Unemployment and rising income inequality will top concerns for global leaders in 2015, a World Economic Forum (WEF) study said Friday.

The organisation, which each year gathers the global elite in the plush Swiss ski resort of Davos, has drawn up a list of the top 10 issues likely to preoccupy leaders over the coming 12 to 18 months.

America's technology giants are drawing on their huge cash stockpiles to make big bets on investments and acquisitions that could prove to be visionary -- or end up as boondoggles.

Companies such as Amazon, Facebook and Google have been on a spending tear in the past year, pouring money into an array of companies, programs and technologies amid concerns that if they do not keep innovating they will be left in the dust.

French bank Societe Generale said Thursday its third quarter earnings leapt 56.6 percent to 836 million euros ($1.0 billion), beating expectations, in large part to reduced risk costs.

The bank was able to cut its provisions, money set aside to cover possible loan losses, from 1.1 billion to 642 million.

Saudi Aramco operations are unaffected by a leak and fire which hit a diesel fuel pipeline near the capital Riyadh, a company statement received on Thursday said.

The state-owned firm is the world's largest oil company in terms of crude production and exports.

German industrial orders, a key measure of demand for German-made goods both at home and abroad, edged slightly higher in September, data showed on Thursday.

Industrial orders rose by 0.8 percent in September compared with the previous month, the statistics office Destatis said in a statement.

The European Central Bank is likely to hold fire on any new policy measures Thursday even as the clouds continue to darken over the euro area economy, analysts said.

Despite growing pressure for more action to ward off the specter of deflation in the single currency area, ECB President Mario Draghi will likely argue that a raft of previous radical measures still need time to unfold, the analysts argued.

The governor of the Central Bank of Syria can travel to France to visit family even though he is on the European Union's sanctions list, a top EU court found Wednesday.

The EU imposed an asset freeze and travel ban on governor Adib Mayaleh in 2012 and 2013 for his role in financially supporting President Bashar al-Assad in the bloody war which has cost some 190,000 dead.

Russia's gas giant Gazprom on Wednesday confirmed receipt of part of the money Ukraine owes it for gas, but Kiev must now pay ahead for the gas to flow.

Ukraine's state-owned energy group Naftogaz said late Tuesday that Kiev has paid $1.45 billion, the first tranche of $3.1 billion of its gas debt.

The Bank of Japan will do whatever it can to beat the plague of deflation, governor Haruhiko Kuroda said Wednesday, adding "half-baked" measures would only worsen the problem.

Just days after he took the markets by surprise with a massive enlargement of the Bank's already-hefty stimulus program, Kuroda said the path forwards was clear.

Oil prices extended losses in Asia Wednesday as dealers looked ahead to the release of the latest U.S. supply report after a sell-off in the previous session owing to price cuts by Saudi Arabia.

U.S. benchmark West Texas Intermediate (WTI) for December delivery fell seven cents to $77.12 while Brent crude for December fell 33 cents to $82.49 in afternoon trade.