Debt-limit talks shifted into an encouraging new phase Tuesday as President Joe Biden and House Speaker Kevin McCarthy named top emissaries to negotiate a deal to avert an unprecedented national default. Biden cut short an upcoming overseas trip in hopes of closing an agreement before a June 1 deadline.

The fresh set of negotiators means discussions are now largely narrowed to what the White House and McCarthy will accept in order to allow lawmakers to raise the debt limit in the coming days. The speaker said after a meeting with Biden and congressional leaders that a deal was "possible" by week's end, even as — in McCarthy's view — the two sides remained far apart for the moment.

Russia has frozen the bank accounts of Finland's diplomatic representations in Moscow and St. Petersburg, disrupting money flow and forcing the country's missions to resort to cash payments, the Finnish foreign minister said Wednesday.

Pekka Haavisto said Moscow's move at the end of April breaches the Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations and Helsinki has delivered a diplomatic note on the matter to Russia.

Iran and Russia on Wednesday signed an agreement to construct the final part in the International North–South Transport Corridor (INSTC) that connects Russia to the Gulf and India.

The INSTC, a freight network of ship, rail and road routes, covers some 7,200 kilometres (4,475 miles) between Russia, Azerbaijan, Iran and India.

The World Bank's Lebanon Economic Monitor presented in its spring issue findings from recent World Bank work on Lebanon.

It examined the continuous decline in the Lebanese economy amidst what it called "a normalization of the state of the crisis."

The United Nations is racing to extend a deal that has allowed shipments of Ukrainian grain through the Black Sea to parts of the world struggling with hunger, helping ease a global food crisis exacerbated by the war Russia launched more than a year ago.

The breakthrough accord that the U.N. and Turkey brokered with the warring sides last summer came with a separate agreement to ease shipments of Russian food and fertilizer that Moscow insists hasn't been applied.

Chinese leaders face pressure to shore up a slowing economic recovery and generate jobs after consumer spending and other activity in April were weaker than expected and a survey found 1 in 5 young workers in cities was unemployed.

Retail sales accelerated following the end of anti-virus restrictions in December but were below forecasts, official data showed Tuesday. Factory output edged down compared with March.

Cyprus and Israel are working on a deal to build a pipeline that will convey natural gas from both countries to the east Mediterranean island nation, where it will be liquefied for export by ship to Europe and potentially elsewhere, the Cypriot energy minister said Monday.

Minister Giorgos Papanastasiou said Monday he would soon visit Israel to hammer out a formal agreement. Once the deal is signed, the pipeline could be completed in 18 months.

The European Union's executive body raised its economic growth forecast, saying Europe had dodged a winter recession that was feared amid an energy crisis but warning that stubbornly high inflation is likely to keep hurting the economy by sapping people's ability to spend.

The outlook for the 20 countries using the euro currency improved to growth of 1.1% this year from 0.9% in February's predictions, the European Commission said in its spring forecast Monday.

Building factories to boost job creation and make France more independent — that's President Emmanuel Macron's ambition for the French economy.

It's a big challenge, as France reels from protracted protests, rising food and energy prices and other fallout from the Ukraine war.

Less than two months into his $44 billion purchase of Twitter, Elon Musk declared that whoever took over as the company's CEO " must like pain a lot." Then he promised he'd step down as soon as he found a replacement "foolish enough" to want the job.

That person, Musk announced Friday, is Linda Yaccarino, a highly-regarded advertising executive from NBCUniversal. She'll start in six weeks. How long she'll last might depend on her pain tolerance.