World News in Brief: November 17

* The Republic of Korean (ROK) government decided to unify an official term for a Northeast Asian trio as the ROK-China-Japan, Yonhap news agency reported Sunday, citing an unnamed official of the the ROK presidential office.

* Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese said on Monday that the nation’s future prosperity lies in Asia and the Pacific as he hailed free and fair trade as a strength of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC).

* Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky paid a brief visit to Greece on Sunday, during which the two countries signed a natural gas agreement.

* Hungary will extend its visa facilitation measures for relevant Chinese business people by one year in response to China’s decision to prolong visa-free entry for Hungarian citizens, Hungarian Minister of Foreign Affairs and Trade Peter Szijjarto said on Sunday.

* Egyptian Foreign Minister Badr Abdelatty and his Russian counterpart, Sergei Lavrov, held consultations on Sunday, focusing on a U.S.-backed draft resolution concerning the security arrangements in the Gaza Strip.

* Iran’s Foreign Minister Seyed Abbas Araghchi said on Sunday that no uranium enrichment is currently being carried out in the country, while stressing the country’s right to do so.

* A Hezbollah official was killed Sunday evening in an Israeli airstrike targeting a car in southern Lebanon, according to Lebanese officials and security sources.

* Gunfire rattled the town of Werchfana, about 35 km southwest of Tripoli, from Sunday night into early Monday after violent clashes erupted between rival armed groups.

* Japan’s economy contracted an annualized 1.8 percent in the third quarter of 2025, marking the first contraction in six quarters, government data showed Monday. Quarter-on-quarter, real gross domestic product in the July-September period declined 0.4 percent from the April-June period, according to the Cabinet Office.

* Singapore’s non-oil domestic exports (NODX) jumped 22.2 percent year-on-year in October, accelerating from the 7.0 percent growth recorded in September, according to data released Monday by Enterprise Singapore.

* Personal remittances from overseas Filipinos reached 3.46 billion USD in September 2025, up 3.8 percent in the same month last year, the Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas (BSP) said Monday.

* The Australian government on Monday committed funding for 96 projects to protect communities around the country from severe weather events.

* Nepal has received 9.4 million USD from the World Bank’s Forest Carbon Partnership Facility (FCPF) for reducing approximately 1.88 million tons of carbon dioxide in the Terai Arc Landscape, the World Bank said in a press release on Sunday.

* A new satellite developed by NASA and the European Space Agency (ESA) was launched on Sunday night to track sea levels across more than 90 percent of the world’s oceans.