* The 156th joint Mekong River patrol by China, Laos, Myanmar and Thailand concluded on Friday, according to the public security department of southwest China's Yunnan Province.
* Russian President Vladimir Putin has expressed expectation that the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) Tianjin Summit will inject powerful new momentum into the organization.
* Russia said Saturday that it conducted a massive overnight strike on Ukraine's military enterprises and airbases.
* An executive meeting of China's State Council on Friday called for the advancement of reforms in the market-based allocation of production factors, and studied options to pilot those reforms in certain regions of the country.
* Japan's defense ministry on Friday submitted a record defense budget request of 8.8 trillion yen for the fiscal year 2026, with a focus on deploying various missiles and drones.
* Most of U.S. President Donald Trump's global tariffs were ruled illegal by a federal appeals court, which found Trump overstepped his presidential authority in imposing them, but the judges let the levies stay in place while sending the case back to a lower court for further proceedings, Bloomberg reported Friday.
* Israel's military spokesman Avichay Adraee said on Friday that the Israeli military has begun the preliminary operations and initial stages of the attack on Gaza City, and is operating with great intensity on the outskirts of the city.
* Palestine on Friday expressed "deep regret and astonishment" at the U.S. decision not to grant visas to the Palestinian delegation for the upcoming UN General Assembly.
* An aid convoy via Syria's Damascus-Sweida Highway 110, blocked for weeks by fighting, has reached the southernmost Sweida governorate for the first time since July 12, UN humanitarians said on Friday.
* Yemen's Houthi group said on Saturday that Prime Minister Ahmed al-Rahawi of the Houthi-backed government, along with several other ministers, was killed in Israeli airstrikes on the capital Sanaa on Thursday.
* A total of 776 people were killed or wounded in northern Yemen during the first half of 2025 as a result of U.S.-Israeli airstrikes, Houthi-run al-Masirah TV reported on Saturday.
* The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) said in a statement on Friday that it had killed a senior member of the Islamic State (IS) group in the Gaza Strip over the past week.
* The Philippine central bank, the Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas (BSP), on Saturday said it welcomed the favorable assessment by credit rating agency Moody's of the country's access to external financing.
* The Asian Development Bank (ADB) has announced three million USD in emergency assistance to support Pakistan's relief operations following devastating floods across the country.
* U.S. core inflation, measured by the core personal consumption expenditures (PCE) price index excluding food and energy, rose 2.9 percent year-over-year in July, the highest level since February, the Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA) reported Friday.
* Canada's real gross domestic product declined 0.4 percent in the second quarter of this year, following a 0.5 percent gain in the first quarter, said Statistics Canada on Friday.
* Russia's Ministry of Agriculture reported on Friday that the country produced nearly 4 million tonnes of poultry for slaughter in the January-July period of 2025, representing a 3.3 percent increase compared to the same period last year.
* Finland's gross domestic product (GDP) contracted by 0.4 percent in the second quarter of 2025 from the previous quarter, Statistics Finland said in a press release on Friday.
* France's gross domestic product (GDP) rose 0.3 percent in the second quarter (Q2) of 2025, after a 0.1 percent increase in Q1, the National Institute of Statistics and Economic Studies (INSEE) said Friday.
* Unemployment in Germany rose to above 3 million in August for the first time in a decade, data from the Federal Employment Agency showed Friday.
* Slovenia's annual inflation rate rose to a 16-month high in August, driven mainly by higher food prices, the country's Statistical Office said Friday.
* Egypt has signed four agreements worth more than 340 million USD with international energy companies to explore for oil and gas in the Mediterranean and Nile Delta, the Petroleum Ministry said on Saturday.
* The World Health Organization (WHO) reported on Friday that cholera outbreaks, driven by conflict and poverty, are worsening across multiple countries and pose a significant global public health challenge.
* The Philippines' Department of Health (DOH) on Saturday reported that it has tallied 2,525 cases of the highly contagious hand, foot, and mouth disease (HFMD) in just one week, bringing the total number of cases to 39,893 recorded from January to Aug. 16.
* East China's Shanghai Municipality experienced its 25th consecutive day of temperatures above 35 degrees Celsius on Saturday, breaking a nearly century-old record for the longest continuous stretch of high temperatures in the city's history.
