* Cambodia exported 149,447 tons of milled rice to China in the first five months of 2022, up 23.6 percent over the same period last year, the Cambodian Rice Federation (CRF) said on Saturday.
* The economic team of the Philippines’s incoming administration of President-elect Ferdinand Romualdez Marcos has vowed to push for the ratification of the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP) agreement, the world's largest free trade area representing 30 percent of the global gross domestic product (GDP).
* Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese has confirmed he will travel to Indonesia on Sunday in a bid to boost relationship between the two nations.
* US President Joe Biden publicly acknowledged on Friday that he may travel to Saudi Arabia soon, a trip that multiple sources say is expected and could include talks with Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman.
* China's State Flood Control and Drought Relief Headquarters on Saturday upgraded its emergency response for flood control from Level IV to Level III as torrential rain continued to batter southern part of the country.
* The Republic of Korea and the United States staged their first combined military exercises involving an American aircraft carrier in more than four years, Seoul's military said on Saturday, amid heightened tensions on the Korean Peninsula.
* Russian President Vladimir Putin on Friday said people were trying to blame Russia for problems on the global food market and denied Moscow had imposed a ban on grain exports from Ukrainian ports.
* Ukrainian Prime Minister Denys Shmyhal said Friday that the country has begun the first stage of its post-conflict reconstruction, the government's press service reported.
* Russian President Vladimir Putin discussed political, trade and economic cooperation, as well as the impact of Western sanctions with the Chairperson of the African Union (AU) and Senegalese President Macky Sall in the southern Russian city of Sochi on Friday.
* A NATO summit in Madrid at the end of June is not a deadline for a decision on Sweden and Finland's membership bids, which are opposed by Turkey, the Turkish president's spokesman said on Saturday.
* Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei on Saturday blamed recent protests in Iran on foreign “enemies” seeking to overthrow the Islamic Republic.
* Turkey summoned the Greek ambassador to Ankara to the foreign ministry to protest about what it said was Greece providing opportunities for terrorist groups to conduct activities, state-owned Anadolu news agency reported on Friday.
* Germany's Bundestag, the lower house of parliament, on Friday approved creation of the 100 billion euro (107.2 billion USD) special defence fund that Chancellor Olaf Scholz announced in response to the Russia-Ukraine crisis.
* Ethiopia's council of ministers have approved a budget for the upcoming 2022/23 fiscal year of 786.6 billion birr (15 billion USD), an increase of 16.6% from the previous year, Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed's office said on Friday.
* US employers added 390,000 jobs in May amid continued labor market tightness, with the unemployment rate unchanged at 3.6 percent, the US Labor Department reported on Friday.
* Two United Nations peacekeepers were killed in Mali on Friday and two more injured when their vehicle hit an improvised explosive device, U.N. spokesman Stephane Dujarric said.
* Russia has successfully launched its Soyuz-2.1a carrier rocket with the Progress MS-20 cargo ship from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan, Russia's state space corporation Roscosmos announced Friday.
* Israel arrested four Palestinian fishermen off the Mediterranean coast of Gaza on Saturday, Palestinian and Israeli sources said.
* US health officials on Friday urged doctors to test for monkeypox if they suspect cases, saying there may be community-level spread but that it was too soon to say if the disease will become endemic and that the overall public health risk remained low.
* Canada has confirmed 58 cases of monkeypox, the country's Chief Public Health Officer Theresa Tam said on Friday.
* The Chinese mainland Friday reported 21 locally-transmitted confirmed COVID-19 cases, with 11 in Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region and five each in Beijing and Shanghai, according to the National Health Commission's report Saturday.
* India has approved Hyderabad-based drugmaker Biological E's COVID-19 vaccine as the first mix-and-match booster dose in the country, the company said on Saturday.
* Iraq has reported an outbreak of highly pathogenic H5N8 avian influenza, commonly called bird flu, on a farm southeast of Baghdad, the World Organisation for Animal Health (OIE) said on Friday.
