U.S. aircraft leasing firm Air Lease said Monday it has bought eight new Boeing 787-9 Dreamliner aircraft to lease to Vietnam Airlines.

Financial details of the purchase were not revealed. The catalog value of the planes is $1.8 billion.

German sportswear maker Adidas reported Monday a strong rise in first-quarter profits but warned full-year earnings would be hit by the discovery of irregularities in its Indian business.

Adidas reported a net profit of 289 million euros ($383 million) in the period January to March, up 38 percent over the year-earlier figure.

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.