One World Trade Center, the giant monolith being built to replace the twin towers destroyed in the Sept. 11 attacks, will lay claim to the title of New York City's tallest skyscraper on Monday. Workers will erect steel columns that will make its unfinished skeleton a little over 1,250 feet high, just enough to peak over the roof of the observation deck on the Empire State Building.

The milestone is a preliminary one. Workers are still adding floors to the so-called "Freedom Tower" and it isn't expected to reach its full height for at least another year, at which point it is likely to be declared the tallest building in the U.S., and third tallest in the world.

Britain's richest people reached record levels of wealth in 2011 even as the country was slipping back towards recession, according to the annual Sunday Times Rich List.

The combined fortunes of the 1,000 richest people in Britain rose by 4.7 percent to £414.26 billion ($674 billion, 508 billion euros) despite high unemployment and harsh government cuts, beating the previous record of £412.85 billion set in 2008.

Egypt will resume supplying gas to Jordan from early May after the flow was disrupted by repeated attacks on its pipeline, a Jordanian government official said on Saturday.

Egypt informed Jordan that it would "resume gas deliveries of 100 million cubic metres per day to the kingdom early next month," the unidentified official was quoted as saying by the official Petra news agency.

The International Monetary Fund approved a $140.8 million (106.6 million euro) loan for Kosovo Friday, after cutting off funding last year in a dispute over pay raises for civil servants.

The new 20 month stand-by arrangement will back a program to ease the country's fiscal pressures and help the government shore up its cash buffer.

The first sight of India's newest "Motor City" is a collection of giant blue-and-grey structures, windowless boxes in corporate colors that are the hallmark of modern manufacturing.

The warehouses and machining plants, walled in on an enormous site of more than 1,000 acres (400 hectares), are owned by Tata Motors which moved to the western state of Gujarat in 2008 to start producing its Nano small car.

Dubai says it now has full control of the Atlantis resort hotel perched atop its palm-shaped island.

State-run investment firm Istithmar World said late Friday it paid $250 million to buy out business partner Kerzner International Holdings Ltd., which had held a 50 percent stake in the coral-colored hotel. Istithmar already owned half of the property.

Procter and Gamble on Friday posted a sharp decline in earnings for its third fiscal quarter, citing a "difficult economic and competitive environment."

P&G, which owns some of the best known brands in the world such as Gillette, Tide laundry detergent and Charmin tissues, said net profit fell 16 percent from the year-ago quarter to $2.4 billion despite a two percent rise in sales.

Honda Motor said Friday its full-year profit plunged 60.4 percent but it showed signs of recovery in the final quarter, bouncing back from the impact of natural disasters in Japan and Thailand.

Group net profit for the 12-month period came to 211.5 billion yen ($2.6 billion), down from 534.1 billion yen a year earlier, the company said.

Spain's jobless rate surged to a record 24.4 percent at the end of March as 5.6 million people searched for work in a recession-bound, deficit-plagued economy, data showed Friday.

Hours after Standard and Poor's downgraded Spain's sovereign debt citing the deficit, fragile banks and recession, the country disclosed that its unemployment woes had deteriorated drastically.

Ratings agency Standard and Poor's on Thursday downgraded Italian automaker Fiat's long-term corporate credit rating from BB to BB-, citing weak demand in Italy and overcapacity in Europe.

The announcement came after the Italian auto giant said its net profit in the first quarter soared ten-fold to 379 million euros ($500 million) thanks to its U.S. partner Chrysler, without which it would be in the red.