M&S says it has stopped placing orders with Viva Global for 'commercial' reasons, but denies workers suffered intimidation

Workers at an Indian factory used by Marks & Spencer claim they have been beaten up while protesting about poor working conditions.

The Viva Global factory in Gurgaon, on the outskirts of Delhi, was exposed last month by an Observer investigation for paying workers as little as 26p an hour and forcing them to work excessive overtime.

Relations between workers and management have since deteriorated to the extent that one worker and union leader filed a complaint with police claiming he had been kidnapped and beaten up. Others have also claimed to have suffered mistreatment while protesting about working conditions.

M&S says it has now dropped the company for "commercial" reasons, but has remained in contact attempting to resolve the disputes. It denies that workers have suffered intimidation.

The Observer investigation focused on two factories in Gurgaon, one used by M&S and the other by Gap and Next, and found staff working up to 16 hours a day. All the retailers launched inquiries into the abuses and pledged to end excessive overtime.

M&S said it had found examples of excessive overtime being worked earlier in the year, but it had tackled the problem. Its own audits also flagged up other problems, which it described as "high-risk issues in documentation and conditions". These are understood to include the provision of water and toilet facilities for workers.

Since the publication of the investigation, there have been a number of reports of clashes between workers and management. British campaign group Labour Behind the Label spoke to workers and claims that 16 women were hurt in clashes outside the gates.

In a statement the group said that the clashes followed "several months of campaigning by the Garment and Allied Workers Union to get improvements in conditions at Viva Global. Workers complained of excessive and forced overtime, low wages, a lack of water to drink and in the toilets".

In a statement, M&S said it had conducted its own investigation into the allegations and could find no evidence to substantiate the claims being made against Viva Global.

A spokesman said: "M&S no longer sources from Viva Global. For commercial reasons only, we have not placed any orders with this factory since May and have no pending orders. All M&S production ended in August."

The violence in Maputo is just the latest manifestation of the crippling shortcomings of the global economy

It has been a summer of record temperatures – Japan had its hottest summer on record, as did South Florida and New York. Meanwhile, Pakistan and Niger are flooded and the eastern US is mopping up after hurricane Earl. None of these individual events can definitively be attributed to global warming. But to see how climate change will play out in the 21st century, you needn't look to the Met Office. Look, instead, to the deaths and burning tyres in Mozambique's "food riots" to see what happens when extreme natural phenomena interact with our unjust economic systems.

The immediate causes of the protests in Mozambique's capital, Maputo, and Chimoio about 500 miles north, are a 30% price increase for bread, compounding a recent double-digit increase for water and energy. When nearly three-quarters of the household budget is spent on food, that's a hike few Mozambicans can afford.

Deeper reasons for Mozambique's price hike can be found a continent away. Wheat prices have soared on global markets over the summer in large part because Russia, the world's third largest exporter, has suffered catastrophic fires in its main production areas. These blazes, in turn, find their origin both in poor firefighting infrastructure and Russia's worst heatwave in over a century. On Thursday, Vladimir Putin extended an export ban in response to a new wave of wildfires in its grain belt, sending further signals to the markets that Russian wheat wouldn't be available outside the country. With Mozambique importing over 60% of the wheat its people needs, the country has been held hostage by international markets.

This may sound familiar. In 2008, the prices of oil, wheat, corn and rice peaked on international markets – corn prices almost tripled between 2005-2008. In the process, dozens of food-importing countries experienced food riots.

Behind the 2008 protests were, first, natural events that looked like an excerpt from the meteorological section of the Book of Revelation – drought in Australia, crop disease in central Asia, floods in south-east Asia. These were compounded by the social systems through which their effects were felt. Oil prices were sky-high, which meant higher transport costs and fossil fuel-based fertiliser prices. Biofuel policy, particularly in the US, shifted land and crops from food into ethanol production, diverting food from stomachs to fuel tanks. Longer term trends in population growth and meat consumption in developing countries also added to the stress. Financial speculators piled into food commodities, driving prices yet further beyond the reach of the poor. Finally, some retailers used the opportunity to raise prices still further, and while commodity prices have fallen back to pre-crisis levels, most of us have yet to see the savings.

