Mark Brooks

The euro rose as high as $1.3479, the highest since Feb. 2012. The euro was worth $1.3371 late Thursday.

A spokeswoman for the company, Molly Carter, says the move was in the works for the past year after the company began "hearing rumblings" from consumers about the ingredient.

Apple's stock has been falling since an earnings report on Wednesday.

Benchmark oil fell 14 cents to $95.81 a barrel in morning trading on the New York Mercantile Exchange. It was up slightly before the release of the housing data.

The ECB launched the unprecedented €1 trillion ($1.3 trillion) loan operation in two tranches at the end of 2011 and again in February 2012 in an attempt to relieve stress on banks at the height of the debt crisis in the group of the 17 European Union countries that use the euro.

The nine-day strike -- which knocked out a system serving more than a million people a day -- was the biggest labor unrest Greece's uneasy, conservative-led governing coalition faced since taking over last June.

Obama also named Richard Cordray to stay on as head of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.

The euro rose to $1.3367 in afternoon trading from $1.3321 late Wednesday.

Not since the Great Depression had an administration inherited so many grave financial threats at once.

Justice Julian Flaux ruled Thursday that granting anonymity would be an affront to open justice.

A White House official said the president would announce White's nomination during a ceremony in the State Dining Room Thursday afternoon.

"To try and shoehorn countries into a centralized political union would be a great mistake and Britain would not be a part of it," he said in a speech at the World Economic Forum in the Swiss resort of Davos.

Benchmark oil gained 72 cents to $95.95 a barrel on the New York Mercantile Exchange in morning trading.

Energy prices were mixed. Benchmark crude oil fell in New York. Brent crude rose in London.

Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev and a bevy of top Russian officials and CEOs are trying to make the case at a forum for the world's business elite that Russia is THE place to invest in 2013.

Bank of Canada Governor Mark Carney said the global economic outlook is slightly weaker than what he projected in October.

Benchmark oil dropped $1.45, or 1.5 percent, to finish at $95.23 per barrel, the first decline of more than 1 percent since Dec. 21.

It's a reflection of how big banks -- blamed by some politicians and the public for the 2007 financial crisis and the resulting Great Recession -- are still grappling with pressure from recent scandals and moves toward increasingly complex regulation.

The IMF says that it expects global growth of 3.5 percent in 2013, down from its previous estimate of 3.6 percent.

The countries' total government debt relative to their annual economic output was barely changed at 90 percent of gross domestic product in the third quarter of 2012 compared with 89.9 percent for three months earlier, the EU's statistics office Eurostat reported.