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French President Francois Hollande's approval rating jumped this month from a record low, improving for the first time since he took office after sending troops to Mali to battle Islamist rebels.

The vast U.S. services sector expanded against last month, extending a three-year run of growth, while European business optimism hit an eight-month high, suggesting the euro zone economy was starting to recover.

The Greek government says its painful austerity drive is paying off, with the budget deficit reduced to 6.6 percent of annual output in 2012 from 9.4 percent a year earlier. A finance ministry statement Monday said that, not counting the cost of servicing Greece's debt mountain, the government posted a modest budget surplus of €434 million ($588 million) last year.

Fiat SpA, the Italian automaker that controls Chrysler LLC, saw fourth quarter earnings more than double thanks to strong North American sales that more than compensated for a weak performance in Europe.

French-backed Malian troops searched house-to-house in Gao and Timbuktu on Tuesday uncovering arms and explosives abandoned by Islamist fighters, and France said it would look to hand over longer-term security operations in Mali to an African force.

Like armies everywhere, the German military is filled with macho, chest-thumping rituals. But one battalion has found there's a downside to all that chest-thumping: The male soldiers are growing breasts — and only on their left sides.

Beatrix, queen of the Netherlands, addressed the nation on television and radio on Monday afternoon, announcing that she would abdicate the throne in favor of her son, Prince Willem-Alexander.

Former prime minister Silvio Berlusconi triggered outrage from Italy's political left on Sunday with comments defending fascist wartime leader Benito Mussolini at a ceremony commemorating victims of the Nazi Holocaust.

France said on Thursday there were no signs that Syrian President Bashar al-Assad is about to be overthrown, something Paris has been saying for months was just over the horizon.

Scientists have given another eloquent demonstration of how DNA could be used to archive digital data. The UK team encoded a scholarly paper, a photo, Shakespeare's sonnets and a portion of Martin Luther King's I Have A Dream speech in artificially produced segments of the "life molecule".