(Reuters) - Kraft Foods Inc Chief Executive Irene Rosenfeld is breaking up the food giant, just 18 months after driving through the controversial acquisition of UK chocolate maker Cadbury. The split will give investors the opportunity to bet on a snacks business that is growing quickly in emerging markets, or opt for the stable dividends offered by a slower growing general grocery business that includes Oscar Mayer lunch meat and Kraft cheese.

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(Reuters) - General Motors Co's quarterly profit shot past Wall Street expectations, but its share price slipped as investors focused on the risks of a sputtering economy and resurgent Japanese rivals. GM reported second-quarter profit that nearly doubled as people paid more for new cars like the Chevrolet Cruze, and the automaker took a larger share of global sales as major Japanese competitors were largely sidelined by the March earthquake.

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Aug 4 (Reuters) - Italian prosecutors have seized documents at the offices of rating agencies Moody's and Standard & Poor's in a probe over suspected "anomalous" fluctuations in Italian share prices, a prosecutor said on Thursday. The measure is aimed at "verifying whether these agencies respect regulations as they carry out their work," Carlo Maria Capistro, who heads the prosecutors' office in the southern town of Trani which is leading the probe, told Reuters.

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(Reuters) - The European Central Bank resumed buying government bonds from the market and offered a new round of funding to commercial banks on Thursday in response to a worsening euro zone debt crisis. But analysts said the intervention was unlikely to ease market tensions for long and some were worried by ECB President Jean-Claude Trichet's suggestion that official interest rates could rise further, would put more pressure on weak economies in the region.

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(Reuters) - Weakening demand in the United States and Europe has spooked some in corporate America, prompting big companies to throttle back their spending just as U.S. government looks for ways to cut its own outlays. That new wave of fears is threatening to choke off a fledgling resurgence in capital investment by big companies -- one of the few areas where economic activity was growing.

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(Reuters) - Hitachi Ltd and Mitsubishi Heavy Industries Ltd have begun talks on what would be Japan's biggest domestic merger, three sources said, heralding a long awaited shake-up of the nation's industrial behemoths. Traditionally seen as a last resort of failing firms, Japanese companies until recently have largely avoided strategic mergers. A combination of two of Japan's oldest, most established conglomerates would mark a deeper embrace of mergers as a tool for corporations to squeeze costs, combat a surging yen and gain competitive scale.

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(Reuters) - Wall Street stocks tumbled on Wednesday with the S&P falling to a new low for the year after another round of soft economic data. The U.S. services sector fell in July to its lowest level since February 2010, while new U.S. factory orders fell in June, pulled down by weak demand for transportation equipment.

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(Reuters) - The pace of growth in the services sector ticked down unexpectedly in July to the lowest level since February 2010, while the number of jobs created by the private sector also slowed, separate reports showed on Wednesday. The Institute for Supply Management said its services index fell to 52.7 last month from 53.3 in June. The reading fell shy of economists' forecasts for 53.6, according to a Reuters survey.

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(Reuters) - The European Union voiced support for Italy and Spain under attack on financial markets but acknowledged that investors now doubt whether the euro zone can overcome its sovereign debt woes. European Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso said a surge in Italian and Spanish bond yields to 14-year highs was cause for deep concern and did not reflect the true state of the third and fourth largest economies in the currency area.

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(Reuters) - MasterCard Inc's second-quarter profit rose a better-than-expected 33 percent as the company processed more card transactions and revenue increased. The Purchase, New York-based payment processor beat the average Wall Street estimate despite signs that the U.S. economy slowed in the quarter, and its shares rose 3 percent in premarket trade.

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