The FINANCIAL -- President Shimon Peres had talks with Greek Cypriot leader Dimitris Christofias during a key visit to the island on Thursday, discussing gas finds in the eastern Mediterranean, a discovery that has sparked a crisis between Turkey and Greek Cyprus.

The FINANCIAL -- Compagnie de Financement Foncier, or CFF, the covered-bond issuing unit of French mortgage lender Credit Foncier de France SA, is to price its EUR2 billion covered bond, maturing August 2015, at 95 basis points over midswaps, one of the banks running the deal said Friday.

The FINANCIAL -- With a greater number of consumers having acquired a taste for luxury fashion in recent years through the proliferation of flash sale websites, full-priced online luxury retailers are now reaping the benefits, reveals new data released today from American Express Business Insights during Mercedes-Benz Fashion Week.

The FINANCIAL -- British Gas customers will be able to talk face-to-face with staff when they telephone call centres through a new video service, the company has announced.

The FINANCIAL -- Anyone can come down with dementia, as the cases of more and more celebrities remind us. "In Germany alone, 1.3 million people currently suffer from the condition.The probability that any one of us could develop Alzheimer's or any other form of dementia by the time we're 90 is around one in three," explains Allianz expert Michaela Grimm.