Banks seized nearly 40,000 homes in Spain last year due to unpaid mortgages, official data showed Friday, as a sharp economic downturn and record unemployment took its toll.

A total of 39,167 homes were seized in 2012, the Bank of Spain said in a bulletin based on a survey of lenders which approve over 85 percent of mortgages in the country.

Bloomberg News said Friday it was curbing reporter access to certain data on its financial terminals after reports claiming its journalists used the devices to spy on Wall Street banks.

A Bloomberg spokesman acknowledged that "limited customer relationship data has long been available to our journalists," without "security-level" data, trading data or messages.

The Group of Seven top economies are set for a second day of talks on Saturday aimed at spurring growth amid U.S.-Europe divisions over the scale of austerity and renewed market focus on "currency wars" after the yen hit new dollar lows.

Our task is to nurture the recovery," British finance minister George Osborne said Friday as he opened the gathering amid pressure on Britain and other indebted European nations to scale back deep cuts to state spending, in order to support fragile growth.

Cyprus authorities have dropped controls on money transfers and withdrawals for international clients of four foreign banks with branches or subsidiaries in the bailed-out country.

The Finance Ministry said in a statement Friday that the exemption extends to the Cyprus branches of Lebanon's BLOM Bank, the Lebanese and Gulf Bank, Russia's OJSC Promsvyazbank and Russian Commercial Bank.

Preliminary surveys of Lebanese offshore fields show reserves of 30 trillion cubic feet of natural gas and 660 million barrels of oil, caretaker Energy and Water Minister Jebran Bassil said on Thursday, adding that production could begin within four years.

Speaking at the Arab Economic Forum, Bassil said scanning was now complete on 70 percent of the country's territorial waters -- an area of some 15,000 square kilometers (5,791 square miles).

Italian Prime Minister Enrico Letta on Friday called for the European Union summit in June to adopt a strategy to combat youth unemployment with concrete measures to be implemented immediately.

"Europe has to provide answers on youth unemployment," Letta said after talks in Rome with European Parliament speaker Martin Schulz.

North Korean visits to China have multiplied over recent years, a Chinese newspaper reported, underscoring growing political and business links between the isolated nuclear-armed state and its sole major ally.

There were a total of 180,600 visits by North Koreans to China in 2012, nearly twice as many as the 103,900 only three years previously, the investigative Southern Weekly said in its latest edition, citing official data.

Finance ministers and central bank chiefs from the Group of Seven leading economies will meet in the English countryside on Friday for talks on spurring growth, amid U.S.-Europe divisions over the scale of austerity.

The G7 -- comprising Britain, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan and the United States -- is expected to build on last month's wider Group of 20 meeting, while looking ahead to next month's G8 heads of state summit in Northern Ireland.

German exports, the driving force of Europe's top economy, are being weighed down by the eurozone debt crisis, data showed Friday, amid otherwise promising signs.

Seasonally adjusted data showed that Germany's trade surplus fell slightly in March to 17.6 billion euros ($23.0 billion) from 17.7 billion euros in February, according to figures from the federal statistics office.

Australia's central bank scaled back its forecasts Friday, warning of muted growth and a "subdued" outlook as the commodities-driven economy transitions away from mining.

The Reserve Bank of Australia said it expected growth of 2.5 percent and inflation of 2.25 percent for the year ended December 31, compared with 2.0-3.0 percent for both forecast in February.