As Homeserve faces its own emergency and hangs up its telephones on new business, Chiara Cavaglieri looks at your policy options for home-breakdown insurance

They are the epitome of unfairness and injustice, leaving ordinary citizens to foot the bill for multinational corporations

A wonderfully malicious piece of gossip doing the rounds at Westminster. Word is that Education Secretary Michael Gove's decision to reintroduce the private finance initiative so as to fund £2bn of schools came about because he finally understood how the system worked. Gove had been so anti-PFI because he thought that the private company took ownership of the school after its 25- to 35-year contract had ended. So it's a Diary dunce's hat for the Rick Moranis lookalike.

General Electric notched a better-than-expected 22 per cent rise in earnings, helped by strong demand for jet engines as well as equipment used in oil and natural gas production.

Rolls-Royce has settled a legal row over patent rights on commercial jets with US rival Pratt & Whitney (P&W), in a case that had threatened to delay deliveries of Boeing's new 787 passenger aircraft.

Small companies across the UK are planning to invest nearly £75bn in their businesses over the coming 12 months, according to a survey of small and medium-sized businesses.

If Henry Ford were alive today, he would, one imagines, be both proud and more than a littleastonished at the evolution of moving assembly lines. They've become longer and vastly more complex than the ones built to churn out his Model Ts back in the early years of the last century. The production line at BMW's factory in Cowley, near Oxford, for instance, coughs out different kinds of Mini one after another. Every car boasts custom fittings, so one with black leather seats might be followed by one with an interior upholstered in black and brown cloth and leather.

'Near-prime' borrowers are being turned down for the tiniest of reasons by cherry-picking lenders – but there are other options, writes Sarah Davidson

Former Fortune 500 doyenne Marianne Abib-Pech begins a new fortnightly column on the new challenge in her life - guiding young entrepreneurs from rags to riches

A High Court judgment yesterday opened the way for General Electric (GE) to face a multimillion-pound compensation claim over the collapsed German airliner Blue Wings.

Workers used a milky white dye today as they frantically tried to trace the path of highly radioactive water gushing near Japan's tsunami-damaged nuclear plant and seeping into the ocean.

The radioactive core in one reactor at Fukushima's beleaguered nuclear power plant appeared to have melted through the bottom of its containment vessel, an expert warned yesterday, sparking fears that workers would not be able to save the reactor and that radioactive gases could soon be released into the atmosphere.

The unfolding crisis at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant has put a harsh spotlight on General Electric, the giant US conglomerate which built parts of the plant and which had been hoping to benefit from a renaissance in nuclear power that now looks to be on hold.

Surging radiation levels forced Japan to order emergency workers to temporarily withdraw from its crippled nuclear plant today, losing time in a desperate operation to cool the overheating reactors — the most urgent crisis from last week's devastating earthquake and tsunami.