July 11 (Reuters) - The New York Times reported the following stories on its business pages on Wednesday. Reuters has not verified these stories and does not vouch for their accuracy.

* Henry Kravis, the billionaire founder of the corporate buyout movement, was working the hallways of Capitol Hill, hoping to kill legislation that would raise his taxes and those of other investment fund executives.

* The slumping housing market again rattled the bond market on Tuesday. Standard & Poor's, the credit rating firm, said that it would tighten the standards it used to rate bonds backed by subprime mortgages, a tacit acknowledgment that it might have been too optimistic about the housing market.

* China executed its former top food and drug regulator on Tuesday for taking bribes to approve untested medicine, as the Beijing leadership scrambled to show that it was serious about improving the safety of Chinese products.

* Dow Jones & Co. <DJ.N> board members met with a pair of wealthy investors who are interested in buying a piece of the company, even as the company appears to be in the late stages of negotiating a full takeover by the News Corp. <NWSa.N> owned by Rupert Murdoch.

* The Federal Reserve is not satisfied with the current rate of inflation. And it is apparently not satisfied with the public's expectations about inflation either.

* Home Depot Inc. <HD.N>, the world's largest home improvement store, and Sears Holdings Corp. <SHLD.O>, the biggest department store company in the country, said they expected second-quarter net income to drop far more than they anticipated just two months ago.

* The politically sensitive Chinese trade surplus surged to a record $26.9 billion in June, potentially heightening tensions with the United States.

* With the House set to take up legislation that would sharply cut subsidies to student loan companies by about $19 billion, lenders are trying to appeal to Democrats.

* Expanding a hunt for commerce in the burgeoning art of Web video, Hollywood's United Talent Agency and the Internet-based advertising agency Spot Runner have started a ministudio for digital entertainment from established actors, directors and others, the agencies said on Tuesday.

* The Orchard, a digital music company that has built a business distributing albums from independent labels to online stores like iTunes, plans to announce today that it will merge with Digital Music Group Inc. <DMGI.O>.

* As Microsoft Corp.'s <MSFT.O> executives played down the impact of an extensive repair program for defective Xbox 360 game machines, they announced several efforts to broaden the appeal of their machine to families.

* Grand Rapids is seeing a boom in medical research, training and patient facility construction that health executives and city officials hope will sustain its culture and economy. ((Compiled by Supantha Mukherjee; Bangalore Equities Newsdesk +91 80 4135 5800; within U.S. +1 646 223 8780))

AlertNet news is provided by