IBT Staff Reporter

British Prime Minister Gordon Brown is optimistic other allies will send more troops to Afghanistan, backing up an expected sharp increase in U.S. forces, according to a letter to NATO released on Wednesday.

Volkswagen Chairman Ferdinand Piech does not intend to merge truckmakers MAN SE and Scania, the Sueddeutsche Zeitung newspaper reported without giving a source for the information.

Iran has detained scores of students in an apparent bid to prevent new opposition protests during annual Student Day events next month, a Western-based human rights group said.

It's a crime so profitable that even dead people are in on the act.

Philippine security forces found 11 more bodies Wednesday at the site of an election-related massacre in the south of the country, taking the toll to 57 dead, officials said.

The World Health Organization is looking into reports in Britain and the United States that the H1N1 flu may have developed resistance to Tamiflu in people with severely suppressed immune systems, a spokesman said Tuesday.

President Barack Obama will unveil his new strategy for the war in Afghanistan in an address to Americans on December 1, White House spokesman Robert Gibbs said on Wednesday.

President Barack Obama hold his first state dinner in honor of Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh Tuesday evening at the White House.

Deere & Co , the world's largest maker of tractors and harvesters, reported a quarterly net loss on Wednesday on weak equipment sales and a series of one-time charges.

First-half pretax profit at Johnson Matthey fell by a fifth and the world's largest supplier of catalytic converters warned on Wednesday that prospects for a recovery in global auto sales were uncertain.

There's no doubt that The Twilight Saga: New Moon will rise to the top of the domestic box office again over the coming long holiday weekend.

SAIC Motor Corp aims to double the sales of its own-brand cars to 180,000 in 2010, its president said on Monday, as the top Chinese automaker seeks to tap the lucrative mid- to higher-end market currently dominated by foreign rivals.

The head of Faurecia SA said on Wednesday that bumper maker Plastal could be a good match for the French parts maker, adding that his company was looking to be a consolidating force in the auto parts industry.

Donny Osmond danced his way to victory on Tuesday, winning the 9th season of the hit ABC television show Dancing With the Stars after wowing the judges with his irrepressible determination and final tango.

Adam Lambert's racy public outing as a solo artist at Sunday's American Music Awards has grabbed headlines and helped send downloads of his debut album soaring worldwide.

Chinese car maker Beijing Automotive Industry Holding Corp (BAIC) said on Wednesday it was reassessing the situation after a consortium it belonged to dropped a bid to buy General Motors' Saab unit.

New Zealand's Peter Jackson takes a break from blockbusters with The Lovely Bones, an adaptation of Alice Sebold's bestselling novel about girl who is brutally raped and murdered and who looks down on her family from heaven.

Jobless Benefits Figures Surprise; Personal Spending Up; GM's Europe Challenges

A nude photo of film director Roman Polanski, who is now being held in a Swiss prison, and his wife Sharon Tate taken shortly before she was brutally murdered, will be sold at an upcoming auction where it could fetch more than $10,000, organizers said.

A deal for General Motors Co to sell Saab collapsed on Tuesday when the buyer pulled out, in a move that threatens a 60-year-old Swedish auto brand with closure after mounting losses.

Director and comic actor Tyler Perry, whose films include the recent I Can Do Bad All By Myself, has given $1 million to the NAACP in the largest gift ever by a single person to that civil rights group.

The future of Sweden's Saab Automobile looks bleak after tiny luxury car maker Koenigsegg, backed by China's BAIC, pulled out of a deal to buy the loss-making firm from General Motors.

The Recording Academy on Tuesday added songs by James Brown, Bob Marley, the Beach Boys, Louis Armstrong and others to its Grammy Hall of Fame, bringing the total number of titles in the collection to 851.

Regis Philbin will be taking a leave of absence from his long-running ABC daytime talk show to undergo a hip replacement surgery.

For the past two weeks, the top result for a search on Google images of the U.S. first lady Michelle Obama is an offensive caricature that replaces her face with that of a chimpanzee, which Google refuses to take down.

The British public would like to see Swedish band ABBA reform more than any other act, according to a survey.

Stock index futures pointed to a higher open on Wednesday after stronger-than-expected data on the labor market.

New Zealand's revised emissions trading plan passed into law on Wednesday, while neighboring Australia moved a step closer to ending a deadlock stalling its carbon-trade legislation ahead of a vote this week.

The number of U.S. workers filing new applications for jobless insurance tumbled last week by a surprisingly large amount to the lowest level in more than a year, according to government data on Wednesday that gave fresh evidence the battered labor market is improving.