Romania, the IMF and the EU have reached agreement on a new, two-year deal that will give the Balkan country access to a 4.0-billion-euro credit line, an IMF official said on Wednesday.

"The authorities intend to treat the arrangement as precautionary and will not draw" any money, Andrea Schaechter, head of an IMF mission to Romania, told a press conference.

Further evidence has emerged that the eurozone economy is on the mend.

Figures Wednesday from Eurostat, the EU's statistics office, show that the number of unemployed across the 17 European Union countries that use the euro fell in June to 19.27 million from the previous month's 19.29 million. That's the first fall since April 2011.

The statutes of the new development bank planned by the BRICS group of five emerging powers could be ready next year, Brazil's foreign minister said here Tuesday.

"We made good progress during the last meeting in Durban and the expectation is that in the 2014 meeting in Brazil, enough progress has been made to conclude the statutes of the bank," Antonio Patriota told reporters.

Mexico's enormous and worsening poverty figures underscore that authorities have not made fighting it a top priority, Amnesty International charged Tuesday.

The government this week reported that the number of Mexicans living in poverty rose from 52.8 million in 2010 to 53.3 million in 2012 -- representing almost half the population of 112 million.

Spain's recession eased in the second quarter, official data showed on Tuesday, raising hopes the eurozone's fourth largest economy may finally be on the road to recovery.

Gross domestic product shrank by 0.1 percent in the three months ending June as booming exports helped to offset weak domestic demand, compared to a 0.5 percent contraction in the first quarter, data from the national statistics institute showed.

Deutsche Bank, Germany's biggest bank, said on Tuesday its net profits were halved in the second quarter, as it made massive provisions to meet litigation costs.

The bank's net profits fell to 335 million euros ($444 million) for the three months ending June, down from 666 million in the second quarter last year.

France's rush to tax nationals who inherit from Swiss residents will backfire by spurring many wealthy Frenchmen to move to Switzerland, taking their tax euros with them, observers say.

France "has shot itself in the foot, several times," Claudine Schmid, a French parliamentarian of the rightwing UMP party, told Agence France Presse Monday.

Mini versions of Richard Wagner's best-known works are on offer in Bayreuth this year for those who baulk at the prospect of sitting through operas lasting five hours and more.

While Wagnerians from all over the world traipse up to Festspielhaus theatre built to the composer's own designs on the town's Green Hill, children and opera novices can get a taste for his music in slimmed-down arrangements of two of his greatest masterpieces.

Organised crime is so big globally that were it a country, it would be part of the G20 group of major economies, the Australian government said Tuesday.

Releasing the Australian Crime Commission's biennial report on the issue, Home Affairs Minister Jason Clare said organised crime had boomed and grown more complex with the advent of the Internet.

A senior Iranian official announced the country has ordered 315 subway cars from China in place of payment for oil that can't be transferred due to sanctions.

Amir Jafarpour, who is deputy head of the Transportation and Fuel Management Committee, said officials were forced to order the coaches because billions of dollars of payments from crude oil exports to China have not been transferred to Iran because of sanctions.