This synchronized global slowdown, which has become increasingly stark in recent months, is hobbling economic growth worldwide, affecting not just homes, but also jobs. In Ireland, Spain, Britain and elsewhere, housing markets that soared over the past decade are falling back to earth. Experts predict that some countries, like Ireland, will face an even more wrenching adjustment than the United States, with the possibility that the downturn could turn into wholesale collapse.

To some extent, the world's problems are a result of American contagion. As home financing and credit tighten in response to the crisis that began in the U.S. subprime market, analysts worry that other countries could suffer the mortgage defaults and foreclosures that have afflicted California, Florida and other states. Citing the far-flung reverberations from the American housing bust and credit squeeze, the International Monetary Fund cut its forecast Wednesday for global economic growth this year and warned that the malaise could extend into 2009.

"The problems in the U.S. are being transmitted to Europe," said Michael Ball, professor of urban and property economics at the University of Reading in England, who studies housing prices. "What's happening now is an awful lot more grief than we expected."

Siew held a historic meeting with China President Hu Jintao during an economic forum in China over the weekend, where the two agreed to restart talks that have been frozen since 1999, Siew told reporters after his return. China has claimed self-ruled Taiwan as its territory since the end of the Chinese civil war in 1949 and pledged to bring the island under its rule, by force if necessary.

Siew said it was too early to comment on a timetable, but that both sides wanted to start talks as soon as possible. The last eight years have seen relations across the Taiwan Strait sour under the administration of outgoing President Chen Shui-bian, whose Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) favors formal independence from China.

But last month, voters overwhelmingly picked the main opposition candidate, Ma Ying-jeou, and running mate Siew, of the Nationalist Party (KMT), to become Taiwan's next president and vice president, partly on the promise of better China ties.

His warning follows that from the leader of the International Monetary Fund, who said hundreds of thousands of people were at risk of starvation. Mr Zoellick proposed an action plan to boost long-run agricultural production.
There have been food riots recently in a number of countries, including Haiti, the Philippines and Egypt.

"Based on a rough analysis, we estimate that a doubling of food prices over the last three years could potentially push 100 million people in low-income countries deeper into poverty," Mr Zoellick said. His proposal for a "new deal" to tackle the international food crisis was endorsed by the World Bank's steering committee of finance and development ministers at a meeting in Washington.

Food prices have risen sharply in recent months, driven by increased demand, poor weather in some countries that has ruined crops and an increase in the use of land to grow crops for transport fuels.

Restrictions on rice exports have been put in place in major producing countries such as India, China, Vietnam and Egypt. Importers such as Bangladesh, the Philippines and Afghanistan have been hit hard. "We have to put our money where our mouth is now so that we can put food into hungry mouths," Mr Zoellick said. "It's as stark as that."

Chinese President Hu Jintao and Taiwan Vice President-elect Vincent Siew shook hands and talked one-on-one for about 20 minutes on Saturday, in what many analysts saw as a breakthrough that could thaw their icy relations and pave the way for closer trade and transit links. Siew, who attended the meeting in a private capacity, met Chinese Commerce Minister Chen Deming on Sunday. Each led a delegation of industrialists, academics and officials to discuss details of how to step up cooperation.

They first met behind closed doors and then held an hour-long seminar, with executives from technology, shipping and other companies from both sides swapping views on the specific market opening and cooperation they hoped to see in their fields. China's Chen called normalizing trade and economic ties between the two sides an urgent matter. "This urgency results especially from the current global uncertainties that we both face," Chen said, pointing to the economic slowdown in the United States and other Western countries as well as soaring prices for natural resources.

"In such times, when we see such a good chance to bring our two sides' economic and trade ties forward towards normalization, ... by working together, we can reduce the negative impact on us from the slowing of growth in Western countries," he said.

The groups named Jerusalem District Police Commander Aharon Franco, Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, Public Security Minister Avi Dichter, the state of Israel, and the Muslim Waqf in a suit alleging racist discrimination.

The organizations are demanding that those named in their suit stop preventing Jews from accessing the Temple Mount, refrain from bothering Jews who attempt to enter the area, and prevent inappropriate behavior. The groups mentioned a recent incident in which Muslim youths played soccer on the Temple Mount as an example of such behavior.

