Sandy Weill, who created the era of megabanks when he led Citigroup in the 1990s, has called for America's biggest banks to be broken up.

The call from the 79 year-old will cause a stir on Wall Street and in the City of London because Mr Weill engineered the 1998 deal that made Citigroup the world's largest bank. Hailed at the time, the merger of Citicorp and Travelers Group required the US government to repeal the Glass-Steagall Act, a law dating back to the Great Depression that prevented banks from both taking deposits from customers and gambling on the markets.

"What we should probably do is go and split up investment banking from banking," Mr Weill said in a television interview on Wednesday. "Have banks do something that's not going to risk the taxpayer dollars, that's not going to be too big too fail."

Mr Weill's intervention comes as the debate in the US over how to regulate the country's largest banks has been reignited by JP Morgan Chase's almost $6bn (£4.9bn) trading loss on complex derivative trades. JP Morgan chief executive Jamie Dimon, who was Mr Weill's chief lieutenant at Citi until the two fell out, has insisted that combining retail and investment banking is beneficial to consumers and businesses.

"I'm suggesting that they [the banks] be broken up so that the taxpayer will never be at risk, the depositors won't be at risk, the leverage of the banks will be something reasonsable," said Mr Weill, whose fortune was estimated at $1.3bn before Citigroup shares crashed in 2008. The bank eventually turned to the US taxpayer for a $45bn bail-out later that year.

Rather than split up the largest banks, the Dodd-Frank Act - America's signature piece of financial reform since the crisis - limited their activities and gave regulators more power. Critics of the reform say it has not removed the risk that taxpayers will ultimately have to bail-out the banks again should they get in trouble.

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The world's super-rich have taken advantage of lax tax rules to siphon off at least $21 trillion, and possibly as much as $32tn, from their home countries and hide it abroad - a sum larger than the entire American economy.

James Henry, a former chief economist at consultancy McKinsey and an expert on tax havens, has conducted groundbreaking new research for the Tax Justice Network campaign group - sifting through data from the Bank for International Settlements (BIS), the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and private sector analysts to construct an alarming picture that shows capital flooding out of countries across the world and disappearing into the cracks in the financial system.

Comedian Jimmy Carr became the public face of tax-dodging in the UK earlier this year when it emerged that he had made use of a Cayman Islands-based trust to slash his income tax bill.

But the kind of scheme Carr took part in is the tip of the iceberg, according to Henry's report, entitled The Price of Offshore Revisited. Despite the professed determination of the G20 group of leading economies to tackle tax secrecy, investors in scores of countries - including the US and the UK - are still able to hide some or all of their assets from the taxman.

"This offshore economy is large enough to have a major impact on estimates of inequality of wealth and income; on estimates of national income and debt ratios; and - most importantly - to have very significant negative impacts on the domestic tax bases of 'source' countries," Henry says.

As she presided over the regular luncheon meetings of the Monterey Bay Colony of Mayflower Descendants, Mary Jane Crawford Holmes represented a lineage stretching proudly back to the original Pilgrims.

She never could have imagined that her family's landing on Plymouth Rock would extend almost four centuries later to a grandson accused of mass murder at a Batman movie.

That sort of violence couldn't be more foreign to the genteel gatherings in the Beach House at the Monterey Peninsula Country Cub on idyllic Pebble Beach in California. And Holmes was not just a member of the chapter. She was the governor. Her duties included conducting an annual reading of the Mayflower Compact, marking the day in 1620 that the Pilgrims pledged "to enact, constitute, and frame, such just and equal laws, ordinances, acts, constitutions, and offices, from time to time, as shall be thought most meet and convenient for the general good of the colony; unto which we promise all due submission and obedience."

President Putin was last night warned that he is taking a "big gamble" with the lives of 20,000 Russians in Syria.

In the bloodiest week since troubles began last year, Russian sources confirmed that despite deploying an assault ship and more than 250 marines near the port of Tartus, Moscow would not pick up its citizens trapped in the fighting.

"Russia is taking a big gamble, and the stakes are high," warned Dr Jonathan Eyal, director of International Security Studies at the Royal United Services Institute.

