Check out the headline at the bottom left of the Sunday Times front page. The man the London paper calls the most powerful banker on Earth says he is "just a banker 'doing God’s work'" .

The report says Goldman Sachs chief executive Lloyd Blankfein"proudly pays himself more in a year than most of us could ever dream of — $68m in 2007 alone, a record for any Wall Street CEO, to add to the more than $500m of Goldman stock he owns" .

Goldman Sachs looks set to pay about $20 billion in bonuses for its top traders this year, at a time when the fallout from last year's financial crisis is still being felt and the United States unemployment rate has hit 10.2 percent, a 26-1/2-year high.

In his defence, Blankfein said in the interview: "We help companies to grow by helping them to raise capital. Companies that grow create wealth. This, in turn, allows people to have jobs that create more growth and more wealth. It’s a virtuous cycle ... We have a social purpose."

An online Twitter seance kicks off in London on Friday, October 30, the day before Halloween, in an attempt to communicate with the spirits of dead celebrities.

Psychic medium Jayne Wallace will try and contact the stars, and will act as online intermediary between the living and the dead by tweeting any responses she receives.

Tweets for the "tweance" can be sent to the social networking site http://twitter.com/tweance

Which dead celebrity would you tweet?

I once worked for a managing editor who felt it was his duty to pay for the majority of drinks when joining the charges after work.  Needless to say, he was well liked.

But leading a group of people — and yes, journalists are people, too — takes more than a few dollars in the pub to do well. A recent survey proves the point: A majority of U.S. workers do not think their bosses are truthful and one in four would fire their boss if they could.

It gets worse: The poll, conducted for a human resources and placement company, found 53 percent of workers did not think their boss was honest, a similar number did not think their boss was fair or patient and two-thirds did not think their boss was loyal.

On the plus side, two-thirds of workers would not change anything about their relationship with their boss, although I’m not certain what that means, or implies.

The poll is timely as National Boss Day falls on Friday, Oct 16, which gives us the perfect opportunity to ask, what do you think of your boss? Leave your comments below.

** This post is from Alertnet, the Thomson Reuters Foundation's global  humanitarian news Web site.**

Earthquakes, floods, the global recession and recurrent famines have been keeping aid professionals across the world as busy as ever. Such crises hit poor countries the hardest, focusing increasing attention on preventing and preparing for disasters rather than dealing with their devastating aftermath.

The European Commission, the executive arm of the European Union, is one of the biggest sources of humanitarian and development aid in the world. For emergency response to recent earthquakes in Indonesia, it has provided $4.4 million - more than any other donor so far.

To help the Philippines currently recovering from two typhoons, the European Union and some member-states have contributed a total of $5.6 million - again, more than sent or promised by any other foreign donor.

How to help the developing world, not just when they are disasters, will be at the core of debates among heads of states, top European Union officials, Nobel Prize winners and other experts at an international conference in Stockholm between Oct. 22 and Oct. 24, called European Development Days.

Ahead of the conference, European Union Commissioner for Development and Humanitarian Aid Karel De Gucht will take questions from readers on this year's topics for discussion: the impact of the economic crisis on developing countries, climate change and the link between democracy and development.

You can participate by using the comments section below or by using the #askEUaid tag on Twitter. Please post your questions by Thursday, Oct. 15.

We will get as many of your questions to De Gucht as possible and will publish his replies by the end of the week, so keep checking back!

New to Twitter? If you aren't using Twitter already but want to post a question or see what other people are asking De Gucht through Twitter, just get yourself a Twitter account, search for the #askEUaid tag and view all questions. You can post a 140-character question yourself, making sure you use the #askEUaid tag somewhere in your post so it sits with all the other posts from people across the Twittersphere.

The statement announcing the Nobel Peace Prize for U.S. President Barack Obama says that "his diplomacy is founded in the concept that those who are to lead the world must do so on the basis of values and attitudes that are shared by the majority of the world's population".

(Photo: Obama at the United Nations, 23Sept 2009/Kevin Lamarque)

Is there actually a set of values and attitudes shared by most people around the world? It would be interesting to know exactly what the Norwegian Nobel Committee meant by this. Are they talking about some vague form of world political consensus or even global ethics? The citation text mentions Obama's "vision of and work for a world without nuclear weapons" and his preference multilateral diplomacy, dialogue and negotiations. But none of these efforts has yet borne much fruit.

