"Happy, happy, happy birth- day . . . right wing!" A low laugh and an explanation follow the jingle being broadcast across the United States: today is the birthday of Jack Abramoff, the Washington lobbyist at the centre of a corruption scandal engulfing some of the nation's top Republicans.

Evelyn Davis, a 70-something who chides CEOs as easily as if they were her grandchildren, put in a typical performance recently at IBM's shareholder meeting.

"When are you going to start building revenues?" the shareholder activist asked the chairman of the world's No. 1 computer company, Louis Gerstner. "Instead of Big Blue, it has been a little bit of pale blue recently," the corporate gadfly said, playing on the computer giant's nickname.

Britain's gardening business is in full-bloom. Nothing illustrates the point better than the Chelsea Flower Show, an extravagant yearly marriage held between green-thumbed aristocracy and mass consumerism. Tens of thousands, including Britain's Queen Elizabeth, will crowd exhibits showcasing both trendsetting and traditional horticultural happenings this week.

Spiralling violence in Iraq has driven costs sky high for foreign firms working on the billions of dollars in reconstruction contracts, with the price of insuring some workers doubling in the past week.

Contractors in Iraq are spending more than half their total operating costs insuring and protecting staff who have become targets of insurgents and prey to kidnappers, according to insurance giant Aon.

Britain may be standing beside the United States in the battle to drive Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq, but the spoils of war promise to be thin for British companies - and thinner for European rivals. U.S. guidelines restrict the bulk of contracts to reconstruct Iraq's damaged infrastructure to American companies, prompting British construction and engineering firms to complain that they are being left out in the cold.

Airlines are dragging their feet in co-operating with a study on whether so-called economy class syndrome, which causes potentially deadly blood clots, is linked to flying, a leading researcher told Reuters on Wednesday.

One of the scientists in charge of the investigation conducted by the World team's research. "The airlines' defensive reaction is counterproductive," the scientist, Frits Rosendaal, said. An international airline lobby group denied the accusation.

GE brings good things to life, according to a classic ad slogan that made the world's biggest company a household name. Now General Electric is going for a fresh image as it adjusts to life without legendary boss Jack Welch and negotiates a wave of criticism about its complex finances.

The conglomerate used the Winter Olympics - televised by its NBC unit - as a showcase for a new corporate image campaign that positions GE as "a company of ideas" - a company that does a lot more than make light bulbs and washing machines.

A Citigroup Inc. unit deliberately targeted low-income, uneducated borrowers for loans and insurance they did not need or understand, a former employee alleged in a government lawsuit. The financial services giant has consistently denied such practices. The charges, filed in an affidavit by part-time branch assistant manager Gail Kubiniec of Citigroup unit CitiFinancial, are part of the lawsuit filed by the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) against Associates First Capital Corp., a consumer lending unit that is part of CitiFinancial. The suit alleges predatory lending and deceptive marketing.

Kemal is a young Bosnian, tough with greased-back hair. During class he taps his pen against a magazine and then throws his hands behind his head. Kemal often sighs loudly when others struggle over nouns like "bedroom" and "Brooklyn", or skip articles like "the" and the seemingly unimportant verb "is".

Yet his voice quavers when it is his turn to complete a sentence, his turn to wrap his mouth around a language that he did not grow up in. "Sorry, I so sorry," he says at every missed "is" and "the", every mispronounced "W" and "V".