Is this 2008 all over again? The weather has gone wild, meat prices have hit a 20-year high, groceries are being looted and heads of state are urging calm. The view from commodities desks, however, is that we're not in quite as dire straits as two years ago. Fuel is relatively cheap and grain stores well stocked. We're on track for the third-highest wheat crop ever, according to the Food and Agriculture Organisation of the United Nations (FAO). While all this is true, it misses the point: for most hungry people, 2008 isn't over. The events of 2007-2008 tipped more than 100 million into hunger and the global recession has meant that they have stayed there. In 2006, the number of  undernourished people was 854 million. In 2009, it was 1.02 billion – the highest level since records began. The hardest hit by these price rises, in the US and around the world, were female-headed households.

Not only are the hungry still around, but food riots have continued. In India, double-digit food price inflation was met by violent street protests at the end of 2009. The price rises were, again, the result of both extreme and unpredictable monsoons in 2009 and an increasingly faulty social safety net to prevent hunger. There have been frequent public protests about the price of wheat in Egypt this year, and Serbia and Pakistan have seen protests too.

Although commodity prices fell after 2008, the food system's architecture has remained largely the same over the past two decades. Bill Clinton has offered several mea culpas for the international trade and development policies that spawned the food crisis. Earlier this year, he blamed himself for Haiti's vulnerability to price fluctuations. "I did that," he said in testimony to the US Senate. "I have to live every day with the consequences of the lost capacity to produce a rice crop in Haiti to feed those people, because of what I did. Nobody else." More generally, Clinton suggested in 2008 that "food is not a commodity like others… it is crazy for us to think we can develop a lot of these countries [by] treating food like it was a colour television set."

Yet global commodity speculators continue to treat food as if it were the same as television sets, with little end in sight to what the World Development Movement has called "gambling on hunger in financial markets". The recent US Wall Street Reform Act contained some measures that might curb these speculative activities, but their full scope has yet to be clarified. Europe doesn't have a mechanism to regulate these kinds of speculative trades at all. Agriculture in the global south is still subject to the "Washington consensus" model, driven by markets and with governments taking a back seat to the private sector. And the only reason biofuels aren't more prominent is that the oil they're designed to replace is currently cheap.

Clearly, neither grain speculation, nor forcing countries to rely on international markets for food, nor encouraging the use of agricultural resources for fuel instead of nourishment are natural phenomena. These are political decisions, taken and enforced not only by Bill Clinton, but legions of largely unaccountable international development professionals. The consequences of these decisions are ones with which people in the global south live everyday. Which brings us back to Mozambique.

Recall that Mozambique's street protests coincided not only with a rise in the price of bread, but with electricity and water price hikes too. In an interview with Portugal's Lusa news agency, Alice Mabota of the Mozambican League of Human Rights didn't use the term "food riots". In her words: "The government… can't understand or doesn't want to understand that this is a protest against the higher cost of living." The action on the streets isn't simply a protest about food, but a wider act of rebellion. Half of Mozambique's poor already suffer from acute malnutrition, according to the FAO. The extreme weather behind the grain fires in Russia transformed a political context in which citizens were increasingly angry and frustrated with their own governments.

Yesterday, I reached Diamantino Nhampossa, the co-ordinator of Mozambique's União Nacional de Camponeses (National Peasants Union of Mozambique). "These protests are going to end," he told me. "But they will always come back. This is the gift that the development model we are following has to offer." Like many Mozambicans, he knows full well which way the wind blows.

EU ministers edge closer to financial transaction levy amid signs that International Monetary Fund is softening opposition to 'Robin Hood tax'

European Union finance ministers will step up talks on raising extra money from banks this week amid signs that the International Monetary Fund is softening its opposition to a "Robin Hood tax" on financial transactions.

Treasury sources said the chancellor, George Osborne, was prepared to back a financial activities tax on bank profits and pay at the Brussels meeting provided it was universally introduced, but was wary of a broader Robin Hood tax. Campaigners said last night, however, that a leaked IMF report showed growing international backing for a broader tax and urged Osborne to look at the revenue-raising potential of a levy of transactions.

