Sweden's economy has recovered strongly from the shock induced by the pandemic and it is time to start to phase out the broad economic support measures implemented during the crisis, the head of the Debt Office said.   

India's Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman on Tuesday unveiled a federal budget, which laid out plans to ramp up government spending to boost growth.

* Kazakhstan's lower house speaker Nurlan Nigmatulin resigned on Tuesday and President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev's former chief of staff was elected to replace him, continuing a series of top-level reshuffles after deadly unrest.

* Italian Prime Minister Mario Draghi and Russian President Vladimir Putin have had a phone call to discuss the crisis over Ukraine and bilateral relations, Draghi's office said in a statement on Tuesday.

* Russian President Vladimir Putin is not expected to talk to British Prime Minister Boris Johnson on Tuesday, but another date for the call could be agreed, the Kremlin said on Tuesday.

* Ukraine will increase the size of its armed forces by 100,000 people over three years, President Volodymyr Zelenskiy told parliament on Tuesday.

* Finland is preparing a response to a letter it received from Russia on Tuesday that asked for security guarantees from OSCE countries, Finnish foreign minister Pekka Haavisto said.

* British Prime Minister Boris Johnson arrived in the Ukrainian capital on Tuesday to meet President Volodymyr Zelenskiy amid heightened tensions with Russia.

* Qatar, one of the world's top natural gas exporters, will not be able to unilaterally replace Europe's energy needs in case of a shortage due to the crisis between Russia and Ukraine, the emirate's minister of state for energy said on Tuesday.

* World stocks looked set to leave a volatile January in the past, starting a new month on firmer ground as a slew of reassuring comments from Federal Reserve officials helped calm rate-hike jitters.

* Oil prices edged higher, trading near seven-year highs hit last week, as investors bet supplies will stay tight, with a limited production hike by major oil producers and a strong post-pandemic recovery in fuel demand.

* The COVID-19 situation at the Beijing Winter Olympics is within the "expected controllable range" despite increasing positive cases being detected, a senior official at China's Olympics Pandemic Prevention and Control Office said.

* More than half of Tokyo's hospital beds set aside for COVID-19 patients were occupied, a level that officials have previously flagged as a criterion for requesting a state of emergency.

* Russia reported a record daily number of cases as the Omicron variant of coronavirus spread across the country.

* The US CDC on Monday advised against travel to a dozen destinations, including Mexico, Brazil, Singapore, Ecuador, Kosovo, Philippines and Paraguay.

* Mexico registered 12,521 confirmed cases and 198 more deaths from COVID-19 on Monday, bringing the country's overall number of confirmed cases to 4,942,590 and the death toll to 306,091.

* The Republic of Korea reported 18,343 new cases for Monday, a highest daily record.

* Britain has started counting possible reinfections in its daily coronavirus data, changing its approach to reflect the increased number of people catching the disease for a second time.

* The number of new infections in Romania reached a record high of 40,018 in the past 24 hours, government data showed, with hospitalisations on the rise as the country's vaccine uptake lags.

* South Africa no longer requires those who test positive for COVID-19 without symptoms to isolate and has also reduced the isolation period for those with symptoms by three days.

* The Spanish medicines agency authorised pharmaceutical firm Hipra to carry out phase III trials of the COVID-19 vaccine it is developing.

* Leading South African scientists are set to investigate COVID-19 and HIV in tandem, amid mounting evidence that the collision of the two pandemics could be generating new coronavirus variants.

* Saudi Arabia has launched investments worth 6.4 billion USD in future technologies, the Saudi minister of communication and information technology said on Tuesday, as the kingdom races to diversify its economy from oil in the face of fierce regional competition.

* Discarded syringes, used test kits and old vaccine bottles from the COVID-19 pandemic have piled up to create tens of thousands of tonnes of medical waste, threatening human health and the environment, a World Health Organization report said on Tuesday.

* OPEC+ missed its oil production target by more 800,000 barrels per day (bpd) on average last year, missing out on billions of dollars in revenues and hurting members of the group which have struggled to raise cash to invest, data seen by Reuters showed.

* Nigeria on Tuesday launched a 62 billion naira (149 million USD) fund to help fight HIV/AIDS, especially targeting the prevention of mother-to-child transmissions as foreign funding for such programmes was under strain due to focus on COVID-19.

* A major winter storm is expected to wallop much of the central United States on Tuesday, bringing heaving snow, freezing rain and ice, the National Weather Service (NWS) said.

* Authorities have discovered an outbreak of what they suspect is the highly-contagious bird flu strain at a farm in the Netherlands and about 168,000 chickens will be culled, the Agriculture Ministry said in a statement on Tuesday.

Reuters