The groups said allowing them to access the Temple Mount would be a victory for freedom of religion. Forbidding Jews from holding their religious ceremonies on the Temple Mount is racism, they said.

The Pope arrives to the US capital Tuesday, for his first visit to the country since elected Pontiff, and will most likely see some of the other banners posted by the Archdiocese of Washington when he travels through the city Thursday in the popemobile. "These ads are a visible expression of our great affection for the [Pope]and our excitement for his upcoming visit," said Susan Gibbs, director of communications for the Archdiocese of Washington.

The text "One who has hope lives differently," taken from Benedict XVI's encyclical "Spe Salvi," runs across the center of the ad. The Pope will visit the White House on Wednesday, and later the same day he will participate in a prayer service and meeting with the nation's 350 bishops.

On Thursday morning he will celebrate Mass at the new Nationals Park in Washington, meet with the heads of more than 200 Catholic colleges and universities at the Catholic University of America, and then meet with interreligious leaders at the Pope John Paul II Cultural Center.

Fu Ying also said that a young Chinese woman asked her: "Where is the gentlemanship?" after the protests during the Olympic torch run in London. Many of the visitors from China who were in London last week felt that Britain was against them, she added. Ms Fu said in the Sunday Telegraph that Tibet is "loved" by the Chinese. The ambassador wrote: "I am concerned that mutual perceptions between the people of China and the West are quickly drifting in opposite directions."

"Of those who protested loudly, many probably have not seen Tibet. For the Chinese people, Tibet is a loved land and information about it is ample. There may be complicated problems of religion mixing with politics, but people are well-fed, well-clothed and well-housed. That has been the main objective of China for centuries. Tibet may not grow into an industrial place like the eastern cities in China, but it will move on like other parts of China."

According to BBC political correspondent, Laura Kuenssberg, officials from the British Foreign Office suggest that one way to settle disputes about biased reporting would be for China to allow the international press free access to Tibet. But Ms Fu says that Western media has to earn China's "respect".

Hu's comments to visiting Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd marked his first public comments on anti-government protests that broke out in the Tibetan capital of Lhasa last month. "Our conflict with the Dalai clique is not an ethnic problem, not a religious problem, nor a human rights problem," the official Xinhua News Agency quoted Hu as saying, referring to supporters of Tibet's exiled Buddhist leader, the Dalai Lama, who Beijing blames for fomenting the unrest.

"It is a problem either to safeguard national unification or to split the motherland," Hu told Rudd at a meeting on the sidelines of a regional economic forum in China's southern province of Hainan. As Tibet's former Communist Party boss, Hu enforced a harsh crackdown against the last major anti-government protests there in 1989 and has tightened Chinese rule over the Himalayan region since taking over as president in 2003.

Under Hu, the party has increased controls over Tibetan Buddhism and increasingly opened the region to travel and migration from other parts of China. Hu's remarks come a day after China ratcheted up its attacks on overseas critics, blasting a US congressional resolution on Tibet as "crude interference" and labeling a leading Tibetan exile group a terrorist organization.

The supermarket chain's partnership with Dunnhumby, the market research specialist, is being rolled out to nine countries where Tesco operates, including Thailand, South Korea and China but not, as yet, the United States. Dunnhumby has worked with Tesco in the UK since Clubcard was introduced in 1995. Analysts claim that its vast database of shopping preferences has been one of the supermarket's biggest competitive advantages over the past decade.

Every day Dunnhumby crunches data taken from Tesco's tills to generate a picture of what its 13.5 million Clubcard holders are buying and why they may be switching products. Discount coupons and promotions are targeted at individuals based on extensive records of their past purchases.

The new agreement is almost certain to spark yet more controversy over Tesco's power. It already claims nearly £1 of every £7 spent on the high street and is set to report pretax profits of nearly £3 billion on Tuesday. It will now have the potential to map every tendency of a customer base equal in size to the population of the United Kingdom. Dunnhumby, which is majority owned by Tesco, generates most of its revenue by selling on the data in an anonymous form to some of the world's biggest companies, such as Coca-Cola and Unilever, to help them to devise marketing campaigns.