David Hillman, a Robin Hood Campaign spokesman, said: "The rug has been pulled from under critics who claim that a Robin Hood tax would damage the wider economy or is unworkable. The IMF, EC and Leading Group of 60 nations have all said it is feasible. The main losers would be those who make lots of money from socially useless trades but the winners would be millions of people at home and abroad pushed into poverty by the economic crisis or whose public services are under threat."

An IMF paper, Taxing Financial Transactions: Issues and Evidence, said securities transactions taxes (STT) existed in many countries with little evidence that they distorted markets. It argued that a small levy on transactions might help to dampen the "herding behaviour" encouraged by computer-program trading. "Unilateral STTs, even if levied on fairly narrow bases, are certainly feasible as witnessed by their use in numerous developed countries. The fact that major financial centers such as the UK, Switzerland, Hong Kong, Singapore, and South Africa levy forms of STTs indicates that such taxes do not automatically drive out financial activity to an unacceptable extent," it said.

The paper added: "The impact on financial markets from a low-rate (less than 5 basis points), broad-based STT would likely be fairly modest, beyond its reduction of very short-term trading."

In its letter to Osborne, the Robin Hood campaign said a financial activities tax could, if combined with other measures, raise as much as £20bn a year in the UK. "We hope that the Ecofin meeting will provide a platform for taking this forward at the European level. Ultimately, we believe that a financial transaction tax has the greatest potential to raise revenue from the financial sector, as it offers a robust, simple to implement and fair mechanism."

David Cameron's new advisory panel is full of corporate big shots. But didn't he promise he would fight against the influence of special interests?

Just four months into the coalition and a prime minister who pledged to "stand up to big business" is instead sitting down with it. A cabal of corporate types has been signed up to provide wise counsel to David Cameron.

We have former BP chief Lord Browne, newly installed as senior non-executive director on the Cabinet Office board – whatever that means. Then there's Topshop's top dog, Sir Philip Green, as efficiency tsar, and on Friday another five were named: BT and easyJet chairman Sir Mike Rake, vacuum cleaner mogul Sir James Dyson, advertising boss Sir Martin Sorrell, CBI president Helen Alexander and Sainsbury chief executive Justin King. They will be joined by another seven big names in the coming weeks, plus a new trade minister, when someone can be persuaded to swap the chauffeur-driven company transport for one of the austerity government's pool cars and an economy-class train ticket. Two captains of industry, a banker and a shopkeeper are understood to have been approached, but each has found the offer a tad underwhelming.

Ostensibly, they are all there to advise on where the axe will fall – but every one of them would fight tooth and nail to ensure it doesn't land anywhere near their business. One of BT's biggest customers is the government. How's that going to work in practice? So much for Cameron's pre-election spiel that he would fight against the influence of "special interests".

The new panel will take over from the old one recruited by Gordon Brown, which met infrequently and produced nothing of note. One of those on the previous committee confided that the entire procedure was a charade, but a good networking opportunity.

Interestingly, one of the few businessmen who went into politics, Archie Norman, hasn't been signed up. The fact is he found Westminster like wading through treacle.

Ocado shares are trading well below the float price but the online grocery business is getting crowded

Don't say you weren't warned. On 11 July we set out a catalogue of reasons why investing in Ocado at the ambitious price of 200p-275p might not be such a bright idea. The price had to be slashed to 180p to enable the float to happen. One month after their debut, the shares are changing hands at 157p, though that is a sight better than the thoroughly miserable 131p they touched at one stage.

Last week three of the eight banks whose job it was to float the business produced their own analysts' recommendations and target prices for would-be and existing investors.

The retail experts at HSBC have plumped for a target share price of 190p, while UBS reckons a fair value is just 167p – or 13p less than the eventual float price. Goldman Sachs is going for 200p – the very bottom of the range its investment banking flotation specialists first had in mind, before reality dawned. The potential the Goldman analysts have spotted is the growing market for online grocery sales together with Ocado's "proprietary centralised, semi-automated distribution and delivery network" – ie, picking goods from a big warehouse rather than from a network of stores.

