Singapore said Tuesday it will ban from its ports and naval bases an Indonesian navy ship named after two marines who bombed an office complex in the city-state in the 1960s.

Defense Minister Ng Eng Hen said the ship will be barred as part of a dispute over the Indonesian navy's decision to name the refurbished frigate after the two marines, Usman Haji Mohamed Ali and Harun Said.

Malaysia is the world's friendliest destination for Muslim travelers, according to a survey released Tuesday, but Japan has shown most improvement as it ramps up efforts to cash in on a growing market.

Malaysia was followed by the United Arab Emirates, Turkey, Indonesia and Saudi Arabia in this year's rankings for "halal" friendly holiday destinations released by Singapore-based Muslim travel specialist Crescentrating.

Suspected Thai militants shot dead five people, including a nine-year-old boy and a Buddhist monk, in the latest attacks in the kingdom's insurgency-torn deep south, police said Thursday.

The killings appeared to be revenge attacks for the recent deaths of three young Muslim brothers.

U.S. President Barack Obama will travel to Japan, South Korea, Malaysia and the Philippines in April, the White House said Wednesday.

The visit is intended to quell doubts in the region about Obama's strategy of rebalancing U.S. power to Asia, following the cancellation of his last planned trip there in October for domestic political reasons.

Two Myanmar politicians from a western state riven by deadly communal violence narrowly escaped a suspected assassination bid during a visit to Malaysia this week, a report said Friday.

Malaysia's state-run Bernama news agency quoted police as saying the pair, Aye Maung and Aye Thar Aung, were fired upon by a shooter aboard a motorcycle in a busy shopping area of the capital Kuala Lumpur late Wednesday night.

Amnesty International said Friday that Malaysia has postponed plans to execute a man for murder in a case that sparked an outcry from rights groups.

Chandran Paskaran, a Malaysian, was sentenced to hang in 2008 for killing another man in a fight five years earlier in the southern state of Johor.

Rights groups urged Malaysia on Thursday to halt the planned hanging of a condemned man, with Amnesty International calling it "yet another secretive execution".

The London-based human rights group said in a statement it had learnt that the man, Chandran Paskaran, would be executed Friday for a murder committed more than a decade ago.

The Australian government on Thursday said it will give Malaysia two customs boats as a gift, part of a strategy to tackle people-smuggling in the region.

Most asylum-seeker boats bound for Australia make the precarious journey from Indonesia, but Malaysia is sometimes used as a transit country to transport people through the Thai-Malay border to Sumatra across the Malacca Strait.

Malaysia's prime minister has appealed for unity and an end to "the politics of hate" amid soaring racial and religious tensions in the Muslim-majority country.

Prime Minister Najib Razak, weakened by an election setback last May, is seen as widely under pressure from conservatives in his ruling party intent on rolling back his reforms and pledges of greater civil liberties.

The Philippine government said Saturday they had cleared a last hurdle in long-running peace negotiations with Muslim rebels aimed at ending a deadly decades-old insurgency in the country's south.

President Benigo Aquino hopes to secure a final peace settlement before leaving office in mid-2016 to end the rebellion by Muslim groups, which has left some 150,000 people dead.