This is National Adoption Week, and it provides a test for David Cameron's slogan "the Big Society". As we report today, hundreds of children are stuck in temporary foster care because short-term financial pressures on local councils discourage them from paying voluntary agencies to arrange adoptions.

Millions of welfare claimants are set to have their benefits scrapped and replaced with a single "universal credit", it was reported today.

With spectacularly poor timing, senior officers of the Army and Royal Navy have chosen the week in which the 70th anniversary of the Battle of Britain is commemorated to suggest that the Royal Air Force should be abolished.

Outlook One announcement made by the coalition yesterday that should be universally welcomed – assuming it is to be taken at face value – is the promise to offer the victims of the Equitable Life scandal a better deal. Whatever one's views about the performance generally of the previous Labour administration, its failure to do the right thing by Equitable savers was shameful.

A recovering appetite among British and European investors boosted Aviva's performance over the first quarter of the year, with the insurer topping forecasts with a smaller-than-expected decline in sales.

Analysts have their fingers crossed ahead of tomorrow's quarterly update from Intercontinental Hotels Group, with the hospitality specialist expected to report improving trends in Asia and the US.

A consumer group made a super-complaint against ISA providers today, claiming that savers were losing out on up to £3 billion of interest because of the way the market operated.

For the first time since ISAs were introduced in 1999, the maximum amount of money that can be paid in is to rise automatically each year. The Chancellor had already announced an increase from 6 April in the amount that can be saved in an ISA each tax year from £7,200 to £10,200 – half of which can be held in cash– but his move to automatically uprate ISA thresholds by the rate of inflation came as a bit of a surprise.

Almost 40 years after the disappearance of Belfast man Joe Lynskey, republicans have finally admitted he was “executed and buried” by the IRA.

Shadow chancellor George Osborne today set out eight benchmarks against which voters would be able to judge a Tory government's success on the economy.