RIKUZENTAKATA, Japan (AP) – Japanese gathered in Tokyo and along the country’s ravaged northeast coast to observe a moment of silence at 2:46 p.m. Friday, exactly five years after a magnitude-9.0 earthquake struck offshore, triggering a devastating tsunami that killed more than 18,000 people and sent reactors at the Fukushima …

HAVANA (AP) – Dozens of uniformed and plainclothes police watch silently every Sunday morning as white-clad dissidents file into Mass at Santa Rita Church in a leafy Havana neighborhood of mansions overlooking the Florida Straits. The officers stand by until the women shout “Freedom!” and try to sit on the …

NAYPYITAW, Myanmar (AP) – A longtime confidant of Aung San Suu Kyi was confirmed Friday in a parliamentary vote as one of the three final candidates to be Myanmar’s next president, albeit as a proxy for the Nobel laureate. Htin Kyaw of the National League for Democracy party was approved …

JOHANNESBURG (AP) – A South African teenager may have found part of a wing from missing Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 during a beach vacation in Mozambique, the boy’s father said Friday. Liam Lotter found the piece on Dec. 30 on a beach in southern Mozambique, near the resort town of …

MIAMI (AP) – The spread of the Zika virus in Latin America is giving a boost to a British biotech firm’s proposal to deploy a genetically modified mosquito to try to stop transmission of the disease. Oxitec has genetically modified the Aedes aegypti mosquito, which also transmits dengue and chikungunya, …

NEW YORK (AP) – Capital One has teamed with Amazon to let owners of Amazon’s Echo smart speaker system pay their bills and get other account information through voice commands. Amazon’s Echo speakers use a voice-command service called Alexa to help users perform various tasks, such as turning on smart …