Are you looking for a loan to purchase a car or a house, to finance your business? You want to open an account or a savings plan? You want to buy a credit card? There are more than 25 banks in Lebanon active in retail. You can spend a week trying to call them one by one or visiting their websites for details, or you can go on Bnooki.com, a new search engine that includes all banking products in Lebanon and find what you want in a few minutes. Once you find what you want, you can calculate the payment or directly apply via Bnooki.com to any bank which is a premium account subscriber on Bnooki.

In short, Bnooki.com is a user friendly and freely accessible web based platform that includes full information regarding all retail products and services of banks in Lebanon such as loans, deposits, accounts, cards, etc.

Credit card giant MasterCard announced Monday the launch of a new digital payment system that lets people use a wide variety of devices including smartphones to spend their money.

The system, known as MasterPass, stores customers' banking and personal information in a "secure cloud" online where it is available for the moment of payment whether in a store on when browsing the Internet, the group said.

France and Germany urged the new government in Cyprus on Monday to negotiate a bailout quickly and welcomed the election of rightwinger Nicos Anastasiades as the president of the financially crippled EU state.

The leader of the right-wing Disy party won 57.5 percent of the vote in a second round run-off against communist-backed Stavros Malas, who polled 42.5 percent, to replace the only communist president in the European Union.

It was billed as China's Dubai: a cluster of sail-shaped skyscrapers on a man made island surrounded by tropical sea, the epitome of an unprecedented property boom that transformed skylines across the country.

But prices on Phoenix Island, off the palm-tree lined streets of the resort city of Sanya, have plummeted in recent months, exposing the hidden fragility of China's growing but sometimes unbalanced economy.

An association of South Korea shopowners Monday urged millions of its members to boycott Japanese goods in protest at Japan's continued claim to a tiny set of islets at the heart of a decades-old dispute.

The Small Local Sales Alliance called on its members, including neighborhood mini-marts, restaurants, pubs, and other stores, to stop selling Japanese goods including cigarettes, liquor and beer, its spokesman told Agence France Presse.

China's manufacturing growth hit a four-month low in February but remained positive, British banking giant HSBC said Monday, noting that the world's second-biggest economy was still recovering slowly.

The bank's seasonally adjusted preliminary purchasing managers' index (PMI) stood at 50.4 for the month, down from a final 52.3 in January, it said in a statement.

Tens of thousands of protesters rallied across Bulgaria on Sunday to denounce poor living standards and corruption plaguing the country, just days after the right-wing government was forced to resign.

More than 10,000 protesters marched in downtown Sofia under the slogan "End to illusions, civil action every day!"

U.S. President Barack Obama urged Congress Saturday to stop automatic spending cuts threatening thousands of American jobs looming at the beginning of next month.

Instead, he argued in his weekly radio and Internet address, they should implement "smart" deficit reduction to help maintain U.S. economic growth.

Moody's stripped Britain of its triple-A debt rating Friday, saying government debt was still mounting and that growth was too weak to reverse the trend before 2016.

In an expected rebuff to the Cameron government's hopes that sharp spending cuts would both reduce its deficit and give growth a boost, the rating agency cut Britain's grade by one notch to Aa1.

Energy consumption by China, the world's leading emitter of C02, rose 3.9 percent in 2012 from the previous year but fell by 3.6 percent per unit of gross domestic product, the government said.

The country used the equivalent of 3.62 billion tonnes of coal, the National Bureaus of Statistics reported in a paper on the state of the economy published Friday.