"I don't see any chance of us being able to implement an agreement in the near term," the Prime Minister said, addressing a pre-Passover holiday toast at Kadima party headquarters in Petach Tikva. Prime Minister Olmert angrily dismissed criticism that he and Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni are compromising on Jerusalem.

"We will insist on all the terms of the Road Map, first and foremost among them a cessation of terrorism, as a precondition for implementation of any understanding. But the first step creating a horizon of hope for us and for the Palestinians can be taken, it must be taken, and we will make every effort in order to successfully do so this year."

The Prime Minister promised that "the response to Hamas will be such that it will be unable to act against the citizens of Israel as it currently is." Olmert concluded his pre-Passover remarks to his party loyalists by saying, "Ahead of the 60th Independence Day, we can stand tall and tell ourselves: we have a wondrous country, we have achievements, we have power, we have security - and with them we will march forward."

Ambrose Evans Pritchard has a comment piece in the Telegraph discussing the refusal of the ECB to cut interest rates yesterday. Jean-Claude Trichet, the ECB's President, claimed that Europe remains insulated from the unfolding slump in the US and would stick to its sole duty of combating inflation, now at a record 3.5pc. However, the ECB is at odds with the conclusions of the IMF, which urged a rate cut. Evans Pritchard notes that "house prices are more overvalued in Ireland (32pc), Holland (29pc), France (22pc), Belgium (18pc), Spain (17pc), and Italy (12.4pc), than in the United States (12pc), and may be subject to a nasty correction". Irish house prices fell 7.3pc last year.

Hans Redeker, currency chief at BNP Paribas, said the ECB had its head in the sand. "They are not looking at the tidal wave that is about to roll straight over them. Balance-sheet stress in Europe is just as bad as it is in the US. The reporting periods are different, so the bad news has not yet come out," he said. The head of Italy's business federation, Emma Marcegaglia, said the soaring euro was having "a very negative effect on our economy. The ECB should be cutting rates," she said. Meanwhile, deficits have reached 12.5pc of GDP in Greece, and 9.2pc in Spain.

The EU's own scientific advisers yesterday joined the chorus of institutions calling for the EU's target for biofuel use to be scrapped. The European Environment Agency said yesterday that the target would be impossible to achieve without harming the environment and contributing to rainforest destruction.

Meanwhile Robert Zoellick, the World Bank's President said: "In the US and Europe over the last year we have been focusing on the prices of gasoline at the pumps. While many worry about filling their gas tanks, many others around the world are struggling to fill their stomachs. And it's getting more and more difficult every day." Zoellick said the price of wheat had risen by 120% in the past year, more than doubling the cost of a loaf of bread.

It has been suggested that the President should be given his own plane, 'White House' style residence and a large personal staff. The article quotes Open Europe saying, "EU politicians claim that the Lisbon Treaty will make the EU more transparent and accessible to voters, but this latest example of secretive horse-trading shows that if it ever does come into force it will be business as usual in Brussels."

Economic confidence indicators, as well as other recent data, have pointed to "startling differences" in performance across the 15-country eurozone.

The article notes that the trend is reviving arguments over the suitability of the "one size fits all" monetary policy of the eurozone. Spain is facing a "serious house price correction" and rising unemployment. A separate article discusses the situation in this country, where the "sudden collapse" in construction activity is prompting banks to sharply rein in credit. Meanwhile, external balances of eurozone members also expose "widening divergences": Germany has an 8% GDP current account surplus; Spain has a 10% deficit.

The CBI has estimated that the Directive, if passed, would cost the UK 250,000 jobs. According to the article, defeat for the UK has been looking increasingly likely since last autumn. The Government is holding secret talks with the European Commission this week. Gordon Brown is trying to persuade the EU to allow the UK to "apply the Directive flexibly".

However, it is far from clear that British trade unions would agree to such a plan if it has the effect of mitigating the cost to Britain of the Directive. The unions argue that the Government is already effectively defeated on the Directive, so they would have no incentive to sign up to Brown's proposed forum negotiation, the intention of which would almost certainly be to lessen the impact of the Directive.

France is likely to push for the Directive to be passed during its EU Presidency, which begins in July. The article notes that Paris has for a long time been "hostile to British foot-dragging on EU social legislation."