The U.S. House of Representatives Friday approved a $1.1 trillion spending package for 2016 which if passed by the Senate as expected would avert a government shutdown before year-end holidays.

The sprawling bipartisan compromise, which also tightens visa requirements, proposes reforms to the International Monetary Fund and lifts a longstanding ban on U.S. crude oil exports, passed easily by a vote of 316 to 113. 

Ukraine announced on Friday it would not make payment on its $3 billion debt to Russia due this weekend, deepening a row with Moscow which said it would take Kiev to court.

"The Ukranian government is imposing a moratorium on repaying the so-called Russian debt," Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk told a government meeting. 

The economic cost of disasters across the world dropped in 2015 to around $85 billion (78 billion euros) from $113 million last year, reinsurance company Swiss Re said on Friday.

Insurance companies covered $32 billion of the total, it said in its Sigma study.

The French economy is forecast to grow at a slower pace in the fourth quarter due mainly to the impact of the deadly Paris attacks last month, the Insee statistics office said Thursday.

Insee revised lower its estimate of economic expansion in the October-through-December period to 0.2 percent, down from the previous forecast of 0.4 percent, following the series of attacks by jihadists that left 130 people dead.

Japan's central bank announced an unexpected round of new stimulus measures Friday to complement its vast asset-buying scheme, pushing the yen down sharply and giving a brief boost to Tokyo share prices.

The move came soon after the Federal Reserve's first interest rate cut in almost a decade and highlights the divergence in monetary policy between the surging United States economy and its rivals.

Syrian refugees who have taken jobs in Turkey are employed almost exclusively on an informal basis in "low-quality, low-paid" work, the U.N. labor agency warned on Thursday.

Hundreds of thousands of the 2.2 million Syrian refugees in Turkey who fled the civil war are in some kind of employment but the International Labor Organization (ILO) warned that their status had to be improved.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu signed a major natural gas deal Thursday aimed at tapping large deposits in the Mediterranean, but a court challenge was expected over the contentious agreement.

Netanyahu has pushed hard for the framework deal setting out parameters for developing natural gas resources offshore with a consortium that includes U.S. firm Noble Energy.

Markets in Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates rallied Thursday after their countries followed the U.S. Federal Reserve by hiking interest rates, but other Gulf bourses showed little response.

Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, UAE and Bahrain hiked their interest rates by 25 basis points after the Fed announced its first rate increase in more than nine years on Wednesday. Qatar and Oman have yet to act.

Energy-rich Qatar has forecast a budget deficit of more than $12 billion in 2016, citing a sharp drop in oil and gas prices, local media reported Tuesday.

The host of the 2022 World Cup said it expected to be short of 46.5 billion riyals ($12.77 billion) next year and that revenues were likely to fall to 156 billion riyals (42.85 billion), compared with 226 billion riyals in 2015.

German business confidence fell slightly in December, but still remains at high levels, reflecting the ongoing resilience of Europe's biggest economy in the face of numerous challenges, the Ifo economic institute said on Thursday. 

The Ifo institute's closely-watched business climate index slipped to 108.7 points in December from 109.0 points in November, Ifo said in a statement, a fractionally steeper drop than analysts had been expecting.