IBT Staff Reporter

The U.S. House of Representatives on Thursday approved tripling U.S. aid to Pakistan to about $1.5 billion a year for each of the next five years in a key part of a strategy to combat extremism with economic and social development.

A prominent anti-Taliban Muslim cleric who condemned suicide bombings was killed on Friday in a suicide attack in the Pakistani city of Lahore, police said.

NATO ministers have backed a U.S. shake-up of military command in Afghanistan based on a model used in Iraq, as well as plans to step up training of Afghan security forces, a NATO spokesman said on Friday.

U.S. financial aid to carmakers and a number of stimulus packages adopted by other countries to fight the economic slowdown could distort global trade, a confidential European Commission report said.

Social media company Twitter is struggling to craft a profitable business model, but the Web-based service has helped Dell Inc chalk up millions of dollars in sales.

North Korea is unlikely to respond militarily to planned U.N. sanctions for its nuclear test, but the possibility should not be completely dismissed, U.S. Defence Secretary Robert Gates said.

General Motors is close to selling loss-making Swedish unit Saab after tiny supercar maker Koenigsegg agreed to ride to the rescue, a source familiar with the talks told Reuters.

The leading moderate candidate in Iran's presidential election said some of his representatives had been denied access to polling stations on Friday to monitor the vote, the ILNA news agency reported.

Wall Street was set to open lower on Friday as commodity prices fell and investors looked ahead to key consumer confidence data for insight into the prospects for the recession easing.

Air France flight 447 that crashed into the Atlantic on June 1 may have broken apart before crashing according to reports from Brazilian newspaper, O Estado de Sao Paulo.

Stock index futures extended losses on Friday, signaling a lower Wall Street open, as crude oil hovered near session lows and gold retreated amid a rise in the U.S. dollar.

Bond giant Pacific Investment Management Co, billionaire Gerald J. Ford and a unit of money manager Legg Mason Inc are eyeing ways to buy up banks' toxic loans, the New York Post said.

A rejuvenated model range led by its new Golf VI hatchback helped Volkswagen outperform its competitors in May and grab more share of the world's car market, Europe's largest automaker said on Friday. Led by massive gains in Germany and China -- its two biggest markets -- group vehicle sales rose over last year's comparable month for the first time in 2009, gaining 1.5 percent t...

A branch of the Native American Kumeyaay Nation in southeastern California announced on Thursday signing an agreement with a wind energy developer Invenergy and San Diego Gas & Electric (SDG&E) to place 160 megawatts of wind turbines on its land.

The U.S. energy bill may not pass until next year, which could also delay an agreement to extend the Kyoto Protocol on cutting global greenhouse gas emissions until 2010, experts said on Thursday.

Capstone Turbine Corp said one of its microturbine systems has been successfully integrated into a Ford Motor vehicle in the U.K., sending shares soaring 82 percent.

Fifty miles east of Los Angeles, a small and inconspicuous facility is using something most of us would rather not think about -- household sewage -- to create a resource we can't live without -- fuel.

Wall Street was set to open lower on Friday as commodity prices eased and investors looked ahead to key consumer confidence data for insight into prospects for the recession easing.

Dutch Philips Electronics may have to take additional measures in the next months to keep the company healthy, its chief executive told workers in an internal magazine.

China will limit the number of messages that a mobile number can send per day to battle rampant spam messages clogging cell phones, state media said on Friday.

Iranians streamed to polling stations on Friday in a hotly contested election and a senior ally of Mirhossein Mousavi said the moderate candidate was on track to defeat hardline President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

Stock index futures pointed to a lower open on Friday as commodity prices eased and investors looked ahead to key consumer confidence data.

Top PC names such as Dell and Hewlett-Packard could lose out in a spat over China's latest move to censor the Web, risking the wrath of U.S. and European consumers if they go along or losing ground in the world's No.2 PC market if they refuse.

World stocks were flat on Friday ahead of a G8 meeting as investors paused for breath to discern further signs of economic recovery while euro zone government bond prices rose after a successful 30-year U.S. bond auction soothed worries over the rising U.S. budget deficit.

Stock index futures pointed to a mixed open on Wall Street on Friday, with futures for the S&P 500 up 0.2 percent, Dow Jones futures up 0.1 percent and Nasdaq 100 futures down 0.3 percent by 6:00 a.m. ET.

BlackRock has agreed to buy Barclays Global Investors to create the world's biggest asset manager, in a $13.5 billion deal that British bank Barclays hopes will put to rest concerns about its capital.

A Chinese lawyer has demanded a public hearing to reconsider a government demand that all new personal computers carry Internet filtering software, adding to uproar over a plan critics say is ineffective and intrusive.

BlackRock Inc. said on Thursday it will buy British bank Barclays Plc's investment arm BGI for $13.5 billion in a blockbuster deal that will create the world's biggest asset manager.

British bank Barclays confirmed on Friday that it had agreed to sell its BGI investment arm to U.S. firm BlackRock for $13.5 billion, creating the world's biggest asset manager.