* China on Friday earmarked an additional 100 million yuan (about 14 million USD) of investment from its central budget to the flood-hit provincial regions of Tianjin and Hebei, said the country's top economic planner.
* Laos has seen a significant increase in the number of visitors in the first six months of 2023, with more than 1.6 million foreign tourists visiting the country.
* Russian President Vladimir Putin signed a law on Friday to raise the maximum military draft age from 27 to 30. The relevant document has been published on Russia's official legal information portal.
* Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said on Friday that his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin could visit Turkey this month.
* A meeting on the Ukraine crisis began on Saturday in the Saudi Arabian city of Jeddah, local media reported.
* Ukraine's conflict-related budget expenditures will reach about 1.8 trillion hryvnia (about 49.2 billion USD) this year, the government press service reported Friday, citing Ukrainian Prime Minister Denys Shmyhal.
* Niger's junta announced on Thursday the suspension of various military cooperation agreements with France, the former colonial power that has condemned violence in the West African country and begun evacuating its citizens.
* France will support efforts by the West African regional grouping ECOWAS to make the military coup in Niger fail, the French foreign ministry said on Saturday.
* Iran has equipped its Revolutionary Guards' navy with drones and 1,000-km (600-mile) range missiles, Iranian news agencies reported on Saturday, as the U.S. offers to put guards on commercial ships going through the Gulf's Strait of Hormuz.
* Sri Lankan government advanced the timeline to achieve climate goals from 2060 to 2050 for the South Asian country, according to a statement from the President's Media Division (PMD) on Saturday.
* Egyptian Foreign Minister Sameh Shoukry will travel to Chad on Sunday for a meeting of Sudan's neighboring countries to seek peaceful solutions to the Sudanese crisis, the Foreign Ministry said Saturday.
* Nigeria has announced the decision to close its land border with Niger due to the recent coup in Niger.
* Unrest in Ethiopia's western Gambella region has displaced at least 12,000 people, a UN agency said Friday.
* Lebanon's caretaker premier Najib Mikati said on Saturday there was no cause for "concern or panic" about his country's security situation, after Germany and Gulf countries issued new travel warnings following outbreaks of violence.
* UN humanitarians on Friday warned of critical aid funding gaps for more than 21 million people in Afghanistan, saying that some relief already has been trimmed.
* The U.S. Federal Reserve will likely need to raise interest rates further to bring down inflation, Governor Michelle Bowman said on Saturday.
* The Italian government on Friday signed a memorandum of understanding with business representatives to take steps in the fourth quarter of this year to temporarily fix prices for key consumer products in an effort to reduce inflation.
* The Abu Dhabi National Oil Company (ADNOC) announced on Friday that it would acquire a 30-percent equity stake in a gas field off the coast of Baku, the capital of Azerbaijan.
* The summer of 2023 is "a summer of extremes," resulting in major damage to people's health and the environment, the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) said Friday.
* Beijing has been speeding up the restoration of key roads damaged in flood-hit areas, such as the districts of Fangshan and Mentougou, since Thursday, to assist with rescue and relief efforts.
* Thousands of people were evacuated as continuous heavy rain and swollen rivers caused floodings in several townships in southern Myanmar, local authorities said on Saturday.
* More than 1,100 firefighters and 14 water-carrying aircraft battled a wildfire in central Portugal's Castelo Branco area on Saturday as civil protection authorities said hot, windy conditions meant it could take days to put out.
