(Reuters) - Goldman Sachs Group Inc Chief Executive Lloyd Blankfein was expected to testify as early as Wednesday in the Raj Rajaratnam insider trading trial, but lawyers are set first to battle over what he can and cannot say. Blankfein's expected appearance as a government witness intensifies the focus on what is already Wall Street's biggest insider trading trial in two decades.

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(Reuters) - ConocoPhillips (COP.N), the third-largest U.S. oil company, said it might double its planned sale of less-desirable assets to $20 billion, with proceeds going to buy back stock. Conoco is executing a plan, first announced in late 2009, to increase shareholder value through debt reduction, stock buybacks and increased dividends.

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(Reuters) - Sprint Nextel Corp cried foul over a planned merger between AT&T Inc and T-Mobile USA, saying the deal would stifle competition and potentially hurt its profitability. Sprint executives attending a wireless industry event on Monday criticized AT&T's proposed $39 billion of Deutsche Telekom's U.S. unit, announced on Sunday, and listed several ways it could hurt the wireless industry.

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(Reuters) - General Mills Inc (GIS.N), the maker of Cheerios cereal and Progresso soup, said on Wednesday it expects commodities inflation to gather speed. Its shares fell 2 percent in premarket trading. General Mills also reported a higher quarterly profit that was in line with Wall Street forecasts, supported by a surge in international sales.

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(Reuters) - U.S. regulators are blaming some of the biggest Wall Street firms for the collapse of five wholesale credit unions and are threatening to sue the banks to recover up to $50 billion of soured investments, the Wall Street Journal reported on Wednesday. The National Credit Union Administration accused Goldman Sachs (GS.N), Bank of America's (BAC.N) Merrill Lynch unit, Citigroup (C.N) and JPMorgan (JPM.N), of misrepresenting risks of mortgage-backed securities to the wholesale credit unions, the Journal said, citing people familiar with the matter.

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(Reuters) - Japan's largest banks are in talks to provide up to $25 billion in emergency loans to Tokyo Electric Power (9501.T) to shore up its finances and rebuild its power network following a disaster at one of its nuclear plants. Tokyo Electric, Asia's largest utility, is waging a desperate battle to cool reactors at its Fukushima-Daiichi power plant which were crippled by the powerful earthquake and tsunami on March 11 and have leaked radiation.

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(Reuters) - Britain cut its economic growth forecast on Wednesday and said inflation would remain above target this year and next in a budget that stuck to ambitious deficit-busting goals. Seeking to support a faltering economy, finance minister George Osborne said corporation tax would be cut by two percentage points to 26 percent from April, rather than by just the one point originally planned. A levy on banks would be increased to pay for it.

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(Reuters) - Wall Street rose sharply on Monday, led by telecom stocks after AT&T said it would buy T-Mobile from Deutsche Telekom, a deal that would create the largest wireless operator in the United States. Glimmers of hope about Japan's nuclear crisis and investor Warren Buffett's comments about a buying opportunity for Japanese stocks also boosted investor sentiment.

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(Reuters) - Sales of previously owned U.S. homes fell unexpectedly sharply in February and prices fell to their lowest in nearly nine years, an industry group said on Monday. The National Association of Realtors said sales fell 9.6 percent month over month to an annual rate of 4.88 million units, snapping three straight months of gains. The percentage decline was the largest since July.

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(Reuters) - Citigroup Inc (C.N) plans to slash the number of common shares outstanding and reintroduce a dividend after suspending payouts two years ago, taking another step in its long recovery from the brink of failure during the financial crisis. Many of the biggest U.S. banks on Friday announced dividend hikes after the Federal Reserve completed a second round of industry stress tests. Citi said it will shrink the number of common shares through a 1-for-10 reverse stock split and start paying a quarterly dividend of 1 cent per share in the second quarter.

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