Japan's current account surplus shrank 68.7 percent in September from a year earlier, hit by lower exports and falling returns on overseas investment, official data showed Thursday.

The surplus in the current account, the broadest measure of Japan's trade with the rest of the world, stood at 503.6 billion yen ($6.3 billion) in September, the finance ministry said.

A huge protest outside the Greek parliament turned violent Wednesday ahead of a late-night vote on a deeply unpopular new austerity bill, as demonstrators hurled petrol bombs and police fired tear gas to disperse them.

As a general strike called by the two main labor unions paralyzed the country for a second straight day, more than 70,000 people turned out to protest the new 18.5-billion-euro ($23.6-billion) belt-tightening package.

Iraq has expelled Turkish energy firm TPAO from an exploration deal in the south of the country, an oil ministry official said on Wednesday, the latest sign of worsening ties between Baghdad and Ankara.

"The cabinet decided to exclude the company TPAO from Block 9," said Abdul Mehdi al-Amidi, head of the ministry's contracting and licensing department, referring to an exploration block awarded in May to a consortium made up of Kuwait Energy, TPAO and Dragon Oil of the United Arab Emirates.

France unveiled Tuesday tax breaks for businesses worth up to 20 billion euros a year in a bid to address the flagging competitiveness at the heart of the country's economic malaise.

"France needs a new model that will put it back at the center of the world economy," Prime Minister Jean-Marc Ayrault said, adding the government had decided to implement virtually all of the measures recommended in a report drawn up at its request by industrialist Louis Gallois.

Munich Re, the world's biggest reinsurer, said it was raising its full-year profit forecast, despite the expected claims losses from superstorm Sandy that battered the United States last week.

"The result for the first three quarters is more than pleasing. Despite Hurricane Sandy, we are very optimistic of realizing a profit in the region of 3.0 billion euros for 2012," said chief financial officer Joerg Schneider.

The cost of the clean-up and compensation after Japan's Fukushima nuclear disaster may double to $125 billion, the plant's operator said Wednesday.

Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO) said decontamination of irradiated areas and compensating those whose jobs or home lives have been affected would cost more than the five trillion yen it estimated in April.

Fear of a 2008-style financial catastrophe is holding back the global economic recovery but investors must show more confidence, Canada's Prime Minister Stephen Harper said Wednesday.

Businesses worldwide want to invest but are "holding back because they fear something strange and unexpected could happen", the Canadian leader said in speech inaugurating the Indian World Economic Forum in New Delhi.

The world's leading economies pressed the United States and Europe to swiftly resolve their fiscal challenges on Monday, warning that they threaten to harm global growth.

Finance ministers and central bankers from the Group of 20 leading developed and emerging nations vowed to do "everything necessary" to strengthen the world economy, reduce financial market volatility and generate jobs.

Japan's Suzuki said Tuesday it would shut down its money-losing car business in the United States and file for bankruptcy, citing a strong yen and weak demand for its small cars in the U.S. market.

But American Suzuki Motor Corp. (ASMC), which said it has debts of $346 million, added that it would continue selling motorcycles, all-terrain vehicles and marine products -- such as outboard motors -- in the country.

The French seismic exploration specialist CGGVeritas and the oil group Saudi Aramco unveiled on Tuesday a deal to jointly develop a robotic technique to explore seabeds for reserves of crude oil.

Dubbed SpiceRack, the technique is "based on the deployment of self-propelled recording nodes," and could "lead to a step-change in the efficient delivery of reservoir quality seismic data," a statement said.