a practical question. God is bigger than just humanity. God is also the god of angels.' In the middle ages, the definition of a soul was to have intelligence, free will, freedom to love and freedom to make decisions, he said. Those characteristics may not be unique to humans. 'Any entity - no matter how many tentacles it has - has a soul,' he added. In practice, machines were unlikely to be smart or human enough to have souls.

Dr Consolmagno, 57, the curator of the Pope's meteorite collection, is a trained astronomer and planetary scientist at the Vatican's observatory. On 'intelligent design', which claims that Darwin's theory of evolution cannot explain the complexity of life, he said: 'The word has been hijacked by a narrow group of Creationist fundamentalists in America to mean something it didn't originally mean at all. It's another form of the God of the gaps. It's bad theology in that it turns God once again into the pagan god of thunder and lightning.' The phrase 'intelligent design' was centuries old and described the idea that God could be discovered in the laws of space and time and the existence of human reason.

With a population projected to grow to 1.44 billion by 2030 from 1.33 billion in 2009, according to World Bank figures, Beijing is hunting for cutting-edge technology to provide better quality food. Du's colleagues are cloning pigs at a laboratory an hour's drive from the farm. They remove DNA from skin cells taken from the ear of a prized boar and transfer them into pig egg cells cleared of their nuclei. The resulting embryos are surgically implanted into surrogate sows.

"Now we import valuable boars from Denmark and the United States. They are costly to buy, transport and susceptible to a lot of disease during transportation," said Du, head of cloning and genetic engineering at the Beijing Genomics Institute. "With this technology, we can import small numbers of pigs and mass produce them in China."

And international experts believe China can take a leading role in promoting the eventual acceptance of cloned animals and even transgenic - or genetically modified (GM) - produce. While experts say meat from cloned animals is no different from naturally conceived animals, Du said more safety assessments were needed for transgenic products. "Transgenic animals have potential risks. It needs a long time to evaluate before they can get into market," she said

The results? CURRENTLY, 68% OF AMERICANS COUNT A SAME-SEX COUPLE WITH CHILDREN AS A FAMILY, up from 54% in 2003. Clearly the kids have something to do with it - just 33% of people see a same-sex couple sans children as a family. Some 30% of respondents were willing to group pets into their menage, but not the same-sex couples.

"The sheer idea that gay couples are given less status than pets should give us pause," Powell told the Associated Press.

While the survey proves a good gauge of shifting societal mores, the government's definition of a family remains much more cut and dry: "A family is a group of two people or more (one of whom is the householder) related by birth, marriage, or adoption and residing together," according to the Census Bureau. Sorry, Fido.

The leader of the Roman Catholic church concluded a speech, made before the Queen and assembled dignitaries at the Palace of Holyroodhouse in Edinburgh, with the argument that the Nazi desire to eradicate God had led to the Holocaust and a plea for 21st-century Britain to respect its Christian foundations.

"Today, the United Kingdom strives to be a modern and multicultural society," he said. "In this challenging enterprise, may it always maintain its respect for those traditional values and cultural expressions that more aggressive forms of secularism no longer value or even tolerate. Let it not obscure the Christian foundation that underpins its freedoms; and may that patrimony, which has always served the nation well, constantly inform the example your government and people set before the two billion members of the Commonwealth and the great family of English-speaking nations throughout the world."

The pontiff's speech set the wide-ranging tone for his four-day visit: despite attacking atheism, he paid tribute to the UK's historic achievements and offered "a hand of friendship" to all its people.

White House science adviser John Holdren urged people to start using the phrase during a speech last week in Oslo, echoing a plea he made three years earlier. Holdren said global warming is a "dangerous misnomer" for a problem far more complicated than a rise in temperature.

The call comes as Congress prepares to adjourn for the season without completing work on a stalled climate bill. The term global warming has long been criticized as inaccurate, and the new push could be an attempt to re-shape climate messaging for next year's legislative session.

"They're trying to come up with more politically palatable ways to sell some of this stuff," said Republican pollster Adam Geller, noting that Democrats also rolled out a new logo and now refer to the Bush tax cuts as "middle-class tax cuts." Holdren's "global climate disruption" isn't the most convoluted term to grace the climate debate, however. According to the NASA article, early studies on the impact humans had on global climate referred to the relationship as "inadvertent climate modification."

About 44 million Americans - one in seven - lived last year in homes in which the income was below the poverty level, which is about $22,000 for a family of four. That is the largest number of people since the census began tracking poverty 51 years ago. The snapshot captured by the census for 2009, the first year of the Obama presidency, shows an America in the throes of economic upheaval.

Since 2007, the year before the recession kicked into gear, the country has almost 4 million fewer wage-earners. There are more children growing up poor. And for the first time since the government began tracking health insurance in 1987, the number of people who have health coverage declined, as people lost jobs with health benefits or employers stopped offering it. With midterm elections less than two months away, the statistics bare the reality fueling much of the anger toward Washington.

Obama said the numbers could have been much worse were it not for government assistance. "Because of the Recovery Act and many other programs providing tax relief and income support to a majority of working families - and especially those most in need - millions of Americans were kept out of poverty last year," he said in a statement. Many conservatives, however, laid the blame on government programs that don't work. "We're spending more money fighting poverty than ever before, yet poverty is up," said Michael D Tanner, a senior fellow at the Cato Institute. "Clearly, we're doing something wrong."

The Corn Refiners Association has in the past marketed high-fructose corn syrup as natural. Our Bad Medicine columnist Christopher Wanjek argues otherwise:

"High-fructose corn syrup could be all-natural if cornstarch happened to fall into a vat of alpha-amylase, soak there for a while, then trickle into another vat of glucoamylase, get strained to remove the Aspergillus fungus likely growing on top, and then find its way into some industrial-grade D-xylose isomerase. This funny coincidence didn't happen in nature until the 1970s in a lab somewhere in Japan."

