BBC News with Iain Purdon.

President Obama has

put forward

sweeping new rules to curb the size and risk-taking of big banks. He said banks that taxpayers

safeguard

ed against failure should not take unnecessary risks, and he would tighten any

loophole

s that allowed those banks to

undertake

risky transactions for their own profit.

"We intend to close loopholes that allowed big financial firms to trade risky financial products like credit default swaps and other derivatives without

oversight

, to identify system-wide risks that could cause a meltdown, to strengthen capital and liquidity requirements, and to ensure that the failure of any large firm does not take the entire economy down with it. Never again will the American taxpayer be held hostage by a bank that is too big to fail."

Minutes after the president had spoken, the Dow Jones Index of shares in New York fell by 2%.

The American Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has urged China to investigate cyber attacks that recently led the Internet company, Google, to threaten to

pull out of

the country. In a speech, Mrs Clinton said countries that restricted free access to information risked

walling themselves off

from the progress of the next century. Google has said the attacks, aimed at Chinese human right activists,

originate

d in China.

Haitian officials say they will resettle as many as 400,000 people from the capital Port-au-Prince after last week's devastating earthquake. The Interior Minister Paul Antoine Bien-Aime said that buses were being laid on to take people from makeshift camps to villages in the north and south. The main sea port in Port-au-Prince badly damaged in the quake is now handling limited amounts of cargo, as Adam Mynott reports.