Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan on Monday visited Albania to talk with Prime Minister Edi Rama on strengthening bilateral ties and also inaugurate new apartments funded by Turkey for Albanians left homeless by the 2019 earthquake.

Upon landing Erdogan immediately headed to the northwestern town of Lac, 50 kilometers (30 miles) northwest of the capital Tirana, where Turkey has funded the building of a complex with 522 apartments at a cost of 42 million euros ($48 million).

On a trip to the United Arab Emirates, the president of South Korea has reportedly reached a preliminary multibillion-dollar deal to sell Seoul's surface-to-air missiles to Abu Dhabi and pledged deeper cooperation with the Gulf Arab federation.

After South Korean President Moon Jae-in met Emirati Prime Minister Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum in Dubai, the countries signed a memorandum of understanding for the UAE's purchase of a South Korean mid-range missile defense system valued at some $3.5 billion, South Korea's Yonhap news agency reported.

Imad Kreidiyeh, the head of state-run telecom provider OGERO, on Sunday threatened to resign over the authority’s “lack of capabilities,” after a diesel shortage led to an hours-long communications outage in half of Beirut.

Tesla is turning to Mozambique for a key component in its electric car batteries in what analysts believe is a first-of-its-kind deal designed to reduce its dependence on China for graphite.

Elon Musk's company signed an agreement last month with Australia's Syrah Resources, which operates one of the world's largest graphite mines in the southern African country. It's a unique partnership between an electric vehicle manufacturer and a producer of the mineral that is critical for lithium-ion batteries. The value of the deal hasn't been released.

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.