* Turkey and United Arab Emirates signed a comprehensive economic partnership agreement to boost trade, Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan said on Friday.
* Switzerland relaxed some of its sanctions against Syria on Friday with the aim of making it easier for humanitarian aid to be delivered there, the Federal Council said in a statement.
* Ukraine said there have been 38 prisoner swaps with Russia since March 2022.
* The United States and the Republic of Korea will conduct more than 10 days of large-scale military exercises in March, including amphibious landings, officials from the two countries said on Friday.
* US Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov held in New Delhi Thursday their first face-to-face interaction since the escalation of the Ukraine crisis over a year ago. The brief encounter took place during the G20 Foreign Ministers' Meeting held in New Delhi under India's presidency.
* King Charles will travel to France on March 26-29 for his first state visit as Britain's monarch, the French presidency said on Friday, in a further sign of warming relations between Paris and London after years of bad blood over Brexit.
* Türkiye's nationalist IYI Party (Good Party) broke ranks with the opposition alliance on Friday ahead of key elections in May, a move likely to favor Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan.
* Palestine on Thursday condemned the Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's visit to the Israeli settlement of Har Brakha near the northern West Bank city of Nablus.
* Director General of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) Rafael Grossi will travel to the Iranian capital Tehran on Friday evening leading a high-ranking delegation from the agency, the Atomic Energy Organization of Iran (AEOI) reported on its website on Thursday.
* The Egyptian Foreign Ministry on Friday condemned an Israeli minister's call for wiping out the Palestinian village of Hawara in the northern West Bank.
* Iran on Friday rejected as "baseless" Britain's claim of "having seized a shipment of Iranian arms" in the Gulf of Oman likely heading toward Yemen.
* The diesel-electric submarine Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky of the Russian Pacific Fleet test-launched a Caliber cruise missile from the Sea of Japan, the Russian Defense Ministry said Friday.
* Italy's Coast Guard said on Friday it rescued 211 migrants off the island of Lampedusa, saving them from a ship struggling in rough seas.
* China's national political advisors believe that the country's economy remains resilient and is full of potential and vigor, a spokesperson for the first session of the 14th National Committee of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference (CPPCC) said Friday.
* A rapid and powerful response to the United States' Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) must come from the European Union as a whole, Italy's Industry Minister Adolfo Urso said on Friday.
* The recovery in euro zone business activity gathered pace last month as growth accelerated in the bloc's dominant services industry, a survey showed, providing the latest piece of evidence suggesting the currency union will avoid a recession.
* The Central Bank of Sri Lanka (CBSL) said on Friday that it was ready to adopt the International Monetary Fund (IMF) program within March 2023.
* The deadly earthquakes that hit Turkey and Syria last month caused about 5.1 billion USD in direct physical damage in Syria, the World Bank said on Friday, furthering destruction in a country already devastated by years of civil war.
* Mexican President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador said Thursday he will introduce a plan to curb inflation and support trade with other Latin American countries.
* Turkish health experts urged authorities to take a series of strict measures to eliminate the threats of epidemics against public health in Türkiye's earthquake zone.
* Mongolia on Friday held a national conference on fully securing domestic food supply as people's purchasing power has been eroded by soaring prices.
* Slovenia's economy is set to expand by 1.8 percent this year, the government's macroeconomic institute UMAR said on Thursday, improving its September forecast of 1.4 percent.
* Egyptian President Abdel-Fattah al-Sisi on Thursday announced a package of measures to cushion the impact of the soaring prices.
* As weekly cholera cases in the affected African countries decline, heavy flooding due to seasonal rains and tropical cyclones in southern Africa are raising the risk of the disease spreading and threatening to undermine outbreak control efforts, warned the World Health Organization (WHO) Thursday.
* Estonia has reported an outbreak of the highly pathogenic H5N1 bird flu virus on a farm in the northern part of the country, the Paris-based World Organisation for Animal Health (WOAH) said on Friday.
* Japan is planning the maiden launch of its H3 rocket on Monday next week following a number of false starts, sources with knowledge of the matter said on Friday.
* SpaceX's Crew-6 Dragon spacecraft autonomously docked to the International Space Station (ISS) on early Friday.
