* Argentine President Alberto Fernandez announced on Friday he will not seek re-election later this year and will "concentrate all efforts on solving the problems of Argentines."
* Russian President Vladimir Putin held a phone conversation with Saudi Arabia's Crown Prince and Prime Minister Mohammed bin Salman Al Saud on Friday on expanding bilateral relations in trade, economic cooperation, investment and energy.
* Russia is expelling more than 20 German diplomats, Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova told RIA Novosti news agency on Saturday, in a tit-for-tat move.
* The Sudanese army on Saturday said it would help to secure the evacuation of foreign diplomats and nationals amid Sudan's deadly clashes between the army and the Rapid Support Forces (RSF).
* Sudan's warring sides "need to sit as Sudanese and find the right way out to restore hope and life," army chief General Abdel Fattah al-Burhan told Al Arabiya TV after a week of strife that has killed hundreds.
* British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak chaired a meeting of the government's emergency response committee on Saturday to discuss the situation in Sudan, with defence minister Ben Wallace among those attending.
* A first batch of Russian fertilizer which Latvia seized last year is being shipped to Kenya by the United Nations' World Food Programme, Latvia's Foreign Ministry said on Saturday.
* Mexican President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador said Friday his government will not accept US intervention to fight organized crime, noting his country is capable of combatting it by itself.
* The Iranian foreign minister and his counterpart of the United Arab Emirates (UAE) on Saturday agreed to expand cooperation in various fields.
* Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi and Foreign Minister Hossein Amir-Abdollahian on Thursday called for greater unity among Muslim states in support of the Palestinians.
* Local shipments of household electric appliances in Japan rose 3 percent year on year for fiscal year 2022, up for the first time in two years, industry data has shown. For the fiscal year from April 2022 to March 2023, the shipments totaled nearly 2.59 trillion yen (19.30 billion USD).
* A new Omicron subvariant is spreading in the United States, and has accounted for nearly 10 percent of new weekly COVID-19 cases reported across the country, according to data updated Friday by the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).
* Finland's fertility rate was the lowest on record in 2022, Statistics Finland said in a press release on Friday. Last year, the country registered 1.32 births per woman, the lowest level since the records started in 1776. In 2021, the figure was 1.46.
* Climate change continued its advance in 2022 as droughts, floods, and heatwaves affected communities on every continent and cost many billions of dollars, said the annual report from the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) released on Friday.
* A 6.4-magnitude earthquake struck off Southeast Sulawesi province in central Indonesia on Saturday, but did not trigger a tsunami, Indonesia's meteorology, climatology and geophysics agency BMKG said.
