* The Republic of Korea (RoK) Foreign Minister Kang Kyung-wha talked on Monday with visiting US special representative for the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK) affairs Stephen Biegun about denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula and the settlement of lasting peace, the foreign ministry of RoK said.
* Brazil's right-wing candidate Jair Bolsonaro of the Social Liberal Party won the country's presidential run-off on October 28, according to Brazil's Superior Electoral Court (TSE). TSE President Rosa Weber announced that with 99.99 percent of the ballot boxes counted, Bolsonaro won 55.13 percent of the valid votes, compared with 44.87 percent for his rival Fernando Haddad of the left-leaning Workers' Party.
* UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres on October 28 expressed concern over the deepening political crisis in Sri Lanka and called for restraint from all parties in the island country.
* Chinese President Xi Jinping and his French counterpart Emmanuel Macron on Monday exchanged congratulations on the successful launch earlier in the day of a jointly developed ocean-observing satellite.
* An earthquake with a preliminary magnitude of 5.4 struck the Torishima Island region in southern Japan, the weather agency said in Tokyo on October 29.
* Iran's First Vice President Es'haq Jahangiri said on October 28 that Iran is prepared to frustrate US November 4 sanctions on its crude exports.
* Georgia's presidential elections are poised for a runoff since preliminary data showed no candidate has won enough votes to secure a victory.
* A suicide bomber detonated explosives near Afghanistan's election commission headquarters in Kabul on October 29, injuring at least six people, officials said.
* Chilean President Sebastian Pinera presented a plan on October 28 to reform the country´s ailing pension system in an effort to boost payouts seen by many as insufficient in one of Latin America´s most stable economies.
* At the invitation of Chinese President Xi Jinping, El Salvador's President Salvador Sanchez Ceren, Dominican President Danilo Medina and Cuban President Miguel Diaz-Canel will pay state visits to China from October 31 to November 8, successively, Foreign Ministry spokesperson Lu Kang announced Monday.
* Three Palestinian boys were killed in an Israeli air strike on the Gaza Strip frontier on October 28, medical officials in the Hamas-run enclave said, while Israel said it had hit suspected militants trying to blow up part of a border fence.
* 17 people were killed and one woman was injured when a passenger van fell into a ravine in Pakistan's north Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (KP) province on October 28 night, local reports said.
