* The Sixth BRICS Media Forum kicked off Saturday in Johannesburg (South Africa), calling for strengthening the voices of developing countries.
* Chinese Vice Premier Liu Guozhong on Saturday urged the country's doctors to put the people and their lives above all else, and to more effectively safeguard people's safety and health.
* India will impose with immediate effect a 40% export duty on onions up to Dec. 31 in an attempt to improve domestic availability of the vegetable, the ministry of finance said in a notification on Saturday.
* Russia's Gazprom said it will ship 41.3 million cubic metres of gas to Europe via Ukraine on Sunday.
* Ukraine has begun discussing with Sweden the possibility of receiving Gripen jets to boost its air defences, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy said on Saturday after meeting Swedish Prime Minister Ulf Kristersson.
* Morocco has not made a formal request to join the BRICS grouping and will not attend its summit in South Africa, state news agency MAP said on Saturday.
* Ecuadoreans go to the polls on Sunday to choose a new president and legislature they hope will lead the country out of a spiral of violence and economic troubles, after a campaign darkened by bloodshed.
* Supporters of Niger's junta were forced on Saturday to halt a census of people willing to volunteer for non-military roles in defence against a possible intervention by West African powers, saying they had been overwhelmed by the numbers who turned up.
* The head of the European Union Election Observation Mission (EU EOM) on Saturday denied that the mission is interfering in the electoral processes of Zimbabwe.
* Negotiations between the East African Community (EAC) and the Federal Republic of Somalia on the admission of the country into the EAC will start on Tuesday next week in the Kenyan capital Nairobi.
* Palestine on Saturday condemned and rejected Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich's plan to legalize 155 Israeli settlement outposts in the West Bank.
* Kenya and South Sudan leaders on Saturday agreed to pursue joint infrastructure projects to boost regional integration and spur trade between the two countries.
* The United Nations said it is providing aid for vulnerable people across Ethiopia as 1.2 million children suffer from acute malnutrition.
* Armed groups have seized another school in Ain Al-Helweh Palestinian refugee camp in southern Lebanon, bringing the total number to eight, the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) said Saturday.
* A spike in conflict and displacement in the eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) is pushing children into the worst cholera crisis since 2017, said the UN Children's Fund (UNICEF) on Friday.
* The speed of the lander module of India's third Moon Mission, "Chandrayaan-3", was successfully reduced further before landing, confirmed the country's space agency the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO).
* Myanmar exported more than 199,924 tons of black grams over the first four months of the 2023-24 fiscal year, according to the country's Ministry of Commerce on Saturday.
* Egyptian President Abdel-Fattah al-Sisi said on Saturday that the government is formulating a plan to enhance domestic industrial production and reduce imports, with the goal of addressing the ongoing economic challenges in the nation.
* Speedboats of Iran's Islamic Revolution Guards Corps (IRGC) Navy can sail at a maximum speed of 90-110 knots (about 166-203 km per hour), the official news agency IRNA reported Saturday.
* Eleven labourers were killed in a militant attack in Northwestern Pakistan, caretaker prime minister Anwaar-ul-Haq Kakar said on Sunday in a post on social media platform X, formerly known as Twitter.
* China's national observatory Sunday issued blue alerts, the least severe in the country's color-coded weather warning system, for rainstorm and convective weather as heavy rainfall is expected to hit most parts of central and eastern China in the coming two days.
* Hurricane Hilary hurtled towards Mexico's Baja California peninsula on Saturday, a U.S. government agency said, blanketing the region with heavy rain amid warnings of catastrophic and life-threatening flooding on the peninsula and the U.S. Southwest.
* Albanian police said they had arrested four people in the past 24 hours for causing fires as soldiers and firefighters were deployed in coastal tourist areas to fight spreading forest blazes.
