Gen Stanley McChrystal

The former US special operations commander assumes command this week of nearly 90,000 US and Nato troops in Afghanistan with responsibility for President Obama’s most crucial foreign policy mission: winning the war against the Taleban. General McChrystal’s background includes a long stint in Iraq leading the military’s hunt for terrorist leaders. After his predecessor in Afghanistan, General David McKiernan, was sacked earlier this year, General McChrsytal told the US Senate during his confirmation hearing that he wanted to bring a “classic counter-insurgency strategy” to the war. He said this week that success hinges on lowering civilian casualties. US airstrikes from drones have caused hundreds of civilian deaths, inflaming anti-US sentiment.

Anil Ambani

The Indian mobile phone tycoon, will confirm his seat at Hollywood’s top table when he finalises a deal to fund Steven Spielberg’s DreamWorks studio with about $800 million. Mr Ambani, who is India’s third- richest man with an estimated $12.5 billion fortune, is suing his elder brother, Mukesh Ambani, India’s richest man, for 100 billion rupees in a libel suit. The sibling oligarchs fell out in 2002 after the death of their father, who founded Reliance, an industrial empire that stretched from petrochemicals to telecoms.

Guido Westerwelle

The gay leader of Germany’s pro-business Free Democrats, looks set to be a winner in the country’s election season after winning 11 per cent of the vote in the European elections — easily enough to compensate for losses suffered by the Christian Democrats of Angela Merkel, the Chancellor. It now looks a racing certainty that the next government will be a centre-right administration with Ms Merkel staying as Chancellor and Mr Westerwelle, who can out-talk just about everyone in parliament, becoming foreign minister.

Yuriko Koike

The 57-year old former business news anchorwoman, may be one of the ruling Liberal Democratic Party’s few hopes of salvation in the coming election — probably in early September.

Ms Koike’s importance to the poll — and the reason the LDP needs her so badly — is her clear association with Junichiro Koizumi, the popular, maverick Prime Minister who resigned in 2006, but whose reformist ghost still haunts parts of the LDP. If Japanese voters want reform, Koike may be one of the few big figures in the LDP they trust to deliver it.

Mauricio Funes

The inauguration of Mr Funes as El Salvador’s President in May marked the end of a journey from jungle camps to the seat of power for the former guerrilla movement Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front (FMLN). After a campaign that reopened the wounds of the country’s brutal 12-year civil war, Mr Funes’s victory ended 20 years of right-wing rule with promises of pro-poor social and economic policies and a crackdown on corruption. His presidency could also have wider regional consequences. Will he, as opponents claim, bring Cuban-style communism to El Salvador and turn the country into a satellite of Hugo Chávez's Venezuela? Or will this former TV journalist turn out to be the pro-market US-friendly moderate that he claims?

THE IN-TRAY

G8 summit

The G8 summit from July 8-10 will offer Silvio Berlusconi a chance to restore his international standing after recent scandals over his private life. The Italian Prime Minister has said that he hopes to use the summit to “define common ethical and legal standards and new rules governing the transparency, propriety and integrity of international economic and financial activity at this time of global economic difficulty”.

UN General Assembly

This year’s session, under Libyan presidency, is likely to be dominated behind the scenes by Iran’s nuclear programme. Barack Obama wants to know by the year’s end if progress is possible. But diplomats say that the real deadline is the gathering of world leaders at the UN in late September. China and Russia will have to decide if they can back the kind of sanctions — such as a ban on imported petroleum products — that could force Iran to back down.

Arms control

American and Russian negotiators are bargaining over a replacement for the 1991 START 1 treaty to cut nuclear weapons to be agreed by the time Barack Obama meets Dmitri Medvedev in Moscow on July 6. The signs are that stockpiles will be limited to 1,500 warheads each. However a major sticking point is the dispute over US plans to site a missile defence shield in Eastern Europe, which the Kremlin insists must be scrapped.

Sweden

As Sweden takes over the European Union presidency it finds itself dangerously exposed to economic meltdown in Latvia, Estonia and Lithuania. Swedish banks helped to fuel the construction bubble across the region, making loans equivalent to 20 per cent of the Baltic states’ GDP on the assumption that their Eastern neighbours would grow and grow. The European Central Bank has given a loan to the Swedish central bank to stave off a regional collapse. But will it be enough?

China

China and the US launch their strategic and economic dialogue in Washington. Military-to-military exchanges are back on track, but talk of a G2 involving China and the US is premature. Beijing is not ready for such a relationship with a country still often seen as a rival and too many differences still irritate — among them political reform and military expansion. But they are clearly closer over North Korea, and China’s huge holdings of US Treasuries mean their economies are increasingly interdependent.