World briefs

MALAYSIA A Chinese sand-dredger capsized off Malaysia’s southern coast yesterday, killing a crew member and leaving 14 others missing, Malaysia’s coast guard said.

MYANMAR’s president, a close friend of leader Aung San Suu Kyi, said yesterday that he was retiring, a move that puts a representative of the country’s already powerful military at least temporarily in a position of executive power.

PHILIPPINES A passenger bus careened off a winding dirt road and hurtled down a ravine south of the Philippine capital, killing 19 people, police said yesterday.

IRAQ has detained or imprisoned at least 19,000 people accused of connections to the Islamic State group or other terror-related offenses, and sentenced more than 3,000 of them to death.

SYRIA Rockets fired on a market in a government-controlled neighborhood of Damascus killed 35 people and wounded more than 20 others, Syrian state-run media said.

UK-RUSSIA British Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson says Russia carried out a nerve-agent attack on British soil because the U.K. has “time and again called out Russia over its abuses” of human rights and democratic values.

NIGERIA Boko Haram extremists returned almost all of the 110 girls abducted from their Nigeria boarding school a month ago with an ominous warning. “We did it out of pity. And don’t ever put your daughters in school again,” the extremists said.

GERMANY Chancellor Angela Merkel acknowledged that the migrant influx of 2015 led to deep divisions in Germany and renewed a promise yesterday that it won’t be repeated as she embarked on her fourth term.

BRAZIL’s health minister says the country is expanding its campaign to vaccinate people against yellow fever to cover the entire country.

PERU The revelation of secretly shot videos allegedly showing attempts to buy a lawmaker’s political support has roiled Peru’s political establishment two days before a scheduled impeachment vote against President Pedro Pablo Kuczynski.

US-RUSSIA US President Donald Trump was warned in briefing materials to refrain from congratulating Russian President Vladimir Putin on his re-election, but he did so anyway, a senior administration official said yesterday.