Germany's chancellor apparently waded into Greece's choppy political waters on Friday, when Athens said Angela Merkel suggested that the country should hold a referendum on the euro together with next month's national elections.

It's Facebook's big day.

LONDON (Reuters) - A new banking crunch in the euro zone risks another sharp retreat by western parent banks from vulnerable economies in central and eastern Europe, a process that must be slowed to preserve growth, officials from the region said on Friday. Countries backing Europe's development bank for the former communist bloc elected a new president - for the first time from non-euro member Britain - just as fears grow that a Greek exit from the currency could hit emerging Europe's lenders. ...

Anyone in the market for a smartphone these days will likely see the term 4G shoved in their face by the major carriers. "We have the biggest network!" "We have the fastest speeds!" Sometimes the providers back up their claims with blazing fast data and great coverage, but other times, consumers will wind up feeling cheated. Here are some examples in which the reality simply doesn't live up to the marketing hype.Sprint's 4G LTE Phones: Hurry Up and Wait

They say patience is a virtue, but like temperance and chastity, it’s not much fun. Unfortunately, if you want to reach a state of true techstasy, you may need to repress your desire to buy a new gadget today and wait for the next version to come out.

Boston (Reuters) - Welcome to the club, Jamie Dimon. Embarrassed by a surprise $2 billion trading loss last week, the chairman and chief executive of JPMorgan Chase & Co faced heightened criticism at the bank's annual meeting on Tuesday. That included 40 percent backing from shareholders for a resolution to strip Dimon of his chairmanship title, up from 34 percent in 2010. With the spring U.S. ...

Facebook updated its status to "public company" on Friday.

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. — A test spacecraft that in two years will fly deeper into space than any vehicle designed for astronauts since NASA's Apollo moon program is set to arrive here next month, where it will be assembled in the same facility that readied the moon-bound spaceships 40 years ago.

Salvage experts plan to use water-filled cisterns to weigh down the above-sea side of the cruise liner capsized off the Italian coast — part of an effort to turn the massive vessel upright so that it can towed for demolition early next year. One official on Friday called the operation's magnitude "unprecedented."

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Stocks fell on Friday, with the NYSE composite stock index turning negative for the year as Facebook Inc stumbled in its market debut and investors were cautious ahead of a G8 summit on the weekend expected to address Europe's debt crisis. The Dow Jones industrial average dropped 61.61 points, or 0.50 percent, to 12,380.88. The Standard & Poor's 500 Index fell 6.90 points, or 0.53 percent, to 1,297.96. The Nasdaq Composite lost 20.81 points, or 0.74 percent, to 2,792.88. (Reporting By Edward Krudy, editing by Dave Zimmerman)

Facebook is trading up 8 percent Friday, as investors seek to put a dollar value on the company that turned online social networking into a global cultural phenomenon.

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - Facebook Inc shares rose less than expected on their first day of trade on Friday and huge order volume caused technical problems that marred the coming out party of the No. 1 online social network. Its shares were up 8 percent in early afternoon trading on the Nasdaq, after opening 11 percent higher and then rapidly heading south to touch their initial public offering price of $38. The gains were below market forecasts of as much as a 50 percent jump. ...

(Reuters) - Kraft Foods said on Friday it lowered prices on many of its U.S. coffees, including its flagship brand Maxwell House and some of its instant coffees, citing lower green coffee costs since prices peaked last year. The move comes three days after trend-setter J.M. Smucker Co. cut the cost of well-known brands Folgers and Dunkin' Donuts by an average of 6 percent. It is the second cut to coffee prices since August 2011 for both companies. "These changes reflect sustained decreases in the cost of green coffee," Kraft spokeswoman Bridget MacConnell told Reuters in an email. ...

NEW YORK, May 18 (Thomson Reuters Accelus) - A labor-backed investor group critical of JPMorgan Chase & Co's corporate governance said the bank has failed to address concerns over its risk oversight and it will try to rally other shareholders for changes after a $2 billion trading loss. CtW Investment Group, which advises labor pension funds holding what it said are 6 million shares in JPMorgan, has advocated for risk governance changes there for more than a year. ...

NEW YORK (Reuters) - World stocks erased the year's gains on Friday as investors fled risky investments for safe-haven assets on concerns about the euro zone's deepening debt woes, while U.S. stocks lost ground after the market debut of social network Facebook . Brent crude briefly slipped below $107 per barrel to its lowest in 2012 as the euro zone crisis raised fears of a global slowdown that could dent oil demand. The euro hovered near a four-month low, while benchmark 10-year German bond yields hit a record low. World stocks, as measured by the MSCI index , dropped 0. ...

The prospect of taking classic board game Battleship, a guessing game with no real story, and turning it into a big-budget summer film for Universal and Hasbro Studios — with clear hopes of it becoming a blockbuster franchise like Hasbro's massively successful "Transformers" — is no easy challenge, but it's one that director Peter Berg was up for.

BRUSSELS/LONDON (Reuters) - European officials are working on contingency plans in case Greece bombs out of the euro zone, the EU's trade commissioner said on Friday, while Berlin said it was prepared for all eventualities. German Finance Minister Wolfgang Schaeuble, one of Greece's harsher critics, said market turmoil fuelled by the euro zone debt crisis could last another year or two. "Regarding the crisis of confidence in the euro ... in 12 to 24 months we will see a calming of the financial markets," he said. ...

