The World Bank has approved an $80 million grant for Myanmar to support its reform drive, resuming assistance for the former pariah nation after a quarter-century absence.

The money is for infrastructure projects in villages in poor rural areas, the bank said in a statement Friday after its board of directors in Washington approved a new strategy for helping the country formerly known as Burma.

European stocks rose on Thursday when company results grabbed investors' attention before a new batch of US economic data, and after Wall Street kicked back into action after its hurricane shutdown.

In midday deals, London's benchmark FTSE 100 index of top companies added 0.52 percent to 5,813.48 points, Frankfurt's DAX 30 advanced 0.52 percent to 7,298.01 points and in Paris the CAC 40 gained 0.55 percent to 3,448.23.

Greece is close to a deal with international creditors that would allow much-needed funds to flow to Athens, although many questions remain, a senior German official said on Thursday.

Speaking to reporters before a meeting of the Group of 20 leading countries this weekend in Mexico, the official, who requested anonymity, said: "We are close to an agreement on Greece and close to an accord within the troika."

Cash earmarked for tsunami reconstruction work was diverted to unrelated projects, a Japanese government audit shows, as residents of the devastated northeast vent frustration over the slow pace of rebuilding.

Parts of the 14.9 trillion yen ($187 billion) were used to fund an array of unconnected works, including road-building on the southern island of Okinawa and boosting security for Japan's controversial whale hunt.

British Prime Minister David Cameron was battling to reclaim authority on Thursday, after rebels in his Conservative party delivered his first major parliamentary defeat by defying him over the EU budget.

Lawmakers passed a motion late Wednesday urging Cameron to insist on a real-terms cut in the European Union's trillion-euro 2014-2020 budget at a summit in Brussels next month.

The Greek recession will be even worse than expected next year, according to a draft budget tabled in parliament on Wednesday.

The country -- which risks running out of money in two weeks -- will run a bigger public deficit than forecast a month ago in a previous draft and the economy is expected to shrink by 4.5 percent in 2013, compared with the previous forecast of 3.8 percent.

Spain's number two bank, BBVA, said Wednesday it had taken a battering from the slumping value of property-related assets, leading to a third-quarter net profit plunge.

Net profit dived 81.8 percent from a year earlier to 146 million euros ($190 million) in the third quarter, the bank said. Net banking income surged 18 percent, however, to 3.88 billion euros.

British bank Barclays, which was rocked by a rate-rigging scandal earlier this year, said on Wednesday it fell into a nine-month net loss as it took a vast charge on the value of its own debt.

Barclays, which also took a large provision for insurance mis-selling, said in a results statement that losses after taxation stood at £200 million ($321 million, 248 million euros) in the nine months to September.

The United Arab Emirates cabinet on Tuesday approved the 2013 federal budget, which projects a rise in both spending and revenue and without any shortfall.

Spending is projected at 44.6 billion dirhams ($12.1 billion) up 6.7 percent on the 2012 expenditure of 41.8 billion dirhams ($11.4 billion), according to the official WAM news agency.

Swiss banking giant UBS announced nearly 10,000 job cuts worldwide on Tuesday, saying that the costs of restructuring its hard-hit investment bank had pushed it deep into loss in the third quarter.

The costs switched the Swiss bank's third-quarter results into a 2.2-billion Swiss franc net loss compared to the 1.0 billion net profit it had reported during the July-September period last year.