After a four-year campaign, the Commission says it accepts that the Druids worship nature and that they also believe in the spirits of places such as mountains and rivers, as well as in 'divine guides'. This, apparently, makes them qualify as a religion. Some might shrug this off. After all, the Druids don't do any harm to anyone. What skin is it off anyone else's nose how they are categorised?

Well, it actually matters rather a lot. Elevating them to the same status as Christianity is but the latest example of how the bedrock creed of this country is being undermined. More than that, it is an attack upon the very concept of religion itself. If the Druids qualify as a religion, can other cults such as the Scientologists be far behind?

Can it be long, indeed, before the wise and learned theologians of the Charity Commission similarly grant charitable status to sorcery, witchcraft or even the Jedi - the fictional Star Wars 'religion' which the 2001 census recorded as having no fewer than 390,127 adherents in England and Wales.

'I'm sure that we're paying many people who aren't worth it - maybe that's the issue,' he told a conference on restoring trust in the banking industry at London's Mansion House yesterday. His comments were echoed by Barclays chairman Marcus Agius, who added that 'unilateral action by any single bank (would) not provide a practical solution' to the problem of ever-rising pay for 'star' performers. Sir Philip's revelations lift the lid on the bonus arms race that is currently sweeping through the Square Mile.

Goldman Sachs recently handed tens of millions in bonuses to its 80 London-based partners to prevent more senior staff defecting to rivals. The declaration by the RBS boss is also likely to inflame public anger over the pay deals on offer at the bank, which has received more than 45 billion pounds in government cash since its implosion two years ago.

Charles Dallara, IIF managing director, said: "A core group of the world's leading economies need to come together and hammer out an understanding." Last week, Guido Mantega, Brazil's finance minister, warned of the dangers of a "currency war" as countries unilaterally intervened to prevent the appreciation of their currencies. The US has been pressing China to allow its exchange rate to rise faster, while several countries including Japan, South Korea, Brazil and Switzerland, have been intervening to hold their currencies down.

Releasing its policy statement and forecast ahead of this weekend's annual meeting of ministers at the International Monetary Fund and World Bank in Washington, the IIF also urged international policymakers not to "gold plate" the Basel III capital accords. It advised countries to avoid creating a variety of national regulations on capital and competing "resolution" regimes.

Mr Dallara criticised the US for failing to adopt a more multilateral approach when it passed financial regulation reform earlier this year. "There was very little attempt by the US authorities to co-ordinate provisions globally," he said.

Besides the effect of the cold weather itself, the continued snowfall has not allowed snow on the ground to thaw, making it much harder for stock to feed. This makes ewes about to lamb particularly susceptible to metabolic illnesses from a lack of nutrients. Reportedly, lamb mortality in the area may be as high as 15% for some farmers. With average prices for lambs expected to be around NZ$80/head this season (NZ Herald), the financial loss to NZ producers will be significant, estimated to exceed NZ$50 million (NZ Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry).

Polish scientists say that it means the stream will not be able to compensate for the cold from the Arctic winds. According to them, when the stream is completely stopped, a new Ice Age will begin in Europe. So far, the results have been lower temperatures: for example, in Central Russia, they are a couple of degrees below the norm.

"Although the forecast for the next month is only 70 percent accurate, I find the cold winter scenario quite likely," Vadim Zavodchenkov, a leading specialist at the Fobos weather center, told RT. "We will be able to judge with more certainty come November. As for last summer's heat, the statistical models that meteorologists use to draw up long-term forecasts aren't able to predict an anomaly like that."

Fears of a double-dip downturn have boosted the appetite for physical bullion as well as for mining company shares and exchange-traded funds, UBS executive Josef Stadler told the Reuters Global Private Banking Summit. "They don't only buy ETFs or futures; they buy physical gold," said Stadler, who runs the Swiss bank's services for clients with assets of at least $50 million to invest.

UBS is recommending top-tier clients hold 7-10 percent of their assets in precious metals like gold, which is on course for its tenth consecutive yearly gain and traded at around $1,314.50 an ounce on Monday, near the record level reached last week.

Julius Baer's chief investment officer for Asia is also recommending that wealthy investors park some of their assets in gold as a defensive stance following a string of lackluster US data and amid concerns about currency weakness. "I see gold as an insurance," Van Anantha-Nageswaran said. "I recommend 10 percent as minimum in portfolios and anything more than that to be used for trading purposes, to respond to short-term over-bought or over-sold signals."

Big financial institutions, including commercial banks, are still making a lot of money. But given unease in the financial markets and the economy, brokerages and investment banks are not making nearly as much as their executives, employees and investors had hoped. Wall Street's Engines of Profit Are Slowing Down.

After an unusually sharp slowdown in trading this summer, analysts are rethinking their profit forecasts for 2010. The activities at the heart of what Wall Street does - selling and trading stocks and bonds, and advising on mergers - are running at levels well below where they were at this point last year, said Meredith Whitney, a bank analyst who was among the first to warn of the subprime mortgage disaster and its impact on big banks.

Worldwide, the number of stock offerings is down 15 percent from this time last year, while bond issuance is off 25 percent, according to Capital IQ, a research firm. Based on these trends, Ms Whitney predicts that annual revenue from Wall Street's main businesses will drop 25 percent, to around $42 billion in 2010, from $56 billion last year. While the numbers will not be known until after the third quarter ends and financial companies begin reporting earnings in October, the pace of trading this summer was slow even by normal summer standards

To make matters worse, he said, many Wall Street firms increased their work forces in the first half of the year, before the mood shifted and worries of a double-dip recession arose. If activity remains anemic, firms could soon begin cutting jobs again.

"I think the summer was horrible for everyone, and no one expected it to be as bad as it was," he said. "It's coming back a little bit in September but nowhere near enough to make up for what happened in July and August."

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."