The United States put its proposed trade partnership with the European Union to the public Monday, marking another step toward creating the world's largest free-trade area.

The U.S. Trade Representative (USTR) said it was seeking public comments on the proposed Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership, including regarding U.S. interests and priorities, in order to develop U.S. negotiating positions.

The Cypriot president pledged Monday that not even his own family will be immune from a commission of inquiry into allegations of wrongdoing in the run-up to a crippling eurozone bailout.

President Nicos Anastasiades was responding to allegations that family members of leading politicians had taken advantage of privileged information to protect their assets from a hit on bank deposits imposed by European Union-led creditors last month.

Armenia's last national airline, Armavia, on Monday ceased operations and launched bankruptcy procedures due to grave financial problems, the company said.

"Over the last three years, the owner of Armavia airline has been investing finances from (his) other businesses in order to support the air carrier," Armavia said in a statement.

Cairo's international airport will be partly closed at night due to fewer incoming flights and to save energy, reports said on Monday, highlighting the economic crisis sweeping Egypt.

Two runways will be closed for four hours starting from 1.30 am (2330 GMT) "in order to save energy", said civil aviation minister Wael al-Maadawi in statements carried by the press.

The mooted BRICS bank of emerging powers is intended to complement, rather than compete with Western-dominated institutions on the world stage, the Indian Finance Minister said Monday.

Finance Minister P. Chidambaram also said India supports Japan's nomination of a senior finance ministry official for the top job at the Asian Development Bank (ADB), as Tokyo looks to keep hold of a role it has held for almost 50 years.

Spanish King Juan Carlos's youngest daughter, Princess Cristina, is in the front line of a legal storm engulfing her husband, Inaki Urdangarin, who is under investigation for allegedly embezzling millions of euros in public money.

The 47-year-old has not been named as a suspect in the corruption probe opened at the end of 2011 by a judge on the Mediterranean island of Mallorca. But the graft allegations facing her husband have cast a growing shadow of suspicion over her role in the affair.

The Kuwait Stock Exchange on Monday suspended trading in the shares of 17 listed firms for failing to report their annual financial results on time, a statement said.

The companies, 10 of them investment firms, violated a rule that requires them to post their results of the previous year within three months, a statement posted on KSE website said.

Manufacturing activity in China expanded at its fastest pace in almost a year last month, official data showed Monday, indicating conditions in the world's number two economy continued to improve.

The official purchasing managers' index (PMI) hit 50.9 in March, the highest since April 2012 when the figure stood at 53.3, according to the National Bureau of Statistics and the China Federation of Logistics and Purchasing (CFLP).

Tunisia must find a new economic model to raise the roughly 20 percent of its people living in poverty from their quagmire, President Moncef Marzouki said on Saturday.

"The objective is liberate from poverty two million Tunisians over the course of the next five years," Marzouki told a meeting of the World Social Forum, an anti-globalization group that wrapped its first-ever meeting in an Arab country.

Cypriot MPs will next week investigate a list of several million euros of alleged loans to politicians and others said to have been written off by the two banks at the center of the island's financial crisis.

Marios Mavrides, a deputy with the conservative Disy party of President Nicos Anastasiades, told Agence France Presse on Saturday "there is an ad hoc committee that will be investigating these privileged loans."