As this week’s report on the deaths of nearly 200 children while in, or on the margins of, state care showed we need to improve the protections and security we provide for vulnerable children.

This week the European Commission published a harrowing and challenging report on the slavery of our times — human trafficking.

Nearly 200 children died in State care or while they were in contact with child-protection services in the last decade.

Today nearly 120 heads of state gather in Brazil for a summit on global development. Many of them will be glad of the brief, few days in the sun, away from the all-consuming economic challenges they have struggled with every day and night for the last few years.

Finding yourself across a courtroom from an estranged partner, flanked by a very expensive legal team, is as chastening an experience as any of us would wish to face.

There’s hardly a conflict in history that has not been driven by nationalism or religion.

It has become almost everyday to complain that we lack political leadership.

In one way or another all of our lives are shaped by belief or disbelief.

Mobile phones, like cars and a good broadband service, are staples of modern life, so the prospect of swathes of the country being left without a good mobile signal hardly bears thinking about.

If we took economic collapse, soaring unemployment, evaporating pensions, and the prospect of years of austerity imposed on us to pay off private bankers’ gambling debts half as seriously as we took sport, then we’d have a revolution more or less the second Tuesday of every month.