The vice president of the oil consortium in Lebanon, Dania Aoun, voiced expectations Monday that the oil prices could witness a new increase this week, media reports said.

Aoun told LBCI TV that fuel prices will spike in the next three weeks, noting that Lebanon is a country that imports fuel and is therefore affected by the rise in global markets.

Two years after being laid off from her job as a health and safety consultant, Ana Luis has found a new, quite different occupation.

The blue-eyed, blonde-haired 46-year-old stands busy in the window of her very own dress shop in Valladolid, northeastern Spain, deftly fixing clothes on a dummy.

Global technology giants Microsoft, Apple and Adobe were Monday ordered to appear before a pricing inquiry examining the often-higher cost of tech goods in Australia compared with other economies.

The lower house committee holding the probe, which was launched last May, said it had summoned the trio to appear at a public hearing next month to explain why Australian customers paid more for the same products.

A top European Central Bank official is pressing for an agreement soon on a rescue package for Cyprus — a prospect viewed with little enthusiasm in Germany.

ECB executive board member Joerg Asmussen was quoted Monday as telling Germany's Handelsblatt newspaper that he expects an aid program to be drawn up by the end of March.

Dutch Finance Minister Jeroen Dijsselbloem holds his first eurozone meeting Monday just as hard-won measures to stabilize the bloc pose a different problem -- a strong euro dampening the economy.

The debt crisis Dijsselbloem inherits has eased greatly since the European Central Bank vowed last year to intervene in the markets to tame borrowing costs and EU leaders agreed tough steps to bolster the euro's defenses.

U.S. President Barack Obama urged Congress Saturday to find a balanced approach to deficit reduction, warning that steep budget cuts known as "the sequester" would hurt the economy and threaten thousands of American jobs.

"If the sequester is allowed to go forward, thousands of Americans who work in fields like national security, education or clean energy are likely to be laid off," Obama said in his weekly radio and Internet address.

Turkey is set to make a "clean break" with the International Monetary Fund by paying off its remaining debt by May, Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan said on Saturday.

"We have been paying and paying... Right now the debt stands at $860 million (643 million euros)," Erdogan said in televised remarks.

U.S. stocks stumbled through the week on a mix of dull earnings and weak forecasts before encouraging data from both Beijing and Washington edged the indices to fresh multi-year highs on Friday.

The catalyst for Friday's jump was a sharply narrowed U.S. trade deficit in December -- driven by both lower oil imports and rising oil exports -- that pointed to a better economy in the 2012 fourth quarter than data has suggested.

Be polite but not too familiar, display lucky symbols and take things slowly -- unusual advice for the frantic world of retail but Australian stores hope it will help lure cashed-up Chinese tourists.

As Sydney gears up to host one of the world's biggest Chinese New Year celebrations, officials are working to help struggling retailers use the key tourism event to set their cash registers ringing.

U.S. firm Las Vegas Sands said Friday it was set to go ahead with building a huge casino near Madrid, which could create hundreds of thousands of jobs at a time of record unemployment in Spain.

The controversial "Eurovegas" project plans to build four casino complexes with 12 hotels providing 36,000 rooms, nine theaters, three golf courses, and convention centers over 10-15 years.