* Niger presidential guards are holding President Mohamed Bazoum inside the presidential palace, which has been blocked off by military vehicles, security sources said on Wednesday.
* Russian President Vladimir Putin intends to visit China in October, planning his visit to coincide with a "One Belt, One Road" forum, Kremlin foreign policy adviser Yury Ushakov told reporters on Tuesday, according to the Russian state news agency TASS.
* Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said on Tuesday that Moscow had no intention of imposing any solution to resolve a decades-old dispute pitting Armenia against Azerbaijan, focusing on the territory of Nagorno-Karabakh.
* The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) said late Monday night that its experts had spotted "directional anti-personnel mines on the periphery of the site" of the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant (ZNPP) in Ukraine.
* New Zealand Prime Minister Chris Hipkins and his Australian counterpart Anthony Albanese met in Wellington on Wednesday for their first annual Australia-New Zealand Leaders' Meeting and the celebration of several anniversaries.
* France and Qatar have a common will to develop a defence partnership that builds on the existing cooperation with Rafale fighter jets, a French defence ministry source said on Tuesday, days after the minister visited Doha to cement military ties.
* Bahrain summoned Sweden's chargé d'affaires and handed her a formal protest letter against "allowing extremists to burn copies of Koran in Stockholm under police protection", the state news agency said on Tuesday citing the foreign ministry.
* The Palestinian leadership is making efforts to create a broad international front to resume the peace process with Israel, which has been stalled since 2014, said a senior Palestinian official on Tuesday.
* Oman's Foreign Minister Sayyid Badr Al-Busaidi on Tuesday denounced the recent desecration of the Islamic holy book, the Quran, in Sweden.
* The Forces of Freedom and Change Alliance (FFC), a civilian political coalition in Sudan, concluded a two-day meeting late Tuesday in the Egyptian capital of Cairo, calling for an immediate end to the bloody conflict in Sudan.
* The Japanese government maintained its view of the economy for July, saying that it is "recovering at a moderate pace," as domestic demand remains solid following the relaxation of anti-COVID curbs, according to a Cabinet Office report released Wednesday.
* The Asian Development Bank (ADB) has approved a 40-million-USD loan to support the Cambodian government to further enhance reforms in public service delivery, said its press statement on Wednesday.
* Thailand's exports shrank for the ninth straight month in June as the global economic slowdown continued to weigh on trade, official data showed on Wednesday.
* During the first six months of this year, a total of 3,949 companies went bankrupt in Sweden, the highest in a decade, Swedish Television (SVT) reported on Tuesday.
* Sentiment among German companies "worsened further" in July, with the corresponding indicator falling for the third month in a row, according to a survey published by the ifo Institute on Tuesday.
* The population of Japanese nationals totaled 122,423,038 across the country in 2022, down by 801,000, marking the biggest drop and the first time all 47 of the country's prefectures have seen a decline, government data showed Wednesday.
* The death toll from weekend rioting at a prison in Ecuador's port city of Guayaquil has climbed to 18, the State Attorney General's Office (FGE) said Tuesday.
* More than 100 government agencies and about 40,000 employees have relocated to Egypt's new administrative capital, the Egyptian presidency said on Tuesday.
* At least one person died as powerful typhoon Doksuri lashed the coastline of the northern Philippines with gale-force winds and torrential rain on Wednesday, bursting banks of rivers and leaving thousands without electricity.
* South China's Guangdong Province has upgraded its typhoon emergency response to Level III, the third-highest level, as Typhoon Doksuri moves closer.
* Heavy rain brought flooding to an area near New Delhi on Wednesday forcing some evacuations and schools closures as the region braced for more downpours two weeks after the Yamuna river burst its banks inundating parts of the capital.
* Wildfires raging across Greece for more than a week abated on Wednesday, though firefighters still battled on several fronts to contain blazes that have killed three people and caused thousands of tourists to evacuate.
* A fire blazed on Wednesday on a ship off the Dutch coast with nearly 3,000 vehicles, killing one person and injuring several others, the coastguard said.
* Firefighters battled wildfires that were spreading in the area south of the Croatian Adriatic city of Dubrovnik late on Tuesday, with strong southerly winds preventing deployment of aircraft and landmines exploding, local media reported.
* Aided by local residents, hundreds of Portuguese firefighters scrambled on Tuesday to put out flames sweeping across a natural park near the popular holiday destination of Cascais, with strong winds complicating efforts to tackle the blaze.
* A UN development body warned on Tuesday that the region has a limited time to safeguard its hard-earned progress, as climate change intensifies disasters and affects billions of people.
* At least 34 people, including seven soldiers, were killed in an attack by a gang of armed men in Nigeria's northwest Zamfara state, the head of a vigilante group and residents said.
* Dengue is spreading rapidly through densely populated Bangladesh this rainy season, raising fears that the mosquito-borne disease could result in a record number of deaths and infections for the second consecutive year.