The citation also mentioned the "hope for the future" it said Obama has given the world. Hope is a powerful force, both in personal and political life. In the Christian tradition, it's a theological virtue as important as faith and love. And it is a key element of the Obama "yes we can" message.

Do you think this is what they gave him the Peace Prize for?

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It's hard to watch France's political and cultural elite rush to support filmmaker Roman Polanski against extradition to the United States on a decades-old sex charge and not wonder exactly how they interpret the national motto "liberté, égalité, fraternité." It's tempting to ask whether they're defending the liberty to break the law and skip town, respecting the equality of all before the law and championing a brotherhood of artists who can do no wrong.

(Photo: Roman Polanski, 19 Feb 2009/Hannibal Hanschke)

Here in Paris, Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner declared the arrest was "a bit sinister ... frankly, (arresting) a man of such talent recognised around the world, recognised in the country where he was arrested -- that's not very nice." He and his Polish counterpart have written to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton about the issue. Culture Minister Frédéric Mitterrand said "just as there is a generous America that we like, there's also an America that scares us, and that's the America that has just shown us its face." Directors, actors and intellectuals have been signing a petition demanding Polanski's immediate release.

Almost all the focus is on the argument that Polanski is a brilliant director, the charge of unlawful sex with a 13-year old dates back to 1977 and the victim herself says she wants the whole issue to be forgotten.  Almost completely ignored is the fact that he fled the U.S. to escape sentencing, which added a crime to the original crime. There is such a widespread assumption that all artists and intellectuals would automatically support Polanski that Paris papers today -- both the left-of-centre Libération and the conservative Le Figaro -- wrote with an air of surprise that Hollywood was not storming the barricades to back him.

The French Greens leader Daniel Cohn-Bendit made headlines by bucking the trend and saying he was "ill at ease" with the rush to absolve Polanski of raping a minor and the culture minister should have been more cautious in his comments.

Across the Atlantic, by contrast, Hollywood's hometown paper, the Los Angeles Times, reviewed the objections by Polanski's supporters and concluded: "Plausible or preposterous, these arguments are eclipsed by a simple fact: Polanski fled the country ... the Justice Department and L.A.'s district attorney are right to seek extradition."

And almost nobody in the media here in France asks the tough questions that Fr. Tom Reese, S.J. (photo at right) did in his Washington Post blog post entitled "Father Polanski would go to jail":
"Polanski's defenders ... argue that he should not be punished. They say that the girl was willing and sexually experienced and she has forgiven him (after receiving a settlement). They even cite his tragic childhood and life as an excuse. And besides, it is ancient history. Such arguments from paedophile priests would be laughed out of court and lambasted by everyone, and rightly so...

"The Catholic Church has rightly been put under a microscope when 4 percent of its priests were involved in abuse, but what about the film industry? The world has truly changed. Entertainment is the new religion with sex, violence and money the new Trinity. The directors and stars are worshipped and quickly forgiven for any infraction as long as the PR agent is as skilled as a saintly confessor. Entertainment, not religion, is the new opiate of the people and we don't want our supply disturbed.

"Is there a double standard here? You bet."

There's a lot to say about the different ways Americans and French approach the law. But let's go right to Tom Reese's question. Do you think Polanski's supporters cut him slack they wouldn't think of permitting for a paedophile priest? Is the entertainment industry setting our values?

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Nearly a year after the collapse of Lehman Brothers, a failure that triggered the global economic crisis, the much-lambasted chief executive Richard Fuld seemed burdened — but not crushed — by the pressure of the upcoming annivesary.

“You know what, the anniversary’s coming up,” he told Reuters. “I’ve been pummeled, I’ve been dumped on, and it’s all going to happen again. I can handle it. You know what, let them line up.”

Fuld, a nearly 40-year veteran of the company, took Lehman’s reins in 1994 at one of its darkest hours and rebuilt it into the fourth-largest U.S. investment bank, a Wall Street powerhouse whose massively profitable mortgage banking machine inspired rivals’ envy.

But after filing the biggest bankruptcy in U.S. history, Fuld was vilified and humiliated before a Congressional panel last October and named in nearly 40 different legal actions.

Opinions are still divided over his role in the disaster, but he doesn’t see the point of speaking out: “Nobody wants to hear it. The facts are out there. Nobody wants to hear it, especially not from me.”

Is he the scapegoat of a massive systemic failure on Wall Street, or does he deserve to be a central villain in the collapse?