BBC News with Marion Marshall

The man leading Afghanistan's efforts to negotiate peace with the Taliban has been killed by a suicide bomber at his home in the capital Kabul. Burhanuddin Rabbani, a former president of Afghanistan, was meeting two members of the Taliban at the time. Police say the attacker had a bomb concealed in his turban. David Loyn reports from Kabul.

Among the dead and injured with former President Burhanuddin Rabbani in his home was Masoom Stanekzai, a close adviser to President Karzai, who's returning from the UN General Assembly in New York to Afghanistan to deal with the crisis. The explosion could hardly be heard a street away, but its shock wave will spread across the country. Former President Rabbani may have died trying to negotiate peace, but in his life he was a highly divisive figure. His death may not necessarily derail the prospects for peace talks with the Taliban, depending on who'll succeed him, but it will make the process far harder to manage.

The International Monetary Fund has warned that the global economy is entering a dangerous new phase. It says the United States and the eurozone are at increased risk of falling back into recession. Here's our economics editor Stephanie Flanders.

There's plenty of bad news to go around. The growth forecast for this year and next has been cut for almost every country listed in the report. Continued volatility in the eurozone was one of the two largest risks to the recovery identified in the report; the other was the possibility of a prolonged slowdown in the US. The fund said that politicians in Washington needed urgently to reach a long-term solution to America's debt problems to free up money to support the recovery right now.