STWR - Share The World's Resources

Britain was the principal slaving nation of the modern world. In The Empire Pays Back, a documentary broadcast by Channel 4 on Monday, Robert Beckford called on the British to take stock of this past. Why, he asked, had Britain made no apology for African slavery, as it had done for the Irish potato famine? Why was there no substantial public monument of national contrition equivalent to Berlin's Holocaust Museum? Why, most crucially, was there no recognition of how wealth extracted from Africa and Africans made possible the vigour and prosperity of modern Britain? Was there not a case for Britain to pay reparations to the descendants of African slaves? These are timely questions in a summer in which Blair and Bush, their hands still wet with Iraqi blood, sought to rebrand themselves as the saviours of Africa. The G8's debt-forgiveness initiative was spun successfully as an act of western altruism. The generous Massas never bothered to explain that, in order to benefit, governments must agree to "conditions", which included allowing profit-making companies to take over public services. This was no gift; it was what the merchant bankers would call a "debt-for-equity swap", the equity here being national sovereignty. The sweetest bit of the deal was that the money owed, already more than repaid in interest, had mostly gone to buy industrial imports from the west and Japan, and oil from nations who bank their profits in London and New York. Only in a bookkeeping sense had it ever left the rich world. No one considered that Africa's debt was trivial compared to what the west really owes Africa.

The two faces of Niger

In Tahoua market, there is no sign that times are hard. Instead, there are piles of red onions, bundles of glistening spinach, and pumpkins sliced into orange shards. There are plastic bags of rice, pasta and manioc flour, and the sound of butchers' knives whistling as they are sharpened before hacking apart joints of goat and beef.

A few minutes' drive from the market, along muddy streets filled with puddles of rainwater, there is the more familiar face of Niger. Under canvas tents, aid workers coax babies with spidery limbs to take sips of milk, or the smallest dabs of high-protein paste.

Wasted infants are wrapped in gold foil to keep them warm. There is the sound of children wailing, or coughing in machine-gun bursts.

"I cannot afford to buy millet in the market, so I have no food, and there is no milk to give my baby," says Fatou, a mother cradling her son Alhassan. Though he is 12 months old he weighs just 3.3kg (around 7lbs).

Big brands are being linked to widespread corruption

Car manufacturers BMW, DaimlerChrysler and Volkswagen; the country's fourth-largest financial institution, Commerzbank; Europe's largest chip-producer, Infineon - five of Germany's leading firms, all members of its Dax-30 blue-chip index, have become embroiled in corruption scandals in recent months.

The revelations of kickbacks, money-laundering and paid-for sex have shocked a country that is already trying - and failing - to come to terms with its fall from graceas Europe's model economy and is mired in anxious depression. Not so much banana republic as backhander republic.

A handful of senior executives, including Peter Hartz, VW's personnel chief and architect of the Schroder government's labour reforms, have resigned; others are being investigated by criminal prosecutors. The country's two-tier company board structure, including the role of the supervisory board, has come under increased criticism.

CAP's defenders argue that it supports small, poor farmers, but data from the Rural Payments Agency shows that affluent Lincolnshire receives more cash than all of the North West, where there are three times as many farms.

'These figures reveal the regional inequality at the heart of the CAP,' said Jack Thurston, an agriculture expert at the German Marshall Fund. 'Payments are skewed towards large, efficient agribusinesses andwealthy landowners. It is no surprise to see the intensive farms of East Anglia coming out on top.'

The regional breakdown of payments to farmers in England, released under the Freedom of Information Act, shows that, while the South East received £212m of subsidies last year, just £86m went to the North West and £96m to the North East.

Beijing bows to pressure from Washington and drops peg to the dollar but Asian exporters may reap greater benefit than the US

China made its biggest monetary shift in more than a decade yesterday by revaluing the yuan and dropping the currency's peg to the dollar.

In a long-anticipated move, the central bank announced that the yuan's value will now be linked to a basket of currencies. The immediate impact was a 2.1% appreciation against the dollar.

China's leaders have frequently talked of the economic desirability of a more flexible exchange rate currency, but the timing of the latest move appears to be political.

Coming two months before China's president, Hu Jintao, is scheduled to visit Washington, the adjustment appears to be aimed at heading off rising US discontent at the bilateral trade deficit, which reached a record $162bn (£92bn) last year.