IBT Staff Reporter

Britain's Barclays is in talks with the governments of China and Singapore to raise 10 billion pounds ($20.6 billion) to help fund its planned purchase of Dutch bank ABN AMRO, the BBC reported on Monday.

Driving through the Lower Rio Grande Valley in southern Texas, it is clear that whatever labor is being done on a farm -- be it driving a tractor or weeding a field -- Latinos are doing it.

Officials in a rural valley in British Columbia hope that keeping out cellphones will help attract residents and tourists who want to escape to the quiet of nature.

The seventh and final Harry Potter book flew off the shelves on Saturday as fans the world over snapped up copies to discover the fate of the boy wizard and his Hogwarts pals.

One in four Americans think China will beat the United States in the next decade as the world leader in innovation, according to a survey released on Sunday by Zogby International.

U.S.-based fund manager Harris Associates has built a $1 billion stake in troubled Swiss investment bank UBS, the Sunday Times said in an unsourced report.

British sandwich chain Pret A Manger is considering ditching flotation plans and taking advantage of interest from several competing private equity firms, the Financial Mail reported on Sunday.

David Schlesinger and Simon Webb OPEC is concerned about the potential impact of the near-record price of oil on the world's economy but has seen little sign that growth has been hit by higher energy costs, the group's president said on Sunday.

Castleberry's Food Co. said late on Saturday it voluntarily expanded a recall of hot dog chili sauce and canned meat products originally announced on July 18 due to a risk of botulinum toxin, a bacterium that can cause botulism.

Internet entrepreneur Brad Greenspan outlined a new proposal on Friday to keep Dow Jones & Co Inc out of Rupert Murdoch's hands, saying his plan could help boost the stock price to above $100.

Finance and travel price comparison Web site Moneysupermarket.com has paid a competitor almost 4 million pounds to settle a dispute over intellectual property, sources familiar with the situation told Reuters.

The seventh and final Harry Potter book flew off the shelves on Saturday as fans the world over poured into stores or waited for the first post to discover the fate of the boy wizard.

Barclays would make a better merger candidate with ABN AMRO than a bid by a group led by Royal Bank of Scotland aimed at breaking up the Dutch bank, a Dutch newspaper quoted ABN's chief executive as saying on Saturday.

Google Inc said on Friday it would take part in a major auction of wireless spectrum airwaves, meeting a minimum required bid of $4.6 billion, if U.S. regulators added a sale condition that Google said would promote an open wireless market.

U.S. lenders facing losses are abandoning the popular but risky loans in favor of safer opportunities.

Big Pharma finds it's tough to get products past clinical trials, regulators and in wide use.

Facing complaints about soaring costs, U.S. health insurers want health reform but not less profits.

Executives at Caterpillar Inc., the U.S. heavy equipment maker whose disappointing earnings dragged Wall Street into the red on Friday, said internal company factors -- as much as broader economic headwinds -- were to blame for the company's bad quarter.

The Redstones, the family that controls Viacom Inc. and CBS Corp., have taken their private squabble public in a battle that throws into question succession plans for the global media company.

Vodafone Group Plc said on Thursday it was concerned that the current model of iPhone mobile phones -- Apple Inc's latest killer gadget -- did not operate on fast 3G networks.

Home sales and a report on economic growth may help investors decide if they want to keep riding a bull market in stocks, while a torrent of quarterly earnings reports will no doubt cause some anxious moments. A sharp drop in shares of equipment-maker Caterpillar Inc. on Friday showed just how badly a stock can be hurt when there is an earnings shortfall.

U.S. stocks tumbled on Friday, battered by disappointing results from such bellwethers as Caterpillar and Google, and more signals that fallout from the risky subprime mortgage market may spread.

A U.S. appeals court on Friday said Qualcomm Inc. was premature in appealing an order by a federal trade agency that banned imports of some cellular telephones containing Qualcomm chips.

The dollar fell to a record low against the euro on Friday and was on track for its sixth straight weekly decline, weighed down by fears that losses in risky mortgage debt would hurt consumers and slow U.S. growth.

SanDisk Corp. (Nasdaq: SNDK) reported a lower quarterly profit late Thursday, but a higher gross margin projection sent the stock up nearly 4 percent in Friday trading.

Shares of Apple Inc. rose on Friday after Piper Jaffray analyst Gene Munster raised his price target on the company to $205 per share from $160.

The social networking site Facebook said late Thursday that it acquired Parakey, a startup formed by the co-founders of Mozilla Firefox.

After six months of microprocessor revenue market-share losses, Advanced Micro Devices Inc. (NYSE: AMD) managed to stabilize its share in this year’s second quarter, while Intel Corp. dipped slightly, according to preliminary results from researcher iSuppli.

In the Vermont town of Springfield nestled in a mountain valley, a banner decorated with images of pink doughnuts is festooned across Main Street, welcoming visitors to the 'Home of the Simpsons.'