There is, however, an alternative view, also outlined last week, by veteran retail analyst Geoff Ruddell of Morgan Stanley. He thinks the online grocery market will grow far less rapidly than others have assumed, that warehouse picking makes sense only if deliveries average more than £100 (only one in eight Ocado orders do) and that there is no way Ocado will retain its current 14% market share, let alone increase it. As a result his target price is a paltry 80p, which has doubtless prompted a fresh blast of steam to emanate from the ears of Ocado chief executive Tim Steiner. Steiner was hopping mad that investors weren't queuing up to pour cash into his business and still reckons they "don't get it".

Ruddell, though, makes a good point. From next year Waitrose will compete head-to-head with Ocado inside the key M25 region and next week Dalton Philips, the new boss at Morrisons, is expected to outline his own plans to start an online grocery service – using stores, not a warehouse – and probably offering a click-and-collect option for shoppers to send in an internet order and pick it up themselves.

Before that, however, we are set to hear from Steiner and his finance chief, Andrew Bracey, on their first public outing since the bungled flotation. On Tuesday they will deliver their first trading update as a listed company.

There should be no nasty surprises – but there is much work to do, and not just the spadework of building a new warehouse. Prior to the float Ocado had a reputation as an upmarket and reliable premium brand. It is a now a byword for a badly handled IPO.

In the run-up to the float, the information coming out of the Ocado camp was that the share offer was bound to be a huge success, that there were plenty of investors willing to dig deep for a piece of the action, and suggestions that journalists were trying to derail the entire process by expressing investors' doubts. It is to be hoped that Tuesday's update is a little more accurate.

What would really happen if the banking commission made multi-national banks split themselves up?

Stuart Gulliver, HSBC's head of investment banking and hot favourite to be its next chief executive, says he would like to be crystal clear. "Our preference is to remain headquartered in the UK," he told a conference last week. Terrific. Panic over. We look forward to having you here for many more decades.

Hold on. Gulliver is pledging nothing of the sort. He's worried the new banking commission might recommend that universal banks, such as HSBC, which span retail, commercial and investment banking, should be broken up. "That has significant implications, clearly, for where we may choose to headquarter our institution," he says.

That, to most ears, will sound like a straightforward threat to quit the UK if the government, which is the authority that matters, gets radical. Gulliver seems to be implying that if HSBC were ordered to break itself up in the interests of greater safety for UK taxpayers, the bank would seek to limit the effect of this by moving its head office abroad, presumably to Hong Kong, while leaving its UK retail bank as a standalone unit.

If so, it would be nice if, rather than performing verbal gymnastics, HSBC executives would spell things out. What would be the cost to the UK in terms of tax revenues? Would HSBC employ fewer people in the UK, or would this simply be moving the nameplate while London-based traders and corporate finance specialists carried on as before?

And, since Gulliver says there would be practical implications for big UK corporates with global operations, let's hear the details. Is it really true that costs to the customer would rise if HSBC's investment banking unit were separated from the retail and commercial divisions? That claim needs some support.

Let's hope the banking commission, which will soon set out the scope of its inquiry, demands clarity. At the moment, we are hearing dark mutterings from HSBC, Barclays and Standard Chartered about moving abroad. They are designed to frighten. But what, specifically, are we meant to be scared of? And is it any more scary than ignoring the "too big to fail" question? That really would be alarming.

Fancy catching up on some reading? Then don't choose easyJet's exit seats

Anyone who grieves over the parlous state of the nation's youth, unable to imagine the average British child as anything more than a large knife with a pair of ill-fitting trousers attached, must have been pleased to read about Francesca Rijks, the 12-year-old who took her violin on holiday so as to keep practising her scales.

Unfortunately, Francesca made the news only because Ryanair refused to let her take the instrument on board unless her father paid £190 for it to have its own seat. (Plus, of course, another £2.10 if the violin wanted a cup of tea.)

