As India celebrated becoming the first Asian nation to reach Mars, S.M. Vaidya, head of business at conglomerate Godrej's aerospace division that made the spacecraft's engine and thruster components, sounded surprisingly downbeat.

Churchgoers grumble that they always get hit with pleas for money. But congregants at a Chicago church this month got a surprise – they each received a check for $500, with instructions to go out and do something good with it.

Nike Inc's (NKE.N) shares rose as much as 11 percent to a record high after the world's largest sportswear maker reported a better-than-expected quarterly profit, prompting at least 13 brokerages to raise their price targets on its stock.

Air France sought to bring a costly 12-day pilots strike, over the expansion of its budget Transavia unit, to an end on Friday with a series of proposals that won the backing of the company's board and French Prime Minister Manuel Valls.

Deutsche Telekom (DTEGn.DE) is preparing for the possibility of keeping its investment in T-Mobile US (TMUS.N) for at least another year as it fears the sole current suitor for the U.S. firm will fail to come through with a sufficiently attractive offer, three people familiar with the matter said.

U.S. weapons maker Raytheon has signed a letter of intent with Polish military software producer WB Electronics to cooperate in bidding for a contract to build Poland's planned anti-missile system, Polish state radio said on its website.

Courts in Berlin and Hamburg upheld bans on online transportation service Uber on Friday, saying the company did not comply with German laws on the carriage of passengers.

BlackBerry Ltd (BB.TO) (BBRY.O) reported a smaller quarterly loss on Friday and flashed encouraging signals about its hard-pressed smartphone business as well as its software and services sales, spurring a more than 4 percent jump in its shares.

An influential U.S. senator wants to hold hearings into "disturbing" issues raised by secretly taped conversations between Federal Reserve supervisors and officials at Goldman Sachs Group Inc (GS.N), a bank the Fed was tasked with policing.

Lockheed Martin Corp (LMT.N) said it will buy a European-built military communications satellite for South Korea as part of a $7 billion deal to supply Seoul with 40 F-35 fighter jets, in what industry observers call among the most unusual "offset" agreements ever to accompany a major arms sale.