USA and Canada

As it reported pre-tax profits of £98.5 million to 31 October, 2013, a rise from the £96.9 million it recorded at the same time in 2012, the company was keen to emphasis the growth potential of its megabus service throughout the UK, mainland Europe and the US.

Stagecoach chief executive, Martin Griffiths, commented: "We see significant potential to expand our presence in the US, where we already operate in 40 states. We are also considering opportunities to roll-out our premium day and overnight services to new locations."

A family owned and run business, Industrias Correagua was founded almost 60 years ago by one Juan Amado. From its inception the main activities of the company included the fabrication of steel products such as roofing material, gas tanks, and speciality projects such as silos, large tanks, flagpoles and bridges, as well as construction. What has remained consistent over the last six decades is the company’s on-going desire to be innovative, utilise new technologies, and identify and harness the potential of new and emerging products.

Located in the Canadian Shield of northern Saskatchewan and Alberta, Canada, the Athabasca Basin is the world’s leading source of high grade uranium and currently supplies approximately 20 percent of all that used across the planet. Covering some 100,000 square kilometres of Saskatchewan, and a small portion of Alberta, the surface of the basin consists of sandstone sediment varying from 100 to 1,000 metres in depth. It is at the base of this sandstone that uranium ore has been mostly found since it was first discovered in the region in the 1940s.

JLR has been in talks with authorities in Rio de Janeiro for many months, but is now able to state that it will invest some 750 million reais into the factory, which it expects to begin production in 2016. The move is a further boost to the company’s efforts to strengthen in emerging economies such as China, where it is also building a plant at Changshu as part of a joint venture with the Chery Automobile Company.

The situation for obtaining gasoline, diesel oil and other oil products in Costa Rica is not ideal just at present. Following an accident in 2011 it was decided that the country’s refinery at Moin, part of the Caribbean, or east coast, port of Limón, was too expensive to run, and since then the country has relied entirely on imported petroleum products.

Topsy, one of only a handful of firms that has access to Twitter’s entire data stream, specialises in using data from the social media site to track customer sentiment. It has recently created a searchable database of all tweets sent - more than 400 billion - since Twitter's launch.

Apple did not say how much it paid for the firm, but it has been suggested the figure comes in at around $200 million.

In what was seen as the last hurdle the two firms needed to clear for the merger to proceed, a US federal bankruptcy judge ruled in favour of the plan to bring the companies together. American Airways says it now expects the deal to be completed by 9 December.

The value of the virtual currency has been rapidly rising since a US Senate committee hearing earlier in November which described it as a “legitimate financial service”.

It was almost 350 years ago that the seeds of Canada’s mining sector were sown with the discovery of coal on Cape Breton Island, Nova Scotia. Three and a half centuries on and there are more than 800 mines across the country providing direct employment for more than 363,000 workers.

Today Canada ranks first in the world for the production of potash and uranium, and among the top five for the production of nickel and diamonds, with its mining industry contributing approximately five percent of its gross domestic product.