"Are you looking for a job?" James Naughtie asked Dame Ann Leslie on Radio 4's Today, a note of panic in his voice. Now there's an idea. As one of the programme's guest editors, Leslie, the veteran foreign correspondent who famously went to war in a fur coat, arrived like a blast of cold air in a sticky sauna. You can imagine plenty of previous guests proffering feature ideas cobbled together by their agents, but not Leslie. She was first in the office, her sleeves rolled up and ready to kick some serious butt.

Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg is following in the footsteps of tech philanthropist Bill Gates, donating half a billion dollars of shares to charity.

Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg is following in the footsteps of tech philanthropist Bill Gates, donating half a billion dollars-worth of shares in the social network to charity.

Saudi investor’s £300m super-jumbo also has room for a concert hall, a garage for his Rolls and four luxury suites

Warren Buffett, the billionaire investor who favours a greater burden on the wealthy, yesterday called for a minimum tax on America's millionaires but proposed a higher threshold for increased taxes on the rich than the one put forward by the White House.

 "We have to do a much better job of teaching our daughters maths and science and encouraging them to be aggressive"

Air travel has come a long way since that momentous day on 17 December 1903 when Wilbur Wright successfully achieved something no one had accomplished, powered flight. Little did Wilbur and his younger brother Orville know that their invention would spawn an industry that would enable millions to not only fly 120ft (as the brothers did) but thousands of miles.

An entire Tuscan village – the hamlet of Pratariccia – has been put up for sale on eBay for €2.5m. But how does it compare to the other oddest items to grace the auction site?

Warren Buffett orders that paint company boss must be canned for taking staff to Bermuda

Rajat Gupta, a former board member at Goldman Sachs, has been convicted of illegally sharing bank secrets with a hedge fund friend, in a victory for prosecutors of insider dealing on Wall Street.

A recent survey conducted among Motley Fool users ahead of the Facebook listing revealed that investors with less than one year's investing experience were twice as likely to invest in the flotation of Facebook as investors with more than 20 years of know-how under their belt.