"Robbery with violins!" was the surprising headline in the Daily Mail, a newspaper not generally known for combining comedy with fierce anti-capitalism. Many might call the Ryanair policy a cheeky fleece, but actual theft? Any more of this radical vigour and the Observer will be out of business.

Anyway, the Rijks family transferred to easyJet, which accepted the violin as hand luggage. Harmen Rijks, the father, is now urging musicians to avoid Ryanair; one can't fail to smile at the marshalling of such a beautiful army. Hasta la victoria siempre, cellists! Flautists of the world, unite! (Then again, if Francesca Rijks sounds anything like I did on the violin aged 12, we had better hope for a silent protest.)

In the world of cut-price air travel, easyJet always seems to be the good guy. If Ryanair is the Simon Cowell of the line-up, easyJet is Cheryl Cole – all friendly and orange.

OR SO I THOUGHT. Thanks to the kindness of strangers, I am typing these words at home. If it were up to easyJet, I'd be slipping you furtive messages from a Portuguese jail.

Two Fridays ago, I clambered on to an easyJet flight from Gatwick to Faro, clutching my special £10 "speedy boarding" pass. My friend Barny wanted to sit in the emergency exit row for extra leg room. We settled down with our newspapers, considering it £20 well spent.

"I'll have those newspapers, please," said the stewardess. "There is no reading in the exit row."

"Sorry?" I squeaked.

"In these seats," said the stewardess, "your job is to remain alert in case of a problem. You can have the newspapers after take-off."

An involuntary image flashed through my mind. The wheels are lifting off the runway… there is a loud bang and the cabin fills with smoke… the passengers are screaming… the stewardess shouts for my aid… "Hold on a minute," I say. "Let me just finish Andrew Rawnsley."

"If the plane gets into trouble," I said, "I promise I will put down the newspaper."

"No, you must hand it over now," said the stewardess. "It is important to concentrate."

The plane starts to taxi… it leaves the ground and wham! A flock of geese takes out two engines. The plane veers dramatically downwards. We ditch into the sea. Children sob. Parents pray. The stewardess, rendered immobile by her own faulty seatbelt, cries for me to open the door and release the inflatable slide. "Just a sec," I say. "Five letters and it's a sort of tree… not beech… the third letter is a z…"

I sighed and handed over the paper. Twenty minutes of staring into space later, the plane finally started to move.

Now, I used to be frightened of flying. Take-off still makes me nervous, but this is abated by reading the paper. Without one, I was a little jumpy and clutched Barny's hand. A male steward sitting opposite looked across with narrowed eyes.

Half an hour before landing, he came up and said: "You must now move to the back of the plane."

"But why?" I said.

"You were nervous on take-off," said the steward. "In the event of an emergency, you would not be capable of helping."

"I'm fine now, I promise," I said. "And I concentrated hard on all the safety information."

"In an emergency," repeated the steward, "you would panic."

"In an emergency," I said, "we'd all panic. I'd be as motivated as anyone to get the door open. Anyway, there won't be an emergency, all that will happen is we'll be stuck at the back of the plane, having paid an extra 20 quid for seats where we weren't allowed to read. It's not fair."

"If you do not move to the back of the plane," said the steward, "the police will be waiting for you at Faro airport."

"I look forward to meeting them," I said. Barny put his head in his hands.

While the steward bustled off to get the requisite paperwork for my arrest, a sympathetic pair of women across the aisle offered to swap seats. We swapped and our weasel-faced little Hitler looked genuinely disappointed at the foiled incarceration. He consoled himself by immediately confiscating the women's magazines, lest an interesting recipe prevented them from noticing the plane explode. I was disappointed too: I felt ready to be imprisoned for my religious beliefs and I worship the god of logic.

What, after all, was the implication? Few passengers have had the formal training required for it to be worth our "concentrating" on the engine noises during take-off. And the cabin crew were also sitting in the exit row. JUST WHERE ARE THESE CHEAP AIRLINES MAKING THEIR SAVINGS?

