Thousands of Turkish Cypriots walked off the job and protested peacefully on Friday against austerity measures in northern Cyprus which they said could force mass migration from the isolated breakaway state. At least 10,000 demonstrators gathered in a square in north Nicosia to protest against steps taken by the right-wing government to cut salaries in

Buying Ocado, the loss-making British online grocer, would give Amazon.com the model for cutting-edge customer service it would need to crack the market for selling groceries. And if anyone can make money selling food online, it is surely the world's biggest internet retailer, which could add its enormous catalogue of general merchandise goods to the

* First time almost entire country has been sealed off * Small number of ISPs makes shutdown easy * Facebook and Twitter particularly vulnerable The move by Egyptian authorities to seal off the country almost entirely from the Internet shows how easily a state can isolate its people when telecoms providers are few and compliant.

France's ban on same-sex marriages was upheld by the country's constitutional authority on Friday, in a ruling that relieves the government of any obligation to grant gays the wedding rights enjoyed by heterosexuals. A handful of countries in Europe allow couples of the same sex to wed and rights campaigners had hoped for a breakthrough

The multi-speed recovery of the global economy is prompting a kaleidoscope of policy responses from central banks around the world, muddying the outlook for investors and heightening the risk of market volatility. One size never fits all. Emerging market central banks in particular have deployed an array of measures, from taxing capital inflows to penalising

Sales of Microsoft Corp's Windows software fell short of outsized expectations, rekindling fears that the spread of mobile gadgets will erode its main PC-focused business. Microsoft surprised Wall Street with a better-than-expected profit, helped by resurgent corporate spending after the belt-tightening of past years. But its shares stayed flat as investors expressed concern about the

The Chinese Year of the Rabbit promises to bring political upheaval from restless youth and sex scandals for the amorous, but in China the government is at least likely to bring inflation under control. Twelve animals make up the traditional Chinese zodiac, with each year having its own peculiar and unique beliefs, some specific to

The decline in the yen following Japan's credit rating downgrade is helping adjust the currency towards its fundamentals, Asian Development Bank President Haruhiko Kuroda said. The yen hit two-month lows against the euro and two-week troughs versus the dollar on Thursday after Standard & Poor's cut Japan's rating for the first time since 2002, saying

British police arrested five young men on Thursday following an investigation into Internet activists who carried out cyber attacks against groups they viewed as enemies of the WikiLeaks website. "The arrests were related to recent 'distributed denial of service' (DDoS) attacks by an online group calling themselves Anonymous," London police said in a statement. Internet

Greek Prime Minister George Papandreou ruled out defaulting on or restructuring his country's huge public debt but said he expected EU/IMF rescue loans to be stretched out and the interest rate reduced. Papandreou told global business leaders at the World Economic Forum on Thursday that Athens hoped to return to capital markets even this year