The International Monetary Fund on Wednesday approved a $1.33 billion (1.0 billion euro) bailout loan for Cyprus and released the first $110.7 million to the Cypriot government.

The loan is part of a combined $13 billion (10 billion euro) emergency financing deal set by the IMF and the European Stability Mechanism that aims to support the government as it seeks to stabilize the ravaged Cypriot banking sector.

France fell into recession in the first quarter of this year with the economy shrinking by 0.2 percent, official figures showed Wednesday, in further bad news for President Francois Hollande's embattled Socialist government.

The data from the official INSEE statistics agency came exactly a year after Hollande's inauguration, with the president already struggling to tackle a 16-year high in unemployment and record-low approval ratings.

Asia-focused bank HSBC announced on Wednesday that it will make another $2-3 billion (1.5-2.3 billion euros) of new cost savings by 2016, extending its restructuring plans.

The lender said in a statement that it will seek the additional sustainable cost savings on top of its wide-ranging restructuring process that was launched in 2011.

Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard's tough exterior cracked Wednesday as she choked back tears while introducing a bill into parliament on disability reforms.

The country's first female leader, seen as a hard-talking survivor in male-dominated politics, spoke in a quivering voice of people with disabilities she had recently met.

China's central bank, which manages the world's largest foreign exchange reserves, is looking into a growing scandal over the access journalists at Bloomberg News had to potentially sensitive data, reports said Wednesday.

The People's Bank of China (PBoC) is the latest major financial organisation to examine the controversy involving the financial news wire, whose terminals are used by officials at many of the world's most important financial institutions and banks.

Borrowing costs for Spain eased as it raised 4.047 billion euros in short-term debt on Tuesday, a sign of further-strengthening market confidence in the crisis-hit country.

The sale offered further encouragement for the eurozone's fourth-biggest economy, which last year resisted speculation that it would need a sovereign bailout to rescue its public finances.

Consumer prices in Hungary rose by 1.7 percent in April over 12 months, the lowest inflation rate since 1974, the national statistics office KSH said on Thursday.

The rate was down from a 2.2-percent in March.

Treasurer Wayne Swan vowed to keep Australia among the world's top economies and talked up his party's poll hopes Tuesday as he prepared to unveil a lean budget with little to offer a hostile electorate.

Swan's center-left Labor party is on track to lose September 14 elections in a landslide to the Tony Abbott-led conservatives according to opinion polls -- a prediction given weight on budget eve by independent lawmaker Tony Windsor.

European finance ministers bid Tuesday to unlock a trillion-euro annual crackdown on tax evasion, under pressure from EU leaders looking for new measures to boost job creation and growth at their Brussels summit next week.

The meeting is expected to be laborious, with Austrian seeking guarantees before agreeing to the automatic sharing of bank records and amid squabbling over the need for treaty change to fix a seemingly stalled banking union sold as the final fix for the debt crisis.

Bangladesh offers the global garment industry something unique: Millions of workers who quickly churn out huge amounts of well-made underwear, jeans and T-shirts for the lowest wages in the world.

But since a building collapse April 24 killed at least 1,100 garment workers in Bangladesh in one of the deadliest industrial tragedies in history, the country has gone from one of the industry's greatest assets to one of its biggest liabilities.