I can't help coming away with the suspicion that we're all sunk in an easyJet emergency, but at least there'd be no extra charge for anyone playing "Nearer My God to Thee" on the way down.

Long live dozy men

Speaking of jumpiness, insomniacs beware! Researchers at Penn State College of Medicine appear to have found a correlation between male sleep patterns and life expectancy. Their specific finding, widely published around the world, is that men with chronic insomnia are four times more likely to die young than those with healthy sleep patterns.

There: that'll help you drop off tonight, won't it?

www.victoriacoren.com

Founder considers a £100m-plus bid for the underperforming book chain if HMV's turnaround plan fails

Tim Waterstone, the founder of the books chain that bears his name, is considering a £100m-plus bid to take the chain private if the parent company, HMV, fails to turn the business around by the new year.

Well-placed City sources say Waterstone is closely monitoring developments at the bookshops, where sales and profits have plunged under HMV's ownership.

HMV's chief executive, Simon Fox, is to update the City this week on trading at the group's operations as rebel shareholders push for a sale following the bungled opening of a new centralised distribution hub in Burton upon Trent.

Waterstone is ready to fire off a bid if Fox decides to sell, and has lined up funding from backers that include a London-based hedge fund.

HMV shareholders are pushing for a sale, although they are prepared to wait until after the all-important Christmas trading period before presenting their case to management.

Waterstone, who last week published his first novel in 10 years – In for a Penny, In for a Pound – founded Waterstone's in 1982, opening the first store in London's Old Brompton Road.

He sold the firm to WH Smith in the early 1990s, which in turn offloaded the company to HMV in 1998 for £300m. But in recent years, the business has floundered. Waterstone attempted to buy the firm back in 2006 for £280m, but withdrew his offer following a row over the terms of a deal.

Sources say Waterstone is still keen to regain control and that "it is unthinkable he wouldn't be in the running" if HMV decided to sell. Analysts say the value of Waterstone's is not reflected in the HMV stock price, which closed at 59p on Friday, valuing the entertainment group at about £255m.

"According to some calculations, Waterstone's doesn't feature at all in the parent company's market value," said one broker.

As reported in the Observer's sister paper, the Guardian, last week, shareholders will demand a sale of Waterstone's if a turnaround plan unveiled in March fails to reap returns.

Investors were rattled at Christmas when HMV disclosed that like-for-like sales at Waterstone's had slumped by nearly 9% during a period viewed as peak trading time.

After the collapse of Borders in the UK, Waterstone's is now Britain's last major specialist books chain, with a national presence of 300 shops. But the firm has been hit by fierce competition from internet retailers such as Amazon and Play, and supermarkets.

New devices like the Kindle e-reader have raised concern about the long-term viability of high-street bookshops. But Tim Waterstone is understood to believe that rumours of the death of the bookshop have been greatly exaggerated.

Former colleagues of Waterstone say he has been troubled by poor morale at the chain, but is supportive of its new managing director, Dominic Myers, who took over when Gerry Johnson departed earlier this year.

An HMV spokesman said: "We have a clear strategy for the turnaround of Waterstone's, focused on reinforcing our credentials as a range bookseller and helping stores reflect the local interest of their customers. Although we are only a few months in with this strategy, we are making very good progress and our initiatives have been very well received by the wider book industry." Insiders said there was no intention to sell at present.

Despite problems at Waterstone's, HMV revealed last month that group profits had risen by more than 12% after a strong showing from its core music and entertainment business. Fox said then that HMV was "on track" to transform the company into a broad-based entertainment brand after a move into live music and ticketing. The idea is to be less dependent on CD and DVD sales.

Health tourists travel the world and spend thousands, but their hopes of being cured are likely to be dashed

For the past decade stem cells have sparked huge excitement among scientists, dramatic media coverage about breakthroughs that could mean a cure for some of the nastiest diseases, and hope – sometimes desperate – among patients that the reality will match the hype. That has fuelled a booming trade in stem cell tourism – people heading to clinics abroad and forking out large sums for what are called stem cell treatments but which are unlikely to work and possibly do harm.

