IBT Staff Reporter

Five senior executives at American International Group told the insurer last week they may quit if their compensation was cut significantly by the U.S. pay czar, the Wall Street Journal reported on Sunday.

Dubai's government will not sell any assets to meet the obligations of state-owned Dubai World, but the conglomerate itself might sell some of its foreign assets, Dubai's finance chief told Al Jazeera television.

The projected long-term cost of the government's bailout of the nation's big banks is going to be at least $200 billion less than previously thought, a United States Treasury Department official said on Sunday night.

Citigroup Inc is trying to persuade the U.S. government to allow it to repay $20 billion in taxpayer funds before a window to launch a share sale effectively shuts by the middle of next week, the Financial Times reported on Sunday.

Social networking site Facebook said it has formed an advisory board comprising five Internet safety organizations to consult on issues related to online safety.

Alexa Ray Joel, 23 the daughter of singer Billy Joel, is stable in a New York City hospital following what police called a suicide attempt, the New York Post reported.

A global water crisis is looming, but the path to profits is a muddy mess of regulated industries, giant companies with small water operations, and start-up technologies.

Starwood Hotels & Resorts plans to add another 15 hotels in India by 2012 and the hotel operator's chief executive said that untapped demand in the country could spell swift returns for the new properties.

Health Care Rally; Banks Raise Risk;Climate Change Turning Point

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.