Prices for basic provisions have nearly doubled in Syria and the U.N. food agency failed to deliver essential food supplies to 100,000 people last month because of the fighting, it said Tuesday.

"We can see that with the increasing violence in some areas, (food) prices have kept going up since the start of the fighting," World Food Programme (WFP) spokeswoman Elisabeth Byrs told reporters in Geneva.

Kuwait's Emir Sheikh Sabah al-Ahmad al-Sabah Tuesday proposed setting up a $2 billion fund to fight poverty in Asia and said the Gulf state will donate $300 million to its corpus.

"In a bid to fight poverty and improve the standard of living ... I propose an initiative to set up a $2 billion program," Sheikh Sabah said as he opened the first Asia Cooperation Dialogue (ACD) summit.

Investor sentiment is cautiously improving in Germany, as fears about a break-up of the euro have eased somewhat in recent weeks, data showed on Tuesday.

Nevertheless, investors' assessment of the current situation in Europe's top economy is worse than it has been since June 2010, the data showed.

Anti-corruption investigators have opened an inquiry into Iraq's central bank tied to alleged manipulation of the local currency's value against the U.S. dollar, officials said on Tuesday.

While the head of the parliamentary anti-corruption committee and the government anti-graft watchdog both said no charges had been brought, the former said 30 arrest warrants had been issued, including for the Central Bank of Iraq's (CBI) governor and his deputy.

South Korea's Hyundai Heavy Industries said Tuesday it had won a $3.2 billion order to build a thermal power plant in Saudi Arabia.

Under the deal with Saudi's energy authorities, Hyundai will build a 2,640- megawatt power plant at a location 20 kilometers (12 miles) south of Jeddah and near the Red Sea by 2017, Hyundai said in a statement.

Toyota plans to halt production next week at its biggest assembly plant in China, reports said Tuesday, with demand for Japanese cars slumping because of a bitter territorial row between Tokyo and Beijing.

Toyota, the world's biggest automaker in the first half of 2012, said it will suspend production for a week starting Monday at its Tianjin FAW plant in the country's northeast, the leading Asahi Shimbun reported.

Qatari Prime Minister Sheikh Hamad bin Jassem Al-Thani said Monday that the gas-rich Gulf state had no political motivations behind its business investments in France.

"Qatar is not a country with great political ambitions ... and it wants no political role from its investments in France," Sheikh Hamad said at a press conference in Doha.

Greece's deputy finance minister on Monday said that international creditors had underestimated the impact of three years of austerity on the country's deep recession by using a faulty calculation.

Christos Staikouras said the actual fiscal multiplier, or negative effect, of austerity on growth is "around 1.0, not 0.5," the number used by inspectors from the European Union, International Monetary Fund and the European Central Bank to draft their fiscal policy recommendations.

US scholars Alvin Roth and Lloyd Shapley won the Nobel Economics Prize on Monday for their work on the functioning of markets and how best to match supply and demand.

The work by Roth and Shapley helps match donors of human organs with patients in need of a transplant, or students with universities, or Internet search engines that auction out space for advertisers.

Japanese mobile carrier Softbank on Monday announced a monster deal to take control of U.S.-based Sprint Nextel for about $20 billion in the biggest-ever overseas acquisition by a Japanese firm.

Softbank said the ambitious takeover would see it acquire 70 percent of Sprint Nextel, the third-biggest U.S. mobile firm behind AT&T and Verizon Wireless, with the deal set for completion in the middle of next year.