It is, as some of the UK's leading stem cells experts warned last week, a world of unproven therapies, patient optimism and predatory clinicians. Despite the lack of reliable evidence underpinning the treatments being offered, the number of people resorting to stem cell tourism is growing. Experts voiced their fears and frustrations after finding that many patients, often desperately ill, were asking their advice on whether to travel overseas.

"I've made some very strong comments which could potentially land me in court, but people still go to these clinics," said Professor Peter Coffey, director of the London Project to Cure Blindness at University College London. There are now several hundred clinics around the world which claim to have turned the potential of stem cells into effective treatments. They lure those suffering from diabetes, multiple sclerosis, heart failure, Parkinson's disease, autism, HIV, eye problems, spinal cord injuries and much else besides.

Several thousand people from around the world so far are estimated to have spent up to £20,000 or more in such places. Yet while stem cells could transform medicine, there is as yet scant actual proof of their efficacy. But still the tourists come.

The fact that scientists believe it is likely to be 15 to 20 years before the continuing worldwide flurry of trials and tests results in reliable treatments has not stopped clinics from offering exactly that already. Strong regulation means there are no such places in the UK or America. But the experts did single out the XCell Centre in Düsseldorf, Germany, and Beike Technology, which runs one in Shenzhen in China.

In 2008 the Multiple Sclerosis Society warned sufferers not to be taken in by Integrated BioSciences, a company registered in the Turks & Caicos Islands, which had offices in the Seychelles, Persian Gulf and Oxford, because there was no scientific backing for the claim that stem cells could cure the condition.

People's willingness to trust their savings and their health to such clinics recently prompted the International Society for Stem Cell Research to launch a website to educate patients about the risks involved. Anyone thinking about going would be well advised to check it out and think again.

IT may not bear thinking about with the summer holidays only just over… but it will soon be time to switch on the heating.

Q I have money to ­invest but want to ensure any growth will not generate a ­potential inheritance tax (IHT) charge in the future. It is also ­important I retain access to the capital.

PEOPLE who paid an average £216,800 for a house when prices peaked in 2007 could face four more years of negative equity.

FRAUDULENT claims and accidents involving uninsured drivers add an average of £50 to every policy, Co-operative ­Insurance research shows.

Sotheby’s the auctioneers is holding its first-ever sale dedicated entirely to ­antique chimney pieces and fire grates.

I have a pension that is due to mature, as I set it up to start paying out when I reached 60. I cannot now afford to retire at 60, what are my options?

Shopping around for a cheaper quote saves drivers an average of £58, according to Which?.

record numbers of Brits have started small, part-time businesses in a bid to earn extra cash during the economic downturn.

Daily Mirror reader updates us on her baby gifts company.

Neville Bain, the chairman at the Institute of Directors (IoD), has hit out at City regulation that forces board members of all FTSE 350 companies to face re-election every year.

The £250m auction of the Wagamama noodle chain will kick off next week when potential bidders receive information on the sale of the business.

China's biggest sovereign wealth fund is in talks to buy a stake in one of London's tallest skyscrapers being developed by Britain's largest property company.

The UK's biggest union will start talks this week with the 3,500 Royal Bank of Scotland staff about to lose their jobs to assess what action to take next in what it describes as a "horror story".

A surge in bank lending. A speculative rush to buy houses – not just second properties, but third or fourth homes. Soaring property prices. Banks hiding the loans off their balance sheets. Surely it could not be happening again? And not so soon? But it is – in China.

There's a new and noisy book just out which you must read to discover why the young and the old are shouting at each other over the supper table in a way I've not heard since those great divides over drugs'n'rock'n'roll or even the Iraq invasion.

First London, the investment bank that attracted attention last year for its links to a convicted fraudster and its role in the short-lived takeover of Notts County Football Club, has gone into administration.

Patience is a virtue in so many aspects of human endeavour, so how do you harness it to create more stable and better-functioning financial markets?

Dr Colin Chartres, the director general of the International Water Management Institute and one of the world's leading water experts, will warn this week that increasingly erratic rainfall related to climate change poses a huge threat to the world's economic growth and food security.