Reuters) – The following were the top stories in the New York Times business pages on Thursday. Reuters has not verified these stories and does not vouch for their accuracy.
* Executives of Goldman Sachs Group Inc (GS.N) and the American International Group Inc (AIG.N) , the Wall Street titans whose long alliance dissolved into a battle that shook the financial world, defended their actions on Wednesday before the federal commission investigating the financial crisis.
* The House on Wednesday adopted legislation to revamp the nation’s financial regulatory system, voting mostly along party lines as partisan acrimony impeded cooperation even on the shared goals of averting future economic crises.
* Google Inc (GOOG.O) will raise the salaries of gay and lesbian employees whose partners receive domestic partner benefits, to compensate them for a tax they pay that heterosexual married couples do not.
* Amazon.com Inc (AMZN.O), which sells millions of products, said Wednesday that it had agreed to buy Woot, a site that sells one item at a time.
* Britain’s financial regulator disclosed on Tuesday that Steven Noel Perkins, a former oil futures broker, single-handedly engineered a jump in the price of oil a year ago and cost his firm millions of dollars with a string of unauthorized trades after a weekend of heavy drinking.
* Toyota Motor Corp (7203.T) said Thursday about 270,000 vehicles sold worldwide, including luxury Lexus sedans, have faulty engines, but the company did not say whether it would recall the automobiles.
* Financial institutions in Europe sought far less money from the European Central Bank on Wednesday than many analysts had expected, offering some reassurance about the health of the euro region’s banking system.
* The Securities and Exchange Commission on Wednesday tightened restrictions against “pay-to-play” practices in the municipal securities market.
* The United States won an “important victory” in a trade ruling that Airbus, the European plane maker, had benefited from four decades of improper subsidies, taking sales from Boeing Co (BA.N) as a result, the United States trade representative, Ron Kirk, said on Wednesday.