IBT Staff Reporter

Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh defended efforts to improve ties with Pakistan on Wednesday in a sign the government is moving toward resuming a stalled peace dialogue with Islamabad despite opposition pressure.

Microsoft Corp and Yahoo Inc inked a 10-year Web search deal to better compete against market leader Google Inc but stopped short of combining their display advertising businesses.

U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said on Wednesday he is willing to visit North Korea to help defuse tensions on the Korean peninsula.

Iranian authorities will release reformist Saeed Hajjarian on Wednesday, the judiciary said, more than six weeks after he was detained with hundreds of others after Iran's disputed presidential election.

Honda Motor Co and Nissan Motor Co surprised markets by eking out small profits last quarter helped by cost cuts, but a sustained recovery looks some way off with demand relying largely on government stimulus.

President Barack Obama said on Wednesday the United States may be starting to see the end of the 19-month recession and that his policies helped the country from plunging into a depression.

Organic food has no nutritional or health benefits over ordinary food, according to a major study published Wednesday.

French drugmaker Sanofi-Aventis raised its earnings growth goal for the year and outlined new cost savings to help it cope with the effect on profit of patent expiries on a number of its top drugs.

Search engine giant Google Inc said it was interested in Microsoft's 10-year search deal with Yahoo announced on Wednesday, adding that competition was usually good for online users.

Sprint Nextel Corp posted a wider quarterly loss and revenue fell 10 percent as the No. 3 U.S. mobile service continued to lose valuable monthly bill-paying customers. Its shares fell more than 10 percent.

Michael Jackson's personal chef Kai Chase revealed details about the role of Jackson's doctor Conrad Murray amid investigations surrounding the physician linked to the death of the King of the Pop.

Defense contractor General Dynamics Corp reported a better-than-expected quarterly profit on Wednesday and boosted its full-year forecast as revenues improved in all its business segments.

The top U.S. futures market regulator would strip liquidity needed to make the market run efficiently if it failed to allow certain traders to exceed position limits, a Goldman Sachs Group Inc executive said Wednesday.

Top Asian and European semiconductor manufacturers gave optimistic forecasts for the second half of the year as they saw demand and prices improving, but said they would continue to monitor the market closely.

Is it possible to tell how happy we all are?

New orders for long-lasting U.S. manufactured goods notched their biggest decline in five months in June, while applications for mortgages fell last week in a sign that economic conditions remain fragile.

ConocoPhillips reported a 76 percent drop in quarterly profits on Wednesday, as oil prices fell sharply from a year earlier and heavy fuel supplies and weak demand hurt its refining business.

Analyst said software budgets will increase 1.53% globally in 2010, according to a Gartner survey on Tuesday, amid reductions in IT budgets in enterprises.

The U.S. housing market may finally have turned around after three years, given the rise in the widely-watched Case-Shiller home price index for May, the developers of the index told Reuters on Tuesday.

New orders for long-lasting U.S. manufactured goods fell more sharply than expected in June, notching their biggest decline in five months as demand for communications and transportation equipment slumped, a government report showed on Wednesday.

Health insurer WellPoint Inc posted higher-than-expected quarterly profit on Wednesday, but its shares dropped 4.1 percent as revenue missed analysts' estimates and the company failed to increase its full-year earnings forecast.

Property services company FirstService Corp (FSV.TO) reported a quarterly net loss on Wednesday, hurt by a drop in revenue in its commercial real estate unit and a deferred income tax charge.

It would seem that the US housing market - arguably the Achilles heel of the global financial morass - is finally looking up.

The world's top two steelmakers and leading carmakers said on Wednesday any return to growth would be gradual, casting doubt over some economists' forecasts for a recovery starting later this year.

China Pacific Insurance (Group) Co Ltd, part-owned by the Carlyle Group, has hired China International Capital Corp (CICC) and three other investment banks to arrange its Hong Kong initial public offering, two people with direct knowledge of the situation said on Wednesday.

China Pacific Insurance (Group) Co Ltd, part-owned by the Carlyle Group, has hired China International Capital Corp (CICC) and three other investment banks to arrange its Hong Kong initial public offering, two people with direct knowledge of the situation said on Wednesday.

Pregnant women infected with the new H1N1 swine flu have a much higher risk of severe illness and death, U.S. government researchers said on Wednesday, confirming a trend that has worried global health experts.

Timken Co, which makes industrial bearings and specialty steel, said it agreed to sell its needle roller bearings business to Japanese autoparts maker Jtekt Corp for about $300 million.

U.S. Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano is expected to reveal on Wednesday the Obama administration's domestic policies to prevent terrorist attacks, the Wall Street Journal said on Tuesday.