Sri Lanka on Tuesday dropped plans for a fresh $1.0-billion loan from the International Monetary Fund following disagreements over how the money should be spent, the central bank said.

The government announced last month that it was seeking a new cash infusion from the IMF after drawing down a previous $2.6-billion bailout loan six months ago.

French President Francois Hollande's visit to India this week is dominated by trade issues, including a $12-billion deal for Rafale fighter jets, nuclear energy and potential tie-ups for new metro lines.

Hollande will be accompanied by five ministers including Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius and Defense Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian. The chiefs of more than 60 top French companies will also join him for the two-day trip starting Thursday.

American Airlines and U.S. Airways are close to striking a merger deal that would create the largest airline in the United States in the latest bout of consolidation in the U.S. aviation industry.

Officials from the two companies declined to comment, but The Wall Street Journal reported that their boards are scheduled to meet separately on Wednesday, and a deal could be disclosed by Thursday.

Jacob Lew, nominated to replace Timothy Geithner as U.S. Treasury Secretary, will miss this week's G20 ministerial meetings in Moscow, the Treasury said Monday.

Lew, previously White House chief of staff, is still awaiting confirmation by the U.S. Senate for the Treasury post.

The vice president of the oil consortium in Lebanon, Dania Aoun, voiced expectations Monday that the oil prices could witness a new increase this week, media reports said.

Aoun told LBCI TV that fuel prices will spike in the next three weeks, noting that Lebanon is a country that imports fuel and is therefore affected by the rise in global markets.

Two years after being laid off from her job as a health and safety consultant, Ana Luis has found a new, quite different occupation.

The blue-eyed, blonde-haired 46-year-old stands busy in the window of her very own dress shop in Valladolid, northeastern Spain, deftly fixing clothes on a dummy.

Global technology giants Microsoft, Apple and Adobe were Monday ordered to appear before a pricing inquiry examining the often-higher cost of tech goods in Australia compared with other economies.

The lower house committee holding the probe, which was launched last May, said it had summoned the trio to appear at a public hearing next month to explain why Australian customers paid more for the same products.

A top European Central Bank official is pressing for an agreement soon on a rescue package for Cyprus — a prospect viewed with little enthusiasm in Germany.

ECB executive board member Joerg Asmussen was quoted Monday as telling Germany's Handelsblatt newspaper that he expects an aid program to be drawn up by the end of March.

Dutch Finance Minister Jeroen Dijsselbloem holds his first eurozone meeting Monday just as hard-won measures to stabilize the bloc pose a different problem -- a strong euro dampening the economy.

The debt crisis Dijsselbloem inherits has eased greatly since the European Central Bank vowed last year to intervene in the markets to tame borrowing costs and EU leaders agreed tough steps to bolster the euro's defenses.

U.S. President Barack Obama urged Congress Saturday to find a balanced approach to deficit reduction, warning that steep budget cuts known as "the sequester" would hurt the economy and threaten thousands of American jobs.

"If the sequester is allowed to go forward, thousands of Americans who work in fields like national security, education or clean energy are likely to be laid off," Obama said in his weekly radio and Internet address.