Federal laws give a lot of protection to “full-time workers”, but for temporary and contract employees it is a much different story. Temp workers don’t get health insurance, vacation time or retirement benefits. They are simply paid for the limited amount of time that they are needed and then they are disposed of immediately.

There has always been a role for such workers in our economy, but these days some of the biggest corporations in the entire country are getting rid of “full-time workers” and replacing them with temp workers just so that they can make a few extra bucks. As a result, the ranks of the “working poor” continue to expand, and the decline of the middle class is accelerating.

Responding to a list of questions published in the paper by Mr Scalfari, who is not a Roman Catholic, Francis wrote: “You ask me if the God of the Christians forgives those who don’t believe and who don’t seek the faith. I start by saying – and this is the fundamental thing – that God’s mercy has no limits if you go to him with a sincere and contrite heart. The issue for those who do not believe in God is to obey their conscience.

“Sin, even for those who have no faith, exists when people disobey their conscience.” In a welcoming response to the letter, Mr Scalfari said the Pope’s comments were “further evidence of his ability and desire to overcome barriers in dialogue with all”.

Some of the worst impacts are likely in Africa with food shortages expected to peak in February. Regions including the Caribbean, Central and South America will also be hit in the next six months. This periodic weather event, which tends to drive up global temperatures and disturb weather patterns, has helped push 2015 into the record books as the world's warmest year.

"In a lot of tropical countries we are seeing big reductions in rainfall of the order of 20-30%. Indonesia has experienced a bad drought, the Indian monsoon was about 15% below normal and the forecasts for Brazil and Australia are for reduced monsoons." As both droughts and floods continue, the scale of the potential impacts is worrying aid agencies.

According to the UN around 60 million people have been forced to leave their homes because of conflict. Aid agencies like Oxfam are worried that the impacts of the continuing El Nino in 2016 will add to existing stresses such as the wars in Syria, South Sudan and Yemen.

The El Nino event is likely to tail off into the spring - but that may not be good news either. El Ninos are often followed by La Nina events, which can have opposite but similarly harmful effects. Scientists say during an El Nino there is a huge transfer of heat from the ocean to the atmosphere. Normally, as in 1997/98, that heat transfer tends to be followed by a cooling of the ocean, a La Nina event,

"It's possible but far from certain that this time next year we could be talking about the reverse of many of these impacts," said Dr Klingaman. "In places where we are seeing droughts from El Nino we could be seeing flooding from La Nina next year. It's just as disruptive, it's just the other way round."

The Washington Post neoconservative journalist Charles Krauthammer summed up the “new reality” as follows:

“We have overwheming global power. We are history’s designated custodians of the international system. When the Soviet Union fell, something new was born, something utterly new – a unipolar world dominated by a single superpower unchecked by any rival and with decisive reach in every corner of the globe. This is a staggering new development in history, not seen since the fall of Rome. Even Rome was no model for what America is today.”

The staggering unipolar power that history has given to Washington has to be protected at all costs. In 1992 top Pentagon official Undersecretary Paul Wolfowitz penned the Wolfowitz Doctrine, which became the basis for Washington’s foreign policy.

The Wolfowitz Doctrine states that the “first objective” of American foreign and military policy is “to prevent the re-emergence of a new rival, either on the territory of the former Soviet Union or elsewhere, that poses a threat [to US unilateral action] on the order of that posed formerly by the Soviet Union. This is a dominant consideration underlying the new regional defense strategy and requires that we endeavor to prevent any hostile power from dominating a region whose resources would, under consolidated control, be sufficient to generate global power.” (A “hostile power” is a country sufficiently strong to have a foreign policy independent from Washington’s.)

The European governments, especially Germany and the UK, are complicit in the move toward nuclear war. These two American vassal states enable Washington’s reckless aggression toward Russia by repeating Washington’s propaganda and supporting Washington’s sanctions and interventions against other countries. As long as Europe remains nothing but an extension of Washington, the prospect of Armegeddon will continue to rise.

At this point in time, nuclear war can only be avoided in two ways. One way is for Russia and China to surrender and accept Washington’s hegemony. The other way is for an independent leader in Germany, the UK, or France to rise to office and withdraw from NATO. That would begin a stampede to leave NATO, which is Washington’s prime tool for causing conflict with Russia and, thereby, is the most dangerous force on earth to every European country and to the entire world. If NATO continues to exist, NATO together with the neoconservative ideology of American hegemony will make nuclear war inevitable.

"We will have to spend much more money on common European defense initiatives," Schäuble told BILD am Sonntag. The foreign and security policies of the EU member states should become interconnected step by step, Schäuble stated. He argued that the EU needs one united army instead of 28 separate ones in order to resolve domestic and foreign security problems more efficiently.

Following Schaeuble' statement, head of the foreign-affairs committee in the Moscow State Duma Alexei Pushkov stated that Europe needs a new army because NATO — which is expected to play the role of European armed forces — has only one goal: to deal with the imaginary Russian "threat" and help the US.

"In Berlin, they stated: The EU should create 'a common European army'. And what is NATO for? To fight with a virtual Russian threat and help the United States", the politician posted on his Twitter.

“Since 2011, an unprecedented terrorist war has been waged against the Syrian Arab Republic by armed terrorist groups, the members of which come from more than 100 countries,” Ja'afari, Syria’s permanent representative to the UN, wrote in his letter to the world body, TASS reported. “Those groups are being provided with funding, weapons, materiel and logistical support by states and regimes from the region and beyond.”

While mentioning other players allegedly involved in the spread of Islamist terrorism, Ja'afari accused Turkey and President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of playing the most active role. “During the crisis, Turkish interference in Syria's internal affairs took many forms, including direct involvement of the regime of Erdogan, the Turkish armed forces in offensive military operations in support of terrorists,” Ja'afari wrote to UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon and the UN Security Council, as cited by RIA Novosti.

Although Calico formed two years before Alphabet, it had many of the markers Google’s co-founders outlined as their rationale for the holding company. A startup staring down a moonshot issue? Check. A problem with a very long time horizon? Check. Google’s tech savvy applied to a market well outside its domain? Check. A venerated founder at its helm? Calico chief Arthur Levinson — former CEO and board chair of biotech firm Genentech, board chair of Apple — may be the biggest heavy-hitter among Alphabet’s execs.

Levinson did not speak to Time for its story. And he has said basically zilch publicly about his company since. Yet some of the hyperbole accompanying Calico (Google wants to disrupt death!) is just that. It is evident that Levinson’s secretive company is focused on medical solutions that fend off the illnesses that come with old age; it’s not trying to give us immortality.

The three hires, it is hoped, will help avert the artificial intelligence (AI) catastrophe that many believe could be the biggest threat to the human race. The search is a timely one. Those who have warned of the dangers of AI include Stephen Hawking, Bill Gates and Elon Musk. Musk, the inventor-cum-business magnate behind enterprises from Tesla Motors’ electric cars to SpaceX’s reusable rockets, is among the FHI’s recent donors.

Their thinking is that once artificial intelligences are cleverer than humans - which is 80 per cent likely to happen in the next 100 years, according to FHI estimations – we could face a future in which the interests of a machine do not include human well-being.