IBT Staff Reporter

The Shanghai Stock Exchange has approved the development of global exchange-traded funds by Chinese fund houses to track six overseas indexes including the Dow Jones industrial average , the Shanghai Securities News reported on Monday, citing Xu Ming, vice general manager of the exchange.

Japan is looking at guaranteeing about $7.8 billion in funding to Japan Airlines Corp , a government source said on Monday, easing concerns that the carrier could run out of funds and helping send its shares 8 percent higher.

U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said in an interview published on Sunday that he was optimistic the December 7-18 climate conference in the Danish capital would produce an agreement all member states would sign

A United Nations climate summit should lay the foundations for a global carbon market or UK business will suffer as firms move to countries with lower emissions targets, business lobby group CBI said on Monday.

Humanity faces a profound emergency and unless we combine to take decisive action, climate change will ravage our planet, a joint editorial published in newspapers in 45 countries said on Monday.

U.N. talks billed as a turning point in a bid to slow global warming open on Monday seeking to agree curbs on greenhouse gas emissions and raise billions of dollars for the poor in aid and clean technology.

Russians mourned on Sunday for 112 revelers killed in a nightclub blaze, expressing anger at breaches of fire safety rules that prosecutors have blamed for Russia's most deadly fire in decades.

Iraqi politicians agreed a last-minute deal on Sunday to overcome divisions on a law needed for an election to take place next year, reducing the risks to U.S. plans for a partial withdrawal in 2010.

The Unites States, Japan and South Korea are working on a road map for ending North Korea's nuclear arms plans that will be on the agenda of a U.S. envoy who visits Pyongyang this week, Japan's Asahi newspaper reported.

Afghan President Hamid Karzai raised doubts on Sunday that his country could take over responsibility for its security by July 2011, while U.S. leaders said the date was not a drop-dead deadline for Kabul.

U.S. President Barack Obama will attend the end of the Copenhagen climate change summit, a late change of plan the White House attributed on Friday to growing momentum toward a new global accord.

President Barack Obama on Sunday urged Senate Democrats to work out their differences on healthcare reform and pass what will be the most significant social legislation in decades.

General Motors Co has tapped recruiting firm Spencer Stuart to find a permanent chief executive with extensive global, manufacturing and turnaround experience, The Wall Street Journal reported on Sunday, citing people familiar with the matter.

TCW Group Inc, one of the largest money managers in the world, fired its chief investment officer, Jeffrey Gundlach, and removed him from its board of directors after buying a smaller rival last week.

Intel Corp has scrapped plans to launch an advanced graphics chip based on its novel Larrabee design, after concluding that delays in the project would make it uncompetitive, a spokesman said on Sunday.

Lifting the value of China's yuan currency would hurt, not help, global economic recovery and threaten the country's own financial and trade health, a Chinese state think-tank said in an essay published on Monday.

The Australian Dollar opens lower today at 0.9130 after a stronger than expected jobs report on Friday night bolstered the greenback. The U.S. Labour Department report showed that 11,000 jobs were shed in November, far less than the 125,000 expected by financial markets, pushing the unemployment rate back down to 10 per cent. The Aussie once again ran into strong resistance just beneath the US93 cent mark before falling quite sharply on the U.S. employment news hitting an overnight low of 0.9107...

The U.S. dollar faces crosswinds as some of the extraordinary market developments that fueled the currency's sharp appreciation in the second half of 2008 fade or even reverse, the Bank for International Settlements said.

Americans face the seemingly intractable dilemma of having to reduce their levels of debt but not so rapidly as to derail a nascent economic recovery.

Rock-bottom interest rates are luring banks into taking risky bets and central banks should be alert to the negative effects of loose monetary policy on financial stability, a high-profile study showed.

The new head of Opel promised investments in new models and pledged to put an end to business as usual at the General Motors brand -- addressing two key grievances by unions when he outlined his turnaround plan this weekend.

Amazon.com Inc, the world's largest online retailer, has no plans to open stores anywhere in the world, it said on Sunday, in response to a report it was planning to open high street shops in Britain.

Oman's top banks said on Sunday they had a total exposure of $77 million to troubled conglomerate Dubai World , sending shares of most lenders down nearly 6 percent.

UN's climate science body said that the Climategate controversy was the work of a well-thought plan and the hackers were probably paid to do it. Jean-Pascal van Ypersele, vice-chairman of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), said the theft of emails from the University of East Anglia's Climatic Research Unit (CRU) was not the work of amateur climate skeptics.

If the bulls have their way, Wall Street's rally will keep going this week on signs of stability in the labor market. But concerns about penny-pinching consumers during the holiday shopping season and the specter of higher interest rates may be a hurdle to jump.

Countries with mounting public debt jeopardize the sustainability of their economic recovery from the global financial crisis over the next several years, the OECD's new chief economist said in a interview in an Italian newspaper.

Amazon.com Inc , the world's largest online retailer, is planning to open high street shops in Britain to complement its Web site, the Sunday Times newspaper reported.

Chris Brown was interviewed on ABC's 20/20 in a program that aired Friday evening.

Japan's government plans to guarantee about 700 billion yen ($7.7 billion) in loans and other funds provided by financial institutions to keep Japan Airlines Corp. afloat, the Nikkei business daily reported.