The Asian Development Bank said Tuesday it will devote at least $14 billion through 2025 to help ease a worsening food crisis in the Asia-Pacific.

The development lender said it plans a comprehensive program of support to help the 1.1 billion people in the region who lack healthy diets due to poverty and soaring food prices.

The British pound stabilized in Asian trading on Tuesday after plunging to a record low a day earlier, as the Bank of England and the British government tried to soothe markets nervous about a volatile U.K. economy.

The instability began to have real-world impacts, with several British mortgage lenders withdrawing deals amid concern that interest rates may soon rise sharply.

With the cost of living surging, free hot bread distribution for the poor has been introduced in Dubai, a rich Gulf emirate where millionaires rub shoulders with hard-working migrants.

Lebanon's parliament has approved the 2022 budget, one of the conditions set by the International Monetary Fund to action a bailout for the crisis-stricken country.

Lebanon and the IMF had reached a conditional agreement on a $3 billion loan in April to help the country tackle its economic crisis, but the global lender last week condemned the "very slow" progress Beirut has made towards implementing reforms.

The Kremlin said Tuesday it was "extremely concerned" about reported leaks on Russia's Nord Stream gas pipeline to Europe through the Baltic Sea and its twin pipeline Nord Stream 2. 

Parliament on Monday approved the 2022 state budget with 63 MPs voting for it, 37 voting against it and 6 abstaining out of 106 lawmakers present in the session.

The budget includes a three-fold wage hike for public sector employees and the armed forces as well as for retirees.

Denmark's maritime traffic agency reported a gas leak in the Baltic Sea on Monday near the route of the Nord Stream 2 pipeline.

A ship carrying thousands of tons of corn and vegetable oil from war-ravaged Ukraine docked in northern Lebanon on Monday, the first such vessel since Russia's invasion of its neighbor started seven months ago.

AK Ambition, registered in Panama and loaded with 7,000 tons of corn and 20 tons of vegetable oil, arrived in the northern city of Tripoli, Lebanon's second-largest, with Ukraine Embassy officials waiting at the port.

Depositors scuffled and long lines formed at Lebanese banks Monday as they partially re-opened after a week-long closure following a slew of heists by customers desperate to access their money.

Banks in crisis-hit Lebanon partially reopened Monday following a weeklong closure amid a wave of heists in which assailants stormed at least seven bank branches earlier this month, demanding to withdraw their trapped savings.

The Association of Banks in Lebanon said last Monday it was going on strike amid bank holdups by depositors and activists — a sign of growing chaos in the tiny Mideast nation.