World briefs

CHINA State-owned PetroChina Ltd., Asia’s biggest oil and gas producer, says its quarterly profit declined 82 percent from a year earlier due to a sharp decline in oil prices.

MALDIVES The Maldives government will introduce corporate residence visas for foreign entrepreneurs who have invested more than USD50 million in the country in a bid to improve investment, local media reported yesterday.

INDONESIA Ambulances carrying coffins arrive at a prison island and relatives pay final visits to their condemned loved ones in a sign that Indonesia will imminently execute eight foreigners and one Indonesian man, despite an international outcry and pleas for mercy.

PAKISTAN Police say a Pakistani private guard has shot and killed himself in front of the U.S. Consulate in the eastern city of Lahore.

S KOREA The ferry captain responsible for last year’s disaster that killed more than 300 people, mostly students, is convicted of homicide and given an increased sentence of life in prison. More on p14

JAPAN-USA President Barack Obama welcomed Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe yesterday with full pomp and ceremony on a bright, dewy morning at the White House, calling the state visit a “celebration of the ties of friendship” and praising the alliance the U.S. and Japan have built over time.

UKRAINE Separatist rebels in the east of Ukraine have resumed the use of rocket launchers that should have been withdrawn under a February peace deal, Ukrainian military officials said yesterday. The army said in a statement that rebels fired Grad rockets Monday evening at the government-held town of Avdiivka, which lies on the fringes of the main rebel stronghold of Donetsk.

USA Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev’s lawyers begin making their case to spare his life by contrasting him with his older brother, a man they said was “consumed by jihad.”

UK Britain’s economic growth has slowed to a quarterly rate of 0.3 percent in the January-March period, a drop that will be seen as setback to the Conservative-led coalition only days before a general election. The Office of National Statistics says the quarter-on-quarter growth rate was half of the 0.6 percent seen in the last quarter of 2014. The data was released days ahead of the May 7 election, which has been fought largely on which party is best placed to secure the economic recovery following the 2008 financial crisis.