WORLD FINANCE UPDATE:
The Australian dollar is lower as traders sell the currency after it it a two month high.
At 0630 AEST on Friday, the local unit was trading at 94.02 US cents, down from 94.23 cents on Thursday.
And the Australian share market looks set to open flat after Wall Street closed mixed with the Standard and Poor's reaching another record but the Nasdaq falling.
At 0645 AEST on Friday, the June share price index futures contract was down one point at 5,416.
ELSEWHERE:
PARIS - French energy giant GDF Suez says it is reconsidering a huge project for a floating gas liquefaction factory off northern Australia and might opt to build an undersea pipeline to Darwin.
WASHINGTON - New US claims for unemployment insurance benefits fell last week, continuing to point to a downward trend in job losses, official data shows.
BRUSSELS - The head of the Belgium office of Swiss banking giant UBS, struggling to restore its reputation after a series of scandals, is under investigation for fraud and money laundering.
WASHINGTON - Ukraine's economy remains in a downward spiral and the IMF-EU rescue plan for the country is already outdated and insufficient, an economist says.
PARIS - General Electric Co has submitted a revised offer to buy the power generation business of France's Alstom SA that the American company hopes will be enough to win approval from the French government and see-off a rival bid by Germany's Siemens AG.
TORONTO - BlackBerry has surprised Wall Street by posting results that beat analyst's expectations.
NEW YORK - General Electric's retail credit bank has agreed to pay $US169 million ($A182.85 million) to Hispanic borrowers barred from two credit-card debt repayment programs due to discrimination, US federal government authorities say.
SAN FRANCISCO - Twitter has announced plans to buy SnappyTV, a service that allows for the clipping, editing and sharing of video over the messaging platform.
PARIS - Facebook users worldwide have rushed onto Twitter to vent their dismay -- and trade jokes -- after a glitch left them briefly unable to reach friends on the social networking giant.
WASHINGTON - The US Supreme Court has ruled that a computerised financial trading system cannot be patented because it is based on an "abstract" idea.
MOSCOW - Russian organisers say they posted a provisional surplus of $US261 million ($A282.4 million) on the Winter Olympics in Sochi.
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