The US president visited Missouri and Michigan yesterday and will be in Ohio and Pennsylvania today.

In his stump speech, the Democratic vice-presidential candidate, John Edwards, says there are two Americas: "One America - middle-class America - whose needs Washington has long forgotten; another America - narrow-interest America - whose every wish is Washington's command." Lubec's locals do not fit into either. Living in Washington County, one of the poorest in the US, they are certainly doing the work, but they are not middle class. Take Daniel Fitzsimmons. He used to employ around 50 people in a business making Christmas wreaths. When the North American Free Trade Agreement came in he went out of business, undercut by cheaper wreaths from Canada. "It's free trade to some people, but it ain't free to us because we're losing everything we had," he says.

But this week his family revealed an entirely different image than the one across T-shirts on the backs of the young and posters on bedsit walls.

Having friends with identities other than your own can teach you all sorts of things. The most valuable, obviously, is how to enjoy their company. But, along the way, the fact that they have a different experience may also introduce you to perspectives you had not encountered and challenge presumptions you never knew you had.

American newspapers were embroiled in another scandal yesterday following the resignation of two publishers prompted by an investigation into fraudulent circulation figures intended to increase advertising revenues.

Rupert Murdoch's Fox News channel is being taken to the federal trade commission over claims that its boast of being "fair and balanced" is a fraud.

Mr Banton was allegedly one of a group of about a dozen armed men who forced their way into a house in Kingston on the morning of June 24 and beat up the occupants while shouting homophobic insults, according to the victims.

Mr Daley said that for security reasons he no longer wanted aircraft flying over the city centre, and if it was good enough for Disneyland it was good enough for America's third largest city.

Little more than a week after the first stone was laid, the two main characters in the project are mired in recrimination.

Born and raised in Mississippi, the deep southern state with the most vicious reputation for racist violence - Martin Luther King described it in his 1963 "I have a dream" speech as "sweltering in injustice" - Hudson was years ahead of her time where civil rights activism was concerned. In 1937, while King was still a toddler, she went to Leake County Courthouse with her sister Dovie to try to register to vote "for the heck of it". It would be 25 years before she would succeed, and in the intervening years came tales of persecution and bureaucratic obstruction.

Bill Cosby, described as "frighteningly inarticulate when asked to expound on critical issues of race in America", gets two stars. Now those who seek to police and prescribe the borders of race-thinking will be set to crowd his lapel with many more. At a meeting last month to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the end of segregation, he told a mostly black audience: "People marched and were hit in the face with rocks to get an education, and now we've got these knuckle-heads walking around ... The lower-economic people are not holding up their end in this deal. These people are not parenting. They are buying things for their kids - $500 sneakers, for what? And won't spend $200 for Hooked On Phonics."

Referring to the Senate investigation which found that the principal claims justifying the invasion of Iraq were fundamentally wrong and the result of a "global intelligence failure", Mr Kerry argued that Mr Bush's record had fed cynicism and mistrust of government.

"I'm in disbelief. I can't believe it's me," she said.

On the one hand there was Democratic presidential nominee, John Kerry - stiff in demeanour and laboured in delivery, the experienced, statesmanlike north-eastern patriarchal blueblood. On the other there was his freshly-picked and fresh-faced running mate, John Edwards - approachable in style and affable in manner, the youthful inexperienced red-blooded southerner.

A highly critical report due to be released later this week by the Senate select committee on intelligence is expected to lambast the intelligence community for doing a poor job of collecting information about Iraqi weapons programmes and for failing to pass on what information it did have.

The Islamic Response Movement, the same group that last week admitted to kidnapping Corporal Hassoun and threatening to behead him, would not say where he was being kept.

There is no exaggerating the appeal of Brazilian football here. Alongside Jesus and Mary, one of the few mortals to appear on tap-taps, the brightly painted local buses, is Ronaldo.