A U.S. official proposed Wednesday that China and Southeast Asian nations call a moratorium on actions seen as provocative in a bid to cool tensions in the South China Sea.

Danny Russel, the top U.S. diplomat on East Asia, said he made the suggestion as "food for thought" and not as a formal proposal as he met regional counterparts in Myanmar to prepare for a regional summit later this year.

The thousands of Rohingya Muslims still flooding out of Myanmar's Rakhine state two years after violence erupted there are facing increasing abuse and exploitation, the U.N. refugee agency warned Tuesday.

Two waves of deadly communal violence between Buddhists and Muslims in Rakhine in 2012 left some 200 people dead and around 140,000 displaced, mainly Rohingya.

Radical Buddhist monks in Myanmar are urging a boycott of telecoms firm Ooredoo because it hails from Muslim-majority Qatar, despite its promise to boost access to affordable mobile phones, a cleric said Thursday.

Ooredoo, along with Norway's Telenor, is set to begin selling cheap SIM cards this year in Myanmar, where the exorbitant cost of phones under the former junta left as many as nine out of ten people without access to them. 

The Japanese military's top officer held meetings with his Myanmar counterpart Tuesday, officials said, the first visit of Japan's highest-ranking army officer to the country since World War II.

General Shigeru Iwasaki, chief of staff of the Japanese Self Defense Forces Joint Staff, met Myanmar army chief Min Aung Hlaing in the capital Naypyidaw as part of a four day trip to the former junta-run nation, according to an information ministry official.

Myanmar is considering restrictions on religious conversion, according to a draft bill released in state media Tuesday, the first of several controversial proposals stemming from a rising tide of Buddhist nationalism.

The proposed legislation, put forward by the ministry of religion and yet to be debated in parliament, would require people who want to change their faith to get approval from a specially-created local authority.

A 5.6-magnitude earthquake hit the border between Myanmar and China early on Saturday, geologists said, but there were no immediate reports of casualties or damage.

The epicenter of the quake, which hit at 2049 GMT on Friday, was located 65 kilometers (40 miles) southeast of Myitkyina, capital of Kachin state in northern Myanmar, the United States Geological Survey (USGS) said. 

Activists have kidnapped two Chinese workers at a China-backed copper mine in Myanmar and are threatening to harm them, their firm said Monday, in the latest eruption of tensions over the controversial project.

China's Wanbao, which operates the Letpadaung mine in the northwestern town of Monywa, said the activists holding the two 23-year-old contractors were demanding the "total halting" of work.

Thousands of people joined a rally in Myanmar's main city on Saturday to call for changes to a military-drafted constitution that bars opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi from becoming president.

The former political prisoner-turned-politician has been campaigning to amend the charter since she became a lawmaker two years ago.

Humanitarian groups have sounded the alarm over the fate of thousands of civilians caught in clashes between Myanmar's army and rebel fighters in northern Kachin state, the U.N. said Friday.

Conflict in Kachin along the border with China has displaced 100,000 people since a 17-year ceasefire collapsed in 2011, and a new peace deal has proved elusive, with skirmishes spilling into neighboring Shan State.

Myanmar on Friday shrugged off U.S. President Barack Obama's decision to renew some sanctions against the country in order to spur continued reform, in a move that highlighted fears over continued rights abuses.

Obama said sanctions restricting certain investments should be renewed because the former junta-run nation still poses "an unusual and extraordinary threat to the national security and foreign policy of the United States" in a letter to Congress on Thursday.