Now the Corn Refiners Association plans to ask the FDA to allow high-fructose corn syrup to be called simple "corn sugar" instead, AP reports. And already the group is advertising it with that name. The ad also claims there's no difference between corn sugar and cane sugar.

In an attempt to tap into the intense hostility towards the banks on both sides of the Irish border they branded bankers as "criminals" and said: "We have a track record of attacking high-profile economic targets and financial institutions such as the City of London. The role of bankers and the institutions they serve in financing Britain's colonial and capitalist system has not gone unnoticed."

"Let's not forget that the bankers are the next-door neighbours of the politicians. Most people can see the picture: the bankers grease the politicians' palms, the politicians bail out the bankers with public funds, the bankers pay themselves fat bonuses and loan the money back to the public with interest. It's essentially a crime spree that benefits a social elite at the expense of many millions of victims."

Not everyone is happy with the plan. Many developing countries complain that it would be wrong to accord the EU privileges that are not enjoyed by other regional associations. Indeed, opponents of the scheme commanded a majority when the issue came to a vote. But the EU is continuing to press its claim and - given that it is the original patron and sponsor of most of the other regional blocs - it will surely be only a matter of time before it gets its way.

I shouldn't be surprised if, as part of the negotiations, Eurocrats offer to exchange the British and French seats on the Security Council for a consolidated EU seat, as long demanded by the two main blocs in the European Parliament, the socialists and the EPP. And British politicians still talk about Europe "coming our way".

Hurricanes Julia and Igor are not thought to pose any threat to land, but Karl, the 11th named storm of the season, dumped more rain on Mexico which is already struggling with heavy flooding in southeastern states. Karl also threatened installations of state oil company Pemex, and was due to pass close by. Nearly a million people have been affected by flooding in Mexico this month alone, including 25 who died.

The rains, which began in July, are set to worsen as the rainy season continues to almost the end of the year. Hurricane Julia weakened slightly after surging overnight, becoming a category three storm with top sustained winds of 125 miles per hour. Igor, however, remained a massive category four storm, the second most powerful hurricane on the five-point Saffir-Simpson scale, with top winds of 135 miles an hour.

On average, there are 11 named storms, six of which become hurricanes, in a six-month season. There has been unusually high storm activity since 1995, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Agency.

Although officials insisted that the 77 year-old had dropped out of the trip for medical reasons, as he had been ill "for some days", his comments represent another embarrassing PR blunder for the Roman Catholic church at a critical time. The are all the more embarrassing because the Cardinal's position makes him responsible for promoting Christian unity around the world. The Vatican, the hierarchy in England and Wales and the Government are all desperate for the first-ever state papal visit to Britain to be a success.

The preparations for the Pope's arrival have suffered a number of setbacks and thousands of tickets remain unsold for the large open-air Masses. Meanwhile secular groups have led protests against the 10 million pounds cost of the trip at a time of public sector cuts, and survivors of clergy abuse are angry that the Pope will be greeted by the Queen today at the start of a full state visit when the worldwide church stands accused of covering up the activities of paedophile priests.

Cardinal Kasper's presence will also be missed during Benedict XVI's visit to Britain as he is seen as more liberal than his fellow German, as well as an expert on ecumenical dialogue. The cardinal's abrupt withdrawal from the trip prompted speculation in Rome that it was linked to the interview he gave this week to the German news magazine, Focus.

His secretary, Monsignor Oliver Lahl, said the remark was a reference to the diverse, multi-cultural population of Britain, which the Cardinal has visited three times in recent years. Cardinal Kasper, who recently retired as the president of the Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity having headed it since 2001, said that Britain was a "secular and pluralist" country in which there was a "distance from God", noting that there was "a crisis of faith" in much of the West.

He is only the second Bank of England governor to speak to the TUC in its 142-year history. RMT union members staged a walk-out ahead of the speech. The TUC congress, taking place in Manchester, has heard strong criticism of the Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition's economic policies, with delegates voting on Monday for joint industrial action if "attacks" on jobs, pensions and public services go ahead.

On Wednesday, the congress will also vote on plans to set up a "shadow commission" to monitor the salaries of the highest-paid company workers, similar to that established by the government to look into public sector wages. Mr King added: "An unprecedented degree of policy stimulus, here and abroad, prevented another world slump. Even so, around a million more people in Britain are out of work than before the crisis."

Many, especially the young unemployed, have had their futures blighted. "So we cannot just carry on as we are." He also said: "Your members, and indeed the businesses which employ them, are entitled to be angry. But however legitimate, anger will not produce change unless its energy is harnessed to a cool analysis of what happened and why."

The government said it recognised the Pope as a head of state and the visit would build "positive relations". Pope Benedict XVI's visit to Scotland and England begins on Thursday. Other signatories to the letter in the Guardian include: Professor Richard Dawkins, Ken Follett, AC Grayling, Stewart Lee, Claire Rayner, Lord Foulkes, Lord Hughes, Professor Steve Jones, Sir Jonathan Miller, Lord Taverne, Peter Tatchell and Baroness Turner.

They say the Pope "as a citizen of Europe and the leader of a religion with many adherents in the UK, is of course free to enter and tour our country". But they say the Vatican has "been responsible for: Opposing the distribution of condoms and so increasing large families in poor countries and the spread of Aids; promoting segregated education; denying abortion to even the most vulnerable women; opposing equal rights for lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people; failing to address the many cases of abuse of children within its own organisation".

It adds that they "reject the masquerading of the Holy See as a state, and the Pope as a head of state, as merely a convenient fiction to amplify the international influence of the Vatican".