* China's top economic planner said on Sunday that it has allocated 350 million yuan (about 49.08 million USD) from the central budget to aid disaster relief and restoration efforts in the flood-stricken Henan, Shaanxi and Sichuan provinces.
* The Laos-Thailand cross-border passenger train has officially started operation, running between Krung Thep Aphiwat Central station in the Thai capital of Bangkok and Khamsavath railway station in Lao capital Vientiane.
* Russia's Defence Ministry said on Sunday that Russian warplanes prevented two U.S. strategic bombers from violating the state border over the Barents Sea.
* Ukraine needs long-range weapons to protect its cities and troops on the frontline from Russian bombs and drones, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy said on Sunday after a massive overnight drone and missile attack.
* The German government is drawing up a paper aimed at revamping the country's defence industry, a spokesperson for the Economy Ministry said on Sunday, without providing additional details.
* Azerbaijan is proposing to sign a document with Armenia on the basic principles of a future peace treaty as an interim measure as they wrangle over a broader deal, a senior Azerbaijani official said on Sunday.
* The International Court of Justice (ICJ) on Friday called on Israel to end its "unlawful" presence in the occupied Palestinian territories as rapidly as possible.
* Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu will meet with U.S. President Joe Biden on Tuesday, according to a statement issued by Netanyahu's office on Sunday.
* The White House unveiled a plan on Friday to phase out the use of single-use plastics from all federal operations by 2035, as part of a broader effort to tackle the growing plastic pollution crisis.
* The European Union (EU) signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with Serbia on raw materials, battery production chains and electric vehicles at the Critical Raw Material Summit in Belgrade on Friday.
* The executive council of the African Union (AU) has approved its Continental Artificial Intelligence (AI) Strategy and African Digital Compact to boost Africa's digital development, an official has said.
* More than 1.4 million South Sudanese refugees have returned home between the signing of a revitalized peace agreement in October 2018 and May 31, 2024, the UN refugee agency said.
* Israel said its air defences intercepted a surface-to-surface missile launched from Yemen on Sunday and Yemen's Iran-aligned Houthi movement said it had fired several missiles at the Israeli Red Sea city of Eilat.
* At least 38,983 Palestinians have been killed and 89,727 others injured in Israel's military offensive on Gaza since Oct. 7, Gaza's health ministry said on Sunday, with 64 people killed in the last 24 hours.
* Cambodia's trade with its fellow ASEAN member states hit 7.96 billion USD during the first half of 2024, up 11.6 percent from 7.13 billion dollars over the same period 2023, said a report from the Ministry of Commerce on Saturday.
* India's foreign exchange (forex) reserves rose for the second consecutive week reaching 666.85 billion USD during the week ended July 12, showed the official data released by the country's central bank, the Reserve Bank of India (RBI).
* Japan logged 3,135,600 foreign visitors in June, the highest number ever recorded for a single month, government data has showed.
* Afghanistan traded goods worth 994.2 million USD from May 21 to June 20, the country's National Statistics and Information Authority (NSIA) reported Saturday.
* Two tropical cyclones will bring gales and heavy rain to China's eastern seaboard this week, with the first expected to make landfall on Sunday, after deadly flash floods struck the country's interior over the weekend.
* At least 40 migrants died and several others were injured after a boat they were traveling in caught fire off northern Haiti, a UN spokesman said on Friday, quoting the International Organization for Migration (IOM).
* Record-breaking heat is expected to hit Japan on Sunday, with over 200 locations across Japan forecasted to experience extreme temperatures. Scorching temperatures were recorded from Kanto to Okinawa on Saturday, which also marked the beginning of summer vacation for children across the country.
* Several Italian cities were placed under the highest heat warning on Friday, as a heatwave causing extreme temperatures is expected to peak over the weekend.
* The Horn of Africa region will have warmer than usual temperatures during the August-October season, the climate prediction agency of the Intergovernmental Authority on Development (IGAD) said Saturday.
* The poliovirus was detected in a child in Pakistan's southwestern Balochistan province, taking the total number of reported polio cases in the South Asian country to nine, an official has said.
* An exponential increase in the number of monkeypox cases has been reported in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), warned the DRC government, with a vaguely-known variant and potential spillover in neighboring countries lurking.
