The head of the International Monetary Fund yesterday called for a tax on the financial sector to protect the world economy from the "systematic risk" it creates.

Current US efforts to kick-start serious negotiations on a future two state solution to the Israel-Palestinian conflict were in the balance yesterday after presidential envoy George Mitchell failed to bridge the gap between the two sides on settlement construction.

In another age and circumstance, Robert McNamara might have been a classic American success story. He was a brilliant student, a formidable administrator who impressed everyone who met him. Destiny, however, propelled him to a job which made him a prime architect of arguably America's greatest foreign policy disaster. The young Robert McNamara had a dazzling career in Detroit; an older and saddened McNamara was President of the World Bank for 13 years. But he will forever be remembered for "McNamara's War," the tragedy of his middle years which was the calamitous US adventure in Vietnam.

The risks of of "sudden emergence of unexpected financial turbulence" could push the world economy even further into recession, according to the president of the European Central Bank.

The latest from the World Bank on global economic prospects, especially those in poorer nations reminds us of two salient points. First, how much the developing world will be hit by the downturn; and second, how we can’t just shrug and move on from that.

The secret of good comedy, it is often said, is timing. Much the same might be said about politics, and, unfortunately for the Treasury Select Committee (and more happily for the Government) the committee's report comes just as another few fragments of good news arrive to suggest that the worst of the downturn may actually be over, and the recovery, feeble as it is destined to be, may turn up by Christmas. With headlines and chatter about "green shoots" growing, the media might be even be accused of talking us into a recovery.

What was an arcane area left to officials to prepare before a G8 summit has suddenly got heads of government's attention. If you think of most of the summits in the past, they showed up a little embarrassedly, almost because they didn't necessarily want to explain to constituencies back home why they were going off on these trips which were often subject to criticism for high living or whatever was supposedly being associated with them. But now suddenly in the run-up to this summit you see a group of world leaders acting as sherpas and using the political platform as they would on a domestic political issue to try and take a position.

City bankers fear that regulatory reforms to be revealed by the Financial Services Authority this week could force banks to quit London unless other countries agree to adopt the new standards too.