The London Olympics and Denmark's EU presidency will get a musical salute at the Vienna Philharmonic's New Year's concert on January 1, conducted for the second time by the Latvian Mariss Jansons.

Broadcast as every year around the world, the 2012 event will see the return of the Vienna Boys' Choir and, unusually, live performances by the Vienna Ballet, amid the usual Strauss waltzes and polkas.

The leaders of 23 European countries moved to tie their economies much closer together in a new treaty in their latest attempt to shore up the euro, but failed to get the four other European Union members, including Britain, to join in.

Following marathon all-night talks, the 23 decided to back a new treaty with strict oversight over national budgets, as they try to convince markets that the euro has a future in the wake of a crippling debt crisis.

Japanese electronics giant Panasonic said Thursday it has been fined 7.7 million euros ($10.3 million) for violating European competition law in connection with sales of refrigerator parts.

The firm said it had been "fully cooperating" in a European Commission probe on compressors, which are used to cool refrigerators and freezers, that Panasonic and other manufacturers sold on the continent.

A Copenhagen hotel will continue reserving a whole floor for women, despite a recent ruling that doing so is discriminatory and illegal, the hotel director said Tuesday.

Last May, the Bella Sky Hotel in central Copenhagen opened a floor dubbed the Bella Donna with 20 specially decorated rooms for women, and no men allowed.

Denmark’s queen Sunday appointed the country’s first woman prime minister after Social Democratic leader Helle Thorning-Schmidt reached a deal on a coalition cabinet with two other parties.

"I have been asked to form the next government," Thorning-Schmidt, 44, daughter-in-law of former British Labor party leader Neil Kinnock, said as she left the Royal Palace to applause from some 400 bystanders.

Somali pirates have released a Danish family, with three teenage children, and two other Danes who they took hostage in February, the Danish foreign ministry said Wednesday.

"The seven Danes have been released and brought to safety," the ministry said in a statement, adding that all were doing well under the circumstances.

A shooting outside a Copenhagen mosque after prayers to mark the end of the Muslim fasting month of Ramadan has left one person dead and at least two people injured, police said Tuesday.

Police spokesman Lau Thygesen said the shooting took place outside the Muslim Culture Institute, located in the Danish capital's western Vesterbro district, and that the roads surrounding the mosque and a nearby car park have been cordoned off. Thygesen could not immediately provide more details.

Religious-linked violence and abuse rose around the world between 2006 and 2009, with Christians and Muslims the most common targets, according to a private U.S. study released Tuesday.

"Over the three-year period studied, incidents of either government or social harassment were reported against Christians in 130 countries (66 percent) and against Muslims in 117 countries (59 percent)," said the Pew Research Center's Forum on Religion and Public Life study.

A magnum of wine from a French vineyard owned by Denmark's Prince Consort Henrik has been sold in Beijing for one million Yuan (110,000 Euros, 155,000 dollars), the vineyard said Thursday.

Guillaume Bardin, director of the Chateau de Cayx vineyard in southwest France, said the magnum was sold in the Chinese capital on Wednesday "during a charity auction to benefit an association that cares for the disabled".

An entirely new strain of the drug-resistant MRSA superbug has been found in cow's milk and people in Britain and Denmark, a study published on Friday said.

The previously unseen variant "potentially poses a public health problem," said lead researcher Mark Holmes, senior lecturer in preventive veterinary medicine at Britain's Cambridge University.