"Moscow has contingency plans, and it has also raised the possibility of Russian military intervention to rescue its citizens, but from my conversations with senior Russian figures, there is no plan to implement it.

Across the country and even in Canada, cities' thinking about front lawns is more than a little bit antiquated. It comes down to this simple formulation: Grass good! Vegetables bad. We've heard one too many stories in which people decide to use their yards to grow some fresh vegetables, only to have city officials come down hard on them, forcing them to tear out their food or bulldozing the gardens themselves. If building a few bike lanes counts as a war on cars, this is definitely a war on gardens.

The latest skirmish took place in Drummondville, Quebec, where Josée Landry and Michel Beauchamp built what supporters describe as "a gorgeous and meticulously-maintained edible landscape full of healthy fruits and vegetables." (You can judge for yourself: It's the garden in the picture above.) Under the town's new code, a garden like that would be illegal. It covers too much of the yard. Under the new rules, only 30 percent of a yard's area can go towards growing vegetables, and the town's given the couple only two weeks to pull out their carefully planted veggies.

Many Americans hurl themselves with fundamentally false, deeply disturbed enthusiasm into public demonstrations of grief over the needless deaths of some human beings -- those human beings they see as being much like themselves, when the deaths happen in what could be their own neighborhood. As for all the murders committed by their government with a systematic dedication as insane as that of any serial killer: silence.

Ghana's President John Atta Mills has died unexpectedly, a presidential statement said, and an aide said his death occurred on Tuesday after he took ill on Monday night.

The death of the president of the world's No. 2 cocoa grower comes months before Mills was due to stand for re-election at the helm of the West African country that posted double-digit growth in 2011 and has been praised for its strong democracy in a turbulent region.

"It is with a heavy heart...that we announce the sudden and untimely death of the president of the Republic of Ghana," a statement sent to Reuters by the president's office said.

Three National Security Agency whistle blowers told Viewpoint host Eliot Spitzer on Monday that the agency was gathering information on every person in the United States.

The FISA Amendments Act (FAA) of 2008 gave the NSA broad powers to monitor international phone calls and emails, and granted legal immunity to telecommunication companies that had participated in the Bush administration's wiretapping program prior to 2008. But former senior official Thomas Drake, former senior analyst Kirk Wiebe, and former technical director William Binney said the NSA was not only monitoring international communications - the agency had been spying on "the entire country."

G4S, the firm at the center of the debacle over security for the London 2012 Olympics, is helping Israel secure facilities where Palestinian children are imprisoned and severly abused.

Defence for Children-Palestine (DCI-Palestine) has released an urgent appeal to end the practice of holding Palestinian children from the West Bank in solitary confinement in facilities in Israel. The organization has documented 53 such cases since 2008.

The children have been held in solitary confinement mainly in Al Jalame and Petah Tikva interrogation centers. The security systems for Al Jalame detention facilities were provided by G4S Israel, according to a March 2011 report on the firm by Who Profits.

G4S Israel is a subsidiary of British-Danish security firm G4S and it is deeply involved in Israel's occupation of Palestinian territories, as well as in Israeli prisons and detention centers.

Meanwhile, G4S has lost its credibility because its incapacity to deliver on the contract to secure the London Olympics. The UK government stepped in and mobilized 3,500 military personnel to fill in the gap. Nick Buckles, G4S's CEO, was interrogated by members of parliament about the failure of his company. Buckles admitted that G4S's reputation is in tatters.

President Bashar al-Assad's regime has friends in the region poised "to strike out" in the event of an intervention into Syria, says a commander of Iran's Revolutionary Guards. The warning was particularly sent to "hated" Arab countries.

­"None of Syria's friends or the great front of resistance has yet entered the scene, and in the event that this happens, decisive blows will be struck at the enemy, especially the hated Arab rulers," Gen. Masoud Jazayeri, a spokesman of the country's Joint Chiefs of Staff, told Fars news agency.

No country in particular was mentioned. Iran remains a key ally of official Damascus, while leaders of such Gulf countries as Saudi Arabia, Jordan or Qatar openly support Syrian rebels.

The hawkish rhetoric heard from Iran comes on top of the exchange over Syria's chemical and biological arsenal, which the Arab country pledged Monday not to use against its own population, but only to combat "foreign aggressors."