* By the end of November, the customs of southwest China's Chongqing Municipality had launched 263 China-Laos freight trains carrying a total of 5,720 TEUs of containers, with the overall value of cargo exceeding 800 million yuan (about 113.4 million USD).
* El Salvador's President Nayib Bukele announced Saturday the deployment of 10,000 security forces to a suburb of San Salvador known to be a stronghold for gangs.
* OPEC+ will likely stick to its oil output targets when it meets on Sunday, five OPEC+ sources said on Saturday, a day after the Group of Seven (G7) nations agreed a price cap on Russian oil.
* Russia "will not accept" a price cap on its oil and is analysing how to respond, the Kremlin said in comments reported on Saturday, in response to a deal by Western powers aimed at limiting a key source of funding for its war in Ukraine.
* Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters on Friday that Russia is not prepared to negotiate with the United States if Washington sets the precondition that Russia pulls troops out of Ukraine, but that Putin remains generally open to contacts.
* Increased stability in grain exports from Russia and Ukraine sent global prices for grains and cereals lower in November, the Rome-based United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) reported on Friday.
* Russian President Vladimir Putin discussed various aspects of the situation regarding Ukraine with German Chancellor Olaf Scholz on Friday over the phone.
* Russian Defence Minister Sergei Shoigu held talks with his Belarusian counterpart Viktor Khrenin, the state-run Belta news agency said on Saturday.
* More than 14.5 million people have fled Ukraine since the start of the Russia-Ukraine conflict, Ukrainian Parliament Commissioner for Human Rights Dmytro Lubinets said Thursday.
* Iran began on Saturday the construction of a new nuclear power plant in its southwestern province of Khuzestan, Nour news agency reported.
* The Iraqi parliament approved the nomination of two more ministers on Saturday, completing Prime Minister Mohammed Shi'a al-Sudani's 23-member cabinet a month after the approval of his government.
* The US Navy's Fifth Fleet said on Saturday it had intercepted a fishing trawler smuggling "more than 50 tonnes of ammunition rounds, fuses and propellants for rockets" in the Gulf of Oman along a maritime route from Iran to Yemen on Dec. 1.
* UN Security Council on Friday condemned "in the strongest terms" what it called a "terrorist attack" on the Pakistani embassy in Afghanistan, while stressing the principle of the inviolability of diplomatic premises.
* The International Monetary Fund said on Friday it has reached a staff-level agreement with Argentine authorities on a third review under its Extended Fund Facility Arrangement, which could give the South American country access to around $6 billion.
* French President Emmanuel Macron said there was no reason to panic about possible power cuts this winter, but he called on citizens to use less energy and on state utility EDF to restart nuclear reactors to prevent outages in case of cold weather.
* Ukraine has exported almost 18.1 million tonnes of grain so far in the 2022/23 season, down 29.6% from the 25.8 million tonnes exported by the same stage of the previous season, agriculture ministry data showed on Friday.
* France will release some 4 billion International Monetary Fund (IMF) Special Drawing Rights (SDRs), worth about 5 billion euros ($5.26 billion), to the world's most vulnerable countries under a G20 programme and expects to release more next year, the finance ministry said on Friday.
* German exports in October fell slightly by 0.6 percent month-on-month to 133.5 billion euros (140.5 billion USD), the Federal Statistical Office (Destatis) said on Friday.
* The economy of Cyprus is projected to grow around 6 percent in inflation-adjusted terms in 2022, Finance Minister Constantinos Petrides told Parliament on Friday as he presented the country's budget for 2023.
* A 6.1-magnitude earthquake struck Indonesia's western province of West Java on Saturday, but did not trigger a tsunami, the meteorology, climatology and geophysics agency reported.
* The Chinese mainland on Friday reported 3,933 locally transmitted confirmed COVID-19 cases, the National Health Commission said Saturday. Altogether 28,894 local asymptomatic carriers were newly identified.
* India's daily COVID-19 caseload Saturday decreased to 253, according to federal health ministry data released on Saturday. The cases marked a decrease in comparison to 275 cases on Friday.
* Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni on Friday issued new guidelines to prevent the flaring up of COVID-19 cases in the country.
