IBT Staff Reporter

Young Australians, mostly males, resort to dangerous methods in order to lose some pounds.

Germany will aid Greece in defense of Europe's shared currency if Athens enforces austerity measures, Foreign Minister Guido Westerwelle said on Sunday, in a speech also calling for tighter EU budget rules.

Ford Motor Co is expected on Tuesday to post a first-quarter profit with North American production picking up amid a gradual recovery in U.S. auto industry sales overall.

Greece must agree to tough new austerity measures before it receives any financial aid from the European Union and failure to do so would endanger such support, German Finance Minister Wolfgang Schaeuble told a newspaper.

Four major Japanese electronics companies will standardize their core software platform for next-generation cellphones aimed at reducing costs and raising competitiveness, the Nikkei business daily reported on Sunday.

Israel will begin allowing people to bring Apple iPads into the country starting on Sunday, two weeks after customs began confiscating the tablet computers for fear they would interfere with other wireless devices.

Finance leaders scrambled to secure aid for debt-stricken Greece on Saturday and Canada cautioned that some European countries feared the 45 billion euros ($60 billion) under consideration was not enough.

Debt-ridden Japan Airlines is forecast to have posted a group operating loss of about 160 billion yen ($1.7 billion) for the financial year that ended in March, Japan's Sankei newspaper reported on Sunday.

The IMF and Argentina are talking about sending an IMF technical mission to the country to improve the quality of the government's economic data, a senior IMF official said on Saturday.

World Bank member countries reached a preliminary agreement on a 3.13 percent shift in voting power to give emerging and developing nations greater influence in the global institution.

Austria signed up to build part of Russia's South Stream gas pipeline on Saturday, and visiting Prime Minister Vladimir Putin scorned the EU's rival Nabucco project as futile.

Equity Investment management firm AXA Rosenberg LLC has found an error in its risk-modeling program that caused it to understate some common risks in its portfolio optimization system, according to a letter to investors posted on the company's website.

The Swiss bank UBS AG and the accounting firm Ernst & Young LLP have agreed to $250.5 million of settlements to resolve investor lawsuits over a fraud that nearly destroyed the hospital operator HealthSouth Corp.

DENVER - Offering 150,000-plus apps that have been downloaded more than 2 billion times, Apple's App Store is far and away the leading source of mobile applications driving today's mobile entertainment market.

Greece and top world finance officials raced to get rescue funds to the debt-stricken euro zone country but concern in Germany about the scale of the bailout threatened to slow down the process.

Countries must not be complacent about the state of the global economy, despite brighter signs of recovery, Japanese Finance Minister Naoto Kan on Saturday warned his counterparts at the International Monetary Fund.

Goldman Sachs Group Inc's top executive boasted in late 2007 about the money the investment bank was making from betting against risky mortgages, according to a collection of e-mails released by a Senate panel on Saturday.

Five senior executives at Goldman Sachs Group Inc sold company stock after the firm received notice of possible fraud charges, according to a report in the Wall Street Journal.

Goldman Sachs Group Inc officials boasted in late 2007 about the money the investment bank was making from betting against risky mortgages, according to a collection of e-mails released by a Senate panel on Saturday.

A bank levy to cover the cost of future bailouts is a flawed idea, a global banking group said on Saturday, calling instead for a global agreement for unwinding failing banks without resorting to taxpayer money.

Emerging-market economies should be given an increased say in global financial institutions at the cost of rich countries, Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner said on Saturday.

Debt-stricken Greece appealed to its European partners and the IMF for emergency loans on Friday, yielding to overwhelming market pressure to start the first financial rescue of a member of the euro zone.

President Barack Obama said on Saturday taxpayer-funded bailouts of the auto industry that he approved had paid off, in what amounted to a rejection of conservative arguments against such government help.

The further integration of Arabic language capabilities in internet and other technological architecture will grant millions access to the digital world, Microsoft and Google executives said.

Goldman Sachs Group Inc officials discussed making serious money in 2007 off the subprime crisis as mortgages were starting to falter in rapid numbers, according to a collection of e-mails released by a Senate panel on Saturday.

Advanced economies must make good on pledges to tighten regulation and curtail government debt or the fragile recovery could unravel, a top European official said on Saturday.

Toyota Motor Corp has agreed to recall a yet-undetermined number of vehicles sold in Brazil since 2008 due to floor mat problems, the latest in a string of safety problems the Japanese automaker faces globally, local newspapers reported on Saturday.

Inflationary expectations are on the rise in China even though inflation itself remains mild, a senior government researcher said on Saturday.

When Ric Hull first looked at launching Great Wall Motor pickup trucks in Australia last year, he considered rebranding them, worried their obvious Chinese origins would raise questions about their quality.