World briefs

AUSTRALIA  The ship involved in the recently halted hunt for Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 returned to port in western Australia yesterday, where officials from the countries that funded the fruitless search gathered to thank them and to defend their decision to end the hunt despite recommendations from investigators that it continue.

CHINA is beefing up a campaign to root out services that circumvent the government’s internet censorship with a 14-month-long “clean-up” of the internet industry. 

THAILAND  When Sapae-ing Basor, the spiritual leader of many Muslims in insurgency-torn southern Thailand, recently died in self-imposed exile in Malaysia, it wasn’t just thousands of followers that noted his passing. Thai PM Prayuth Chan-ocha expressed his condolences. 

JAPAN A gov’t panel studying a possible abdication of Emperor Akihito released an interim report in favor of enacting special legislation that would apply to him but not to future monarchs. The panel is looking at how to accommodate Akihito’s apparent abdication wish. 

AUSTRALIA An actor was killed while filming a scene featuring several guns for an Australian band’s music video, police said. The man died at a bar in the Queensland city of Brisbane while filming the video by hip hop group Bliss n Eso. Members of the band were not on the set at the time.

MIDDLE EAST Negotiators for the Syrian government and representatives of rebel factions traded accusations of terrorism after their first face-to-face meeting yesterday, as talks in Kazakhstan arranged by Russia and Turkey got off to a rocky start. The gathering in Astana is the latest in a long line of diplomatic initiatives aimed at ending the nearly six-year-old Syrian war.

AUSTRIA Police urged Vienna residents yesterday to be on heightened alert for suspicious objects and activities as they hunted for possible associates of a suspected Islamic radical who they say might have been planning a bomb attack. A 14-year old was among those questioned.

GERMANY Berlin police say a man suspected of killing an elderly man and collecting his pension for a decade, before police found his body in a freezer, may have had a second victim: 92-year-old Irma Kurowski had not been seen since the end of 2000 and had lived in the same building in trendy Prenzlauer Berg neighborhood as the 55-year-old suspect. They say the suspect, whose name wasn’t released, had access to her pension payments.