Online retailing giant Amazon said Monday that sales of its Kindle e-readers and tablets quadrupled on Black Friday over the previous year's annual pre-Christmas national shopping orgy.

The company gave no specific data on Kindle sales last Friday, but said its new tablet computer, the Kindle Fire, was also the bestselling product on Amazon.com.

Euro finance ministers' head Jean-Claude Juncker rejected Monday any debt crisis solutions that would divide the EU, reacting to German-French ideas for an inner Eurozone club.

"It is not good to artificially divide the EU into two groups, it is important not to create differences between the 27 (EU member states) and the 17" members of the euro currency area, he told reporters.

The Khartoum government has blocked South Sudanese oil exports due to a dispute over transit fees, Oil Minister Ali Ahmed Osman said on Monday.

"Sudan stopped South Sudan's exports of oil on November 17," in the second such incident since August, a month after the south declared its independence, the minister told reporters.

Mounting concerns over Italy's debt problems pushed the euro and stock markets down Friday only for a technical bounce to take them off their lows after sustained recent losses.

Dealers said investors appeared to have lost confidence that European leaders can deliver a solution to the Eurozone debt crisis snapping at their heels, with the euro slumping to seven-week dollar lows.

Russia on Friday took control of the Belarus gas pipeline network in an economic rescue deal that will help Minsk survive isolation by the West and increase the Kremlin's influence over its neighbor.

Russian gas giant Gazprom said it would pay $2.5 billion to take the 50 percent stake it does not own in Beltransgaz in a deal easing pressure on the depleted treasury of Belarus President Alexander Lukashenko.

India said on Friday plans to open its vast retail sector to global supermarket chains would create up to 10 million jobs over three years after the cabinet approved the long-awaited reforms.

The pledge by Commerce Minister Anand Sharma came after heated opposition protests stopped the government announcing details in parliament about its move to relax foreign ownership rules for retailers such as Wal-Mart.

Asian markets mostly fell on Friday as a meeting between the eurozone's three biggest economies highlighted their differences on finding a solution to the region's debt crisis.

Traders remained nervous at the end of a week that saw fears over Europe deepen as the yields on Italian and Spanish bonds sat dangerously high and even Germany -- the bloc's pillar -- failed to sell all its bonds at auction.

Facing its worst economic crisis, Syria is banking on boosting self-sufficiency to overcome sanctions, Economy Minister Mohammed Nidal al-Shaar told Agence France Presse in an exclusive interview Thursday.

"This is not an easy crisis. It's the worst in our recent history because it is immediately affecting the Syrian citizen -- it's affecting the street, it's affecting factories, it's affecting the business community," Shaar said.

The European Commission offered on Thursday an additional 500 million Euros in EU aid for Bulgaria, Lithuania and Slovakia to put Soviet-era nuclear reactors out of service for good.

The three EU states closed down the reactors as part of their deals to join the European Union, but Brussels wants to ensure that the power plants are forever sealed off.

Italy's new Prime Minister Mario Monti insisted at Eurozone debt crisis talks Thursday that his country would balance its budget in 2013, despite rising doubts over its ability to do so.

Monti said after the talks with French President Nicolas Sarkozy and German Chancellor Angela Merkel that he had laid out his economic program to the leaders, "confirming the objective of a balanced budget in 2013."