Nearly half of the capital Beirut was plunged as of Sunday morning into a communications outage, as state-run telecom provider OGERO ran out of diesel needed to operate its power generators.

Central Bank Governor Riad Salameh announced Friday in a statement that the Central Bank will continue to allow commercial banks to purchase U.S. dollars from it at the Sayrafa platform exchange rate.

U.S. Ambassador to Lebanon Dorothy Shea on Friday met with Prime Minister Najib Miqati and conveyed to him “an official written communication from the U.S. Department of the Treasury” that she said “answers to some of the concerns that the (Lebanese) authorities have” regarding regional energy deals.

The forces pushing inflation in the eurozone to record highs in recent months are expected to ease over the course of 2022, European Central Bank President Christine Lagarde said on Friday.

"We expect the drivers of inflation to ease over the course of this year," Lagarde told the French senate, after eurozone inflation reached its all-time peak in December at five percent, driven by soaring prices for energy.

Shops, bars and restaurants in a southern Dutch town opened Friday in a protest action that underscored growing anger at weeks of coronavirus lockdown measures, a day before some of the restrictions are expected to be eased.

A local broadcaster showed people eating and drinking at outdoor tables of restaurants in the main street of Valkenburg in open defiance of a lockdown in the Netherlands. Authorities in the tourist town, which was devastated by flooding last year, didn't take action to enforce coronavirus restrictions.

Shares slipped in Europe and Asia on Friday after a retreat on Wall Street that left the Nasdaq composite down 2.5%.

Germany's DAX lost 0.6% to 15,928.83 and the CAC 40 in Paris shed 0.7% to 7,145.19. Britain's FTSE 100 edged 0.1% lower to 7,556.29. On Wall Street, the future for the Dow industrials and the S&P 500 both were 0.1% higher.

The risk of recession is looming for Germany after Europe's biggest economy shrank at the end of 2021 and as it faces a bumpy start to this year, with the rapid spread of COVID-19's omicron variant deterring people from shopping and travel and supply bottlenecks holding back manufacturers.

Output in Germany fell by between 0.5% and 1% in the fourth quarter, the state statistics agency Destatis said Friday. Forecasts are also shaky for the first three months of 2022, and two straight quarters of falling output would leave Germany in recession, according to one commonly used definition.

China said Friday it gained support on issues including the treatment of Uyghur Muslims from a number of Gulf states following talks between their foreign ministers at which they agreed to upgrade relations.

Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Wang Wenbin said the ministers and Gulf Cooperation Council Secretary-General Nayef Falah Al-Hajraf expressed firm support for China's "legitimate positions on issues related to Taiwan, Xinjiang and human rights."

The Lebanese lira made a major recovery against the dollar on Friday, after the central bank allowed commercial banks to purchase dollars from it at the Sayrafa platform exchange rate.

Central Bank Governor Riad Salameh on Thursday hit out at Mount Lebanon Attorney General Judge Ghada Aoun over recent actions and tweets.