The White House abruptly announced that it had scuttled plans to hold the coming G8 economic summit in Chicago and would instead host world leaders at the presidential retreat at Camp David in Maryland's mountains north of Washington.

World leaders, tearing up a carefully prepared agenda for the annual Group of Eight summit, were to turn their attention to a growing crisis in the Middle East which highlighted the differences between them.

Leaders of the world’s major industrialised countries, hoping to regain control of a summit marred by a protester’s death in massive demonstrations, searched today for ways to extend help to poor nations.