Britain's bluechip shares edged lower in early trade on Tuesday, a day after hitting a high for 2009, as oil majors retreated on falling crude prices while Standard Chartered dropped after announcing a fundraising. By 0823 GMT, the FTSE 100 was 0.6 percent, or 27.84 points lower at 4,654.62, after ending at 4,682.46 on Monday

Global stocks and commodity prices pulled back on Tuesday as investors paused to assess the state of the economy after pushing them higher in the past two weeks, while the U.S. dollar was broadly flat. BNP Paribas, France's biggest bank by market value, posted higher second-quarter profit, and expressed some optimism over prospects for financial

Leading global automakers reported forecast-beating quarterly results on Tuesday, but continued to give cautious outlooks for the industry, which remains hard hit by weak demand and a lack of consumer credit. Toyota Motor Corp, the world's biggest automaker by sales, beat targets with an operating loss of 194.9 billion yen in the April-June quarter, and

EBay Inc's online payments service, PayPal, shut down worldwide for about an hour on Monday after the Internet retailer encountered "internal" problems with the fast-growing division. The outage began at 10:30 a.m. Pacific Time and affected all users for about an hour. All customers had regained service as of 3:30 p.m., eBay spokesman Anuj Nayar

The U.S. Federal Trade Commission said it will continue to investigate the relationship between the boards of Apple Inc and Google Inc, after Google's chief quit Apple's board on Monday. Richard Feinstein, director of the FTC's bureau of competition, commended both companies for recognizing that sharing directors raises competitive issues, in light of the resignation

Swiss bank UBS (UBSN.VX) posted another big loss in the second quarter as wealthy clients continued to take their cash elsewhere, but there were signs of improvement in its best underlying performance in two years. UBS (UBS.N) said on Tuesday it remained cautious about its prospects, given the economic environment, but after taking out one-off

Asian stocks hit an 11-month high on Tuesday before profit taking pulled them back, while the Australian dollar also pared gains after the country's central bank left interest rates unchanged but offered no clues on when tightening would begin. Major European stock futures were down 0.3 percent and U.S. equity futures off 0.4 percent after

Asian stocks climbed to an 11-month high on Tuesday on hopes a V-shaped recovery may be forming in the United States, while the Australian dollar hit its highest since late September after solid housing and retail sales data. The batch of economic reports increased speculation the Reserve Bank of Australia at a policy meeting later