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Financial markets are unlikely to be derailed by mass euro zone downgrades but with Greek debt talks at an impasse, pressure has been loaded on the bloc to shore up its defenses and glimmers of optimism from last week have been firmly doused.

In Spain, the prime minister pledged spending cuts and a banking-system cleanup, while in Italy, the prime minister called for “efforts in favor of growth.”

Standard & Poor's ratings agency has downgraded France's credit rating, French television channels reported on Friday, citing a government source.

The Duchess of York faces charges in Turkey for going undercover and secretly filming children at a state-run home for a documentary, according to the semiofficial Anatolian news agency.

Greece could reach a bond swap deal with private creditors to reduce its debt load by the end of next week, with a formal offer possible by early February, a finance ministry source said on Thursday.

The European Union might appear a military superpower, at least on paper. It has more uniformed personnel than the United States and overall EU defense spending outstrips Russia or China.

Welcome to an unlikely beacon of hope for the global auto industry -- Detroit. Executives arriving this week for the Detroit auto show find a U.S. car market that has morphed from meltdown three years ago to a safe haven as concerns grow about the stability of other big economies, from Europe to China.

Perhaps that nostalgia for a 1950s that never was is valid, perhaps not, but what isn’t valid is the claim that Germany is the richest country in Europe. The results change a little whether you use nominal GDP per head (ie, just the plain numbers ) or PPP adjusted (to take account of different price levels) but the are a number of countries in Europe with higher GDP per capita than Germany.

European Central Bank policymaker Athanasios Orphanides called for euro zone leaders to abandon plans to make private sector investors help reduce Greece's debts, but his push showed no sign of gaining any traction in Europe's capitals on Friday.

Police investigating Britain's phone-hacking scandal made another arrest Friday, keeping up the pressure on Rupert Murdoch's media empire. Officers from Scotland Yard arrested a 47-year-old woman early Friday morning in Essex, a county just east of London. Police said she was the 17th person to be arrested as part of Operation Weeting, the official investigation into phone hacking.