Outlook When Anthony Bolton speaks, it usually pays to listen. Quite literally, given the way Fidelity's Special Situations fund performed when he was in charge of it.

President Obama's talks in China offer a precious opportunity to strengthen and recalibrate the world's most important bilateral relationship. Few dramatic public breakthroughs are likely as a result of his visit; his public urgings at his town hall-style meeting with students in Shanghai on human rights are unlikely to be any more successful than similar appeals by his predecessors in improving Beijing's dismal record in this field. But in his private session with President Hu Jintao, the stakes could hardly be higher.

For the Chinese dissident poet Yang Lian, in transit since the repressions of 1989, Stoke Newington starts to become a truly "local" place "the fourth year you see the very last apple on the branch".

The family of a mentally ill Briton facing the death penalty in China have appealed for his life to be spared.

China has banned foreign investment into its lucrative online games industry in an effort to tighten control over its virtual worlds.

US Outlook: Richard Fisher, head of the Federal Reserve's Dallas branch, calls the foreign exchange market a "manic depressive mechanism," and we just closed a particularly manic week. To listen to the hubbub from the trading desks, you would think we have passed into a new world economic order, with the dollar consigned to history as the dominant reserve currency. To all this, I just want to say: not so fast.

Few things would be more powerfully symbolic of the shift in the balance of global economic power than to have oil traded in the Chinese renminbi rather than the American dollar.

The way that Timothy Brook teases out trade routes, struggles for power and the delicate dance of international relations from an image of a hat or a china bowl is truly mesmerising. In this accessible but authoritative study, he relies on five paintings by Vermeer (and Girl with a Pearl Earring isn't one of them) for his history of the Dutch reach for global power, and shows, better than anyone I've read so far, the truly subversive power of detail – especially when it's brought to the fore instead of filling in the background.

Chinese police are investigating a bootcamp for Internet addicts after a teenage boy died, apparently following a severe beating, just hours after checking in, the official Xinhua news agency said late on Wednesday.

An unfinished factory building collapsed amid a violent thunderstorm today in northern China, killing 17 people, state media and a government official said.

State media reports the death toll for July 5 ethnic riots in western China has risen to 192.