EU trade ministers finally thrashed out a deal Friday on how to negotiate for a free trade deal with the United States, after meeting a French demand to exclude the key audiovisual sector.

After some 13 hours of talks, ministers had reached what one EU source described as a "not in, not out" formula.

A massive database of private offshore banking entities that could be used for tax evasion was posted online for public use Friday by the muckraking group that first reported the files.

The International Consortium of Investigative Journalists said anyone can now search the records of some 100,000 companies, trusts and funds located in leading tax havens to see who could be making use of them to skirt home-country taxes.

The head of Europe's bailout fund says the region should eventually aim to do without help from the International Monetary Fund.

Klaus Regling's comments in Friday's edition of Germany's daily Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung add to recent hints from other European policymakers that the bloc should aim to handle future emergencies on its own.

Moody's credit rating agency put debt issued by Bahrain on watch on Friday, warning of a possible downgrade because the country could face strains over its debt given the weak outlook for oil prices.

Bahrain is a Gulf oil-producing country, but Moody's warned that it could be entering a period of making a loss on every barrel of oil produced.

The Vatican bank is taking a "zero tolerance" approach to suspect transactions, says its new chief executive Ernst von Freyberg, as it fights hard to shatter a culture of silence and shed its murky image.

The 54-year-old German lawyer, who took over at the helm of the Institute for Works of Religion (IOR) in February, said in an interview with Agence France Presse that he is giving it his all to disperse the clouds hanging over the bank.

Pilots for national carrier EgyptAir began a sit-in on Thursday to demand better pay and working conditions, disrupting flights out of Cairo, an airport official said.

The strike has caused the cancellation of nine flights with more disruption expected, the official told Agence France Presse.

Greek unions plan a 24-hour general strike Thursday, amid a storm of protest over the government's decision to shut down public broadcaster ERT as part of sweeping cost-cutting measures.

The socialist and moderate leftist parties supporting the coalition government called the decision "unacceptable" as Prime Minister Antonis Samaras refused to back down.

EU trade ministers will try Friday to resolve deep differences with France on whether its prized "cultural exception" should be included in free trade talks with a United States which believes there should be no exceptions at all.

Negotiations with Washington already promise to be difficult but France insists that culture and its special status within the EU is a no-go area and has threatened to block agreement rather than accept a carefully worded compromise minimizing possible damage.

Airbus's new A350 plane is due to take off on its much-anticipated maiden flight Friday, a milestone for an aircraft the firm hopes will help close the gap with rival Boeing in the lucrative long-haul market.

Weather permitting, the next-generation plane will lift off from the southwestern city of Toulouse at 0800GMT with six people on board -- a British and a French test pilot, a flight engineer and three other engineers at the back.

Austrian construction firm Porr announced on Wednesday it was to sign a 1.89-billion-euro ($2.5-billion) contract to build one of Doha's new metro lines, as part of a consortium with two Qatari partners, SBG and HBK.

This was the second such contract for European firms in three days.