French President Emmanuel Macron hosted United Arab Emirates President Sheikh Mohamed bin Zayed Al-Nahyan for lunch in Paris on Monday, with increased diesel supplies on the menu for their official talks.

The European Union will target Russian gold exports in an update to its sanctions packages due to be announced on Friday, an EU commissioner said.

The EU has so far approved six packages of sanctions on Russia. The last one passed in June imposed a ban on most Russian oil imports.

China's economy contracted in the three months ending in June compared with the previous quarter after Shanghai and other cities shut down to fight coronavirus outbreaks, but the government said a "stable recovery" is under way after businesses reopened.

The world's second-largest economy shrank by 2.6%, down from the January-March period's already weak 1.4%, official data showed Friday. Compared with a year earlier, which can hide recent fluctuations, growth slid to 0.4% from the earlier quarter's 4.8%.

Top financial officials from the Group of 20 leading rich and developing nations met on the Indonesian island of Bali on Friday seeking strategies to counter the economic fallout from the war in Ukraine, inflation and other global crises.

Indonesian Finance Minister Sri Mulyani Indrawati opened the two-day meeting by urging fellow finance ministers, central bank chiefs and other leaders to find ways to "build bridges, not walls." She said the consequences of failure, especially for less wealthy nations, would be "catastrophic."

A US firm targeted in a $250 million lawsuit over the 2020 port explosion in Beirut that killed more than 200 people has denied any wrongdoing in the tragedy.

President Emmanuel Macron said Thursday that France aims to manage without Russian gas as soon as possible with no early end to the war in Ukraine in sight.

Amazon, seeking to resolve two European Union antitrust investigations, has promised to treat third-party merchants on its website fairly, the bloc's competition watchdog said Thursday.

The U.S. online retail giant offered to make a number of commitments to ease competition concerns, and the European Commission, the 27-nation bloc's top antitrust enforcer, said it will now seek feedback on them from "interested parties."

Russia's war in Ukraine is expected to wreak havoc with the European Union's economic recovery for the foreseeable future with lower annual growth and record-high inflation, the bloc's economic forecast showed Thursday.

The summer figures for the 19-nation eurozone set inflation to reach an average of 7.6% this year, a major increase from its earlier expectation of 6.1%. Last month, consumer prices surged 8.6% from a year earlier. Expectations for economic growth slid by 0.1 point to 2.6% for the year, a big drop from last year's expansion of 5.3%.

U.S. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen has urged leaders of major economies to work more closely in countering the impact from Russia's invasion of Ukraine.

Yellen and other top financial officials from the Group of 20 leading rich and developing nations are gathering on the Indonesian island of Bali for meetings that begin Friday. Yellen has been seeking support for a price cap on Russian oil that might help bring energy costs under control and alleviate the decades-high inflation seen in many countries.

Mahmud Aguil has a comfortable house in Libya's capital Tripoli, but chronic power outages in the war-battered country and roasting summer heat now force him to sleep in his air-conditioned van.

"This is my bedroom," the 48-year-old said pointing to the cramped vehicle, its back seats removed to make space for him and his two young children. "In the morning I wake up with a terrible backache.