* Sri Lankan Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe has declared a state of emergency in his role as the acting president, after President Gotabaya Rajapaksa fled to the Maldives on Wednesday, leading to more protests amid an economic crisis.
* Conservative lawmakers will vote on Wednesday to narrow the field of eight candidates hoping to succeed Boris Johnson as party leader and prime minister, as rival camps trade barbs in an increasingly fractious contest for the leadership.
* Pacific island leaders welcomed a pledge by the United States to triple aid to the region to combat illegal fishing, enhance maritime security and tackle climate change, after decades of stagnant US funding.
* Visiting Chinese State Councilor and Foreign Minister Wang Yi said in Kuala Lumpur on Tuesday that China and Malaysia have reached a five-point consensus on further developing their relations.
* Israel and Austria signed on Tuesday an agreement on establishing "a comprehensive strategic partnership" to expand security cooperation.
* Russian, Ukrainian and Turkish military delegations are set to meet U.N. officials in Istanbul on Wednesday for talks on a possible deal to resume safe exports of Ukraine grain from the major Black Sea port of Odesa as a global food crisis worsens.
* The International Monetary Fund on Tuesday warned that avoiding recession in the United States will be "increasingly challenging" as it again cut its 2022 US growth forecast to 2.3% from 2.9% in late June as recent data showed weakening consumer spending.
* OPEC expects global oil demand to rise in 2023 but at a slower pace than 2022, the producer group said in its first forecast for next year, citing still robust economic growth and progress in containing COVID-19 in China.
* Germany will completely stop buying Russian coal on Aug. 1 and Russian oil on Dec. 31, marking a major shift in the source of the country's energy supply, deputy finance minister Joerg Kukies said at a conference in Sydney.
* Brazil is looking to buy as much diesel as it can from Russia and some of the deals were being closed "as recently as yesterday," Brazilian Foreign Minister Carlos Franca said on Tuesday, without giving further details on the transactions.
* France's new foreign minister said on Tuesday there were only a few weeks to revive Iran's 2015 nuclear deal with world powers, although a senior US official made clear Washington had set no such deadline.
* Austria is seeking support from other European Union countries for its legal challenge to the bloc's rules labelling investments in gas and nuclear power plants as climate-friendly, the climate minister said on Wednesday.
* Australian shares slipped, dragged down by mining and energy stocks, hit by subdued commodity and metal prices following fresh COVID-19 curbs in China to control rising cases.
* Spain will implement temporary taxes on power companies and banks that should rake in 7 billion euros (7.02 billion USD) in 2023-2024 to help Spaniards cope with soaring inflation, the government said on Tuesday, triggering a selloff in some banking shares.
* The number of employed people in the Republic of Korea rose 841,000 in June from a year earlier, marking the fastest June growth in 22 years, statistical office data showed Wednesday.
* Italian Prime Minister Mario Draghi on Tuesday said he plans to announce a series of measures aimed to reduce the impacts of the worsening economic situation caused in part by rising energy costs.
* Ukrainian Prime Minister Denys Shmyhal on Tuesday welcomed the decision of the European Union (EU) to grant Ukraine a new aid package of 1 billion euros.
* Ukraine has become an associate member of the Multilateral Interoperability Program (MIP), which coordinates technological cooperation of the armies of NATO member states, Ukrainian Defense Minister Oleksiy Reznikov said on Tuesday.
* Nominations for Russian gas flows into Slovakia from Ukraine via the Velke Kapusany border point remained steady on Wednesday while flows via Nord Stream 1 pipeline remain shut due to maintenance.
* Rising food prices have further exacerbated global hunger, the German non-governmental aid agency Welthungerhilfe said on Tuesday.
* Searing heatwaves swept across China's vast Yangtze River basin on Wednesday, hammering densely populated megacities from the country's commercial hub Shanghai on the coast to Chengdu deep in the country's heartlands.
* Several wildfires swept across Portugal's central region on Tuesday, forcing the evacuation of hundreds of locals as firefighters struggled to put out flames at a time the country is battling a sweltering heatwave.
* The World Health Organization said COVID-19 remains a global emergency, nearly 2-1/2 years after it was first declared.
* The White House on Tuesday urged Americans over age 50 to get vaccination boosters against COVID-19 as the fast-spreading Omicron BA.5 subvariant takes hold across the United States and said doing so now would not preclude another shot this fall.
* Daily COVID-19 infections in Republic of Korea have jumped above 40,000 for the first time in two months, with the government warning of a potential five-fold surge in the coming months.
* Rising prices, border restrictions and airport chaos are threatening hopes for a post-pandemic summer travel boom in Canada, stalling a tourism recovery and taking the sheen off the country as a destination, analysts and industry executives say.
* Long-haul travel is back among Danes and even more popular than before the pandemic, as pent-up wanderlust increasingly drives them to venture outside Europe's borders, Scandinavia's largest insurer Tryg said.
* The Portuguese Directorate-General for Health (DGS) published a rule on Tuesday, recommending monkeypox vaccination for those who had close contact with the confirmed cases of the disease.
* An earthquake of magnitude 6.6 struck the Easter Island region in the Pacific Ocean near Chile on Tuesday, the European Mediterranean Seismological Centre (EMSC) said.