In this weekly series, Life's Little Mysteries rates the plausibility of popular science fiction concepts.

MILAN (Reuters) - Italian carmaker Fiat said 5,000 office workers at its Mirafiori factory will be laid off for three days in June and three days in July. Car sales in Italy fell 20 percent in the first three months of the year, and are in their fifth year of decline. "When we sell less, we produce less, and therefore our office staff also works less as a consequence," a spokesman said on Friday. Manufacturing workers at Mirafiori in Turin, where Fiat has its executive headquarters, have already been laid off temporarily. ...

PARIS (Reuters) - French luxury giant LVMH is struggling to retain its image as exclusive and high-end creators of $10,000 alligator handbags and goat-lined fur coats, while opening enough stores and reaching enough customers to keep profits high. Thus far LVMH has managed the balance well, but it is taking no chances, offering customers increasingly expensive and bespoke services in an effort to retain a high-end mystique around brands in danger of becoming ubiquitous. ...

MADRID (Reuters) - Spanish banks' bad loans rose in March to their highest in 18 years, underscoring the problems facing the government as it drafts in independent auditors in an attempt to reassure investors it can clean up the sector. The Bank of Spain said bad loans rose to 8.37 percent of banks' outstanding loans, the highest since August 1994 and up from 8.3 percent in February, which was also revised higher. The data was released before Spain names auditors on Monday to assess how bad the losses are likely to get, and how much cash banks will need to rebuild their balance sheets. ...

BRUSSELS (Reuters) - The European Commission and the European Central Bank are working on scenarios in case Greece has to leave the euro zone, EU trade commissioner Karel De Gucht has said. Speculation about such planning has been rife, but the comments in a newspaper interview, confirmed by a person close to De Gucht, appear to be the first time an EU official has acknowledged the existence of contingency plans being drawn up in case Greece has to drop out of the currency bloc. ...

MUNICH (Reuters) - Premium carmaker BMW is considering new production sites around the world, with one option being Mexico, a person familiar with the situation told Reuters on Friday. German daily Handelsblatt earlier cited company sources as saying BMW was examining whether to build plants in Mexico and eastern Europe. It said Slovakia's Kosice and Hungary's Miskolc were possible candidates. BMW declined to comment. Earlier this month, it denied reports it plans to build an assembly plant in Slovakia. ...

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - JPMorgan Chase & Co Chief Executive Jamie Dimon has agreed to testify before Congress over the bank's recent trading losses, which have ignited a political debate over whether large U.S. banks need to be reined in by regulators or new laws. U.S. Senate Banking Committee Chairman Tim Johnson said in a statement on Thursday that his panel will invite Dimon to appear before Congress. ...

PARIS (Reuters) - Market turmoil over the euro zone crisis could last another 12 to 24 months, German Finance Minister Wolfgang Schaeuble said on Friday, saying it was up to the Greeks to decide if they wanted to stay in the single currency. Schaeuble said he was confident France's new Socialist government would ratify Europe fiscal pact because policymakers were working on a strategy to improve growth, as demanded by French President Francois Hollande. "Regarding the crisis of confidence in the euro ... ...

QINGDAO, China (Reuters) - When metals warehouses in top consumer China are so full that workers start stockpiling iron ore in granaries and copper in car parks, you know the global economy could be in trouble. At Qingdao Port, home to one of China's largest iron ore terminals, hundreds of mounds of iron ore, each as tall as a three-storey building, spill over into an area signposted "grains storage" and almost to the street. ...

BEIJING (Reuters) - China's annual economic growth could slow to 7.5 percent in the second quarter, largely due to curbs on the property sector and headwinds from external demand, the State Information Center, a government think-tank, said in a report published on Friday. If the GDP forecast is accurate, growth in the second three months of 2012 would be the slowest since the first quarter of 2009, when the global economy was in the grip of the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression. The forecast is in line with the government's official 2012 growth target of 7. ...

MADRID (Reuters) - The Spanish government has hired Goldman Sachs to carry out an independent valuation of Bankia , the ailing bank taken over by the state last week, Spanish newspaper Expansion said on Friday. The U.S. bank will review Bankia's and its parent company BFA's books and determine within a month how much the state should inject to refloat the lender, which had to be rescued after its auditor, Deloitte, identified several gaps in last year's accounts. ...

A rocket has lifted off in Japan in the country's first commercial launch of a foreign satellite — one from South Korea designed to monitor the environment.

(Reuters) - The legal team winding down MF Global's bankruptcy estate, led by former FBI director Louis Freeh, estimates the fees charged by the team and other professionals have reached nearly $25 million since the bankruptcy was filed in October. Now a customer group is planning to ask that the case be streamlined so that those professionals -- especially Freeh -- receive less and customers receive more. On Friday, a coalition of former MF Global customers plans to argue in U.S. ...

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Shooting from the hip may have got Jamie Dimon into deep trouble -- shooting straight may help to get him out of it. The JPMorgan Chase & Co CEO made the crisis over the bank's trading loss of at least $2 billion far worse because he had assured financial markets back in April that news reports about massive bets the bank's Chief Investment Office had taken were "a tempest in a teapot". It meant that when the bank disclosed the big and probably growing loss on May 10, it not only had to admit a sizable problem, but also that it had been misleading investors. ...