* Chinese President Xi Jinping has urged beefed-up disaster relief efforts after Super Typhoon Yagi struck the country's southern region. Yagi, the 11th typhoon of this year, made landfalls in the provinces of Hainan and Guangdong on Friday, leaving three people dead and 95 others injured.
* Thailand's King Maha Vajiralongkorn swore in Prime Minister Paetongtarn Shinawatra and cabinet ministers in a coalition government on Friday, following the royal endorsement of the new portfolios earlier this week.
* New French Prime Minister Michel Barnier on Friday pledged he would work independently from President Emmanuel Macron but signalled he would defend some of the president's key policies while toughening the government's stance on immigration.
* Thailand's Prime Minister Paetongtarn Shinawatra said on Saturday her new government will seek to stimulate the economy "right away" and will continue with the policies of former premier Srettha Thavisin.
* The four-day 9th Eastern Economic Forum (EEF) concluded in Vladivostok, Russia, on Friday with the signing of 313 agreements amounting to 5.5693 trillion rubles (61.7 billion USD), local media reported.
* Azerbaijan's President Ilham Aliyev has expressed a willingness to participate in resolving the ongoing conflict between Russia and Ukraine, should such involvement be deemed necessary, AZERTAC news agency reported.
* Russia will continue its special military operation until all objectives are achieved and there is currently no set deadline for when it will end, said Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov on Friday.
* Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy discussed his peace plan to end the war with Russia and reconstruction with a focus on Ukraine's energy system in a meeting with Italy's Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, he said in a post on social media platform X. The two leaders met on the sidelines of the Ambrosetti Forum in Italy.
* Ukraine shot down 27 out of 44 Shahed-131 and Shahed-136 drones launched by Russia overnight, the Ukrainian Air Force said Friday.
* French President Emmanuel Macron discussed the importance of maintaining support for Ukraine and the need for a ceasefire in Gaza during talks on Friday with German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, said the French presidency.
* Kosovo said on Saturday it had closed two border crossings with Serbia after protesters on Serbian soil partially blocked roads and turned back passengers with Kosovo documents in protest over recent tensions in Kosovo's volatile north.
* U.S. President Joe Biden will host British Prime Minister Keir Starmer on Sept. 13, the White House said on Friday.
* Finland and Norway have agreed to collaborate on carbon dioxide (CO2) transport and storage, meaning that in the future, captured CO2 could be transported from Finland to Norway for permanent storage.
* More than 30,000 protesters gathered in South Korea's capital in broiling heat on Saturday, demanding more aggressive action by the government to combat global warming.
* European Union and South American negotiators ended two days of trade negotiations on Friday with "significant progress" on contentious issues that have been holding up the long-overdue EU-Mercosur agreement, two sources close to the talks said.
* Kyrgyzstan has removed the Taliban from the list of banned organizations, the Kyrgyz Foreign Ministry said on Friday.
* The United Nations Security Council began considering on Friday a draft resolution to extend the mandate for an international security mission helping Haiti fight armed gangs and ask the U.N. to plan for it to become a formal peacekeeping mission.
* More than 30,000 Afghan refugees have returned to their homeland from Pakistan, Iran and Turkey over the past week, said an official from the Ministry of Refugees and Repatriation on Friday.
* The head of Turkey's Intelligence Organization, Ibrahim Kalin, visited Tripoli, Libya, on Thursday amid the country's ongoing armed conflict and political instability, according to Turkish media reports.
* The Israeli army withdrew from the West Bank city of Jenin on Friday after a 10-day operation that left 21 people dead, according to Palestinian and Israeli sources.
* At least 40,939 Palestinians have been killed and 94,616 others injured in Israel's military offensive on Gaza since Oct. 7, Gaza's health ministry said on Saturday.
* Trucks using the recently opened Adre crossing from Chad carried 100 metric tons of food aid into Sudan on Friday for the most famine-risk communities, a UN spokesman said.
* Federal Reserve policymakers on Friday signaled they are ready to kick off a series of interest rate cuts at the U.S. central bank's meeting in two weeks, noting a cooling in the labor market that could accelerate into something more dire in the absence of a policy shift.
* Myanmar exported 718,281 tons of rice and broken rice in the first five months of the 2024-25 fiscal year starting April, according to figures from the Myanmar Rice Federation (MRF) on Saturday. The Southeast Asian country earned 353 million USD from the exports, the MRF reported.
* Canada's unemployment rate rose 0.2 percentage points to 6.6 percent in August, after holding steady in July, Statistics Canada said Friday.
* Boeing's Starliner spacecraft landed at the U.S. state of New Mexico early Saturday after a journey of approximately six hours from the International Space Station (ISS), with no astronauts on board, as two astronauts were forced to remain in space until next year due to a technical malfunction.
* The Philippine Coast Guard (PCG) on Saturday said it has joined the search and rescue operations for 15 fishermen reportedly missing at sea since Sept. 1 due to then tropical storm Yagi.
* Floods in August have inflicted 33.46 billion taka (280 million USD) in damage on agriculture in Bangladesh's eastern area. According to the latest data from the agriculture ministry, more than 200,000 hectares of cropland have been damaged, out of a total of 372,733 hectares of land affected by floods in the country.
* Africa is witnessing an "upward trend" in mpox cases, the Africa Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (Africa CDC) warned on Friday as it launched a joint continental response plan with the World Health Organization (WHO).
* Norway has reported an outbreak of bluetongue disease on a sheep farm in the southern part of the country, the World Organisation for Animal Health (WOAH) said on Friday.
