Miner Anglo American is the biggest faller on the FTSE 100. It's down almost 8% after it said that it would close its Drayton coal mine in Australia. A state panel had recommended that the government should block an expansion of the mine.

Image source, Getty Images

Starting from 1 January 2016, Russia will suspend visa-free travel with Turkey, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov has said. He was speaking at a joint news conference in Moscow with his Syrian counterpart Walid al-Mu'allim, shown on the Russian pro-Kremlin, privately-owned, rolling news station LifeNews TV.

Image source, Getty Images

Wall Street is slightly lower on a shortened trading day, as investors turn their focus to the crucial US holiday shopping season and Disney weighs on indexes.

Wall Street was slightly lower on Friday, a shortened trading day, as investors turn their focus to the crucial U.S. holiday shopping season and Disney weighed on indexes.

Dow component Walt Disney fell around 3.3% after the media giant said late on Wednesday that its ESPN sports network lost 3 million subscribers in 2015.

The British Retail Consortium has predicted that UK Black Friday sales could top £1bn, although a number of retailers have declined to participate.

Are large-scale economic factors boosting consumer confidence?

Andrew Lewis, senior lecturer in retail operations at Manchester Metropolitan University, says Chancellor George Osborne's U-turn on tax credits, plus unemployment falling to a seven year low, a flat rate of inflation leading to low mortgage rates, and "excellent credit card deals" should mean consumers are more confident.

Image source, Macy's

This is the scene from department store Macy's in Manhattan at midnight last night as around 15,000 shoppers queued to get into the main entrance.

The government plans to scrap grants for student nurses, but union Unison says this will lead to "major shortages".

The union asked 2,000 student nurses for their opinion, and nine in ten said they would not have applied for their nursing degree without access to a bursary, the union said.

Newly qualified nurses will end up earning £22,000, but could have debts of more than £50,000, the union added.     

Image source, Getty Images

HSBC is closing its private banking unit in India "after a strategic review", HSBC says. Banks including Royal Bank of Scotland and Morgan Stanley have recently sold their onshore India private banking units as part of restructuring.

Maria Bueno left El Salvador as a teenager and now runs five businesses in the US. She tells Business Daily how attitudes towards women in the workplace have changed.

The Bank of England says it has fined one of UK's oldest private banks £1.3m after a unit of its parent company secretly borrowed large sums of money from it to tackle cashflow problems.

Raphaels Bank, which dates back to 1787, failed to properly supervise a firm within its parent group, Lenlyn Holdings, which helped to operate cash machines, the Bank of England says.

"Raphaels put its safety and soundness at risk by failing to have adequate controls in place," Bank deputygGovernor Andrew Bailey, who is the head of its Prudential Regulation Authority (PRA), said in a statement.

"This behaviour could have had severe consequences ... which is why the PRA has taken the relatively unusual step of levying a fine in this case." 

It's not looking mega busy in New York either. 

The Institute of Customer Service's chief executive Jo Causon has some advice for retailers.

Some analysis from Keith Richardson, managing director of retail at Lloyds Bank Commercial Banking.

BBC business reporter and motoring enthusiast, Theo Leggett tweets:

Watch for any yawning colleagues this morning.  

Between the hours of midnight and 01:00 online sales were more than double last year, according to data from PCA Predict.

Image source, PCA Predict

Image source, PA

Asda may not be taking part in Black Friday, but it has cut the price of petrol to under £1 a litre. That's the first time it's priced fuel at less than a £1 since 2009.

But it's a temporary deal, just lasting until Monday when the price will revert to 106.7p per litre.

Financial Analyst Louise Cooper often writes on supermarkets. This is from her latest blog.

Greece's economy contracted faster than previously estimated in the three months to the end of September data from the country's statistics service Elstat has shown.

The economy shrank by 0.9% in the period compared to the previous three months. That's more than the first estimate of a 0.5% contraction.

Year-on-year the economy shrank 1.1% in the third quarter versus a previously estimated decline of 0.4%.