Germany's Social Democrats (SPD), stung by defeat in a state election on Sunday, fell to their lowest level in more than three months in a poll on Tuesday, underlining the scale of the task they face to oust Angela Merkel in a September election.

French president-elect Emmanuel Macron won an offer of support from Socialist ex-prime minister Manuel Valls on Tuesday as he and his aides worked on strategy ahead of parliamentary elections that will be crucial to his ambitious reform plans.

London's River Thames has been the lifeblood of the British capital since the city's origins as a Roman garrison town around 2,000 years ago.

Fly-blown corpses of Islamic State militants (IS) littered the streets of a district in Mosul on Tuesday as U.S.-backed Iraqi forces chipped away at the last remaining handful of districts under the jihadists' control.

Muslim militants fighting for a separate state in the south of predominantly Buddhist Thailand were suspected of carrying out a car-bomb attack on Tuesday outside a supermarket in the city of Pattani that wounded 60 people, authorities said.

The Bank of England said on Tuesday it will set out plans by the middle of this year to widen access to Britain's interbank payment system, part of efforts to boost the country's financial infrastructure.