Japan marked the second anniversary on Monday of a devastating earthquake and tsunami that left nearly 19,000 people dead or missing and more than 300,000 people still displaced.

At memorial observances in Tokyo and in barren towns along the northeastern coast, those gathered bowed their heads in a moment of silence marking the moment, at 2:46 p.m. on March 11, 2011, when the magnitude 9.0 earthquake — the strongest recorded in Japan’s history — struck off the coast.

Taylor Swift has visited a young cancer patient in Nebraska.

The singer was at Children's Hospital & Medical Center in Omaha on Saturday to see 10-year-old Lauren Hacker. The fifth-grader at St. Margaret Mary School has cancer.

Tiffani Thiessen is probably best known for her role as Kelly Kapowski on "Saved by the Bell," but the actress says she had no idea at that time how popular the teenage sitcom was.

"I mean, I was so young. I was 15 when I started that show," Thiessen, now 39, said in a recent interview.

Nobel laureate Aung San Suu Kyi has been elected head of the new executive board of Myanmar's opposition National League for Democracy, as the party has a makeover to adjust itself to the country's new democratic framework.

A landmark three-day party congress attended by 894 delegates from around the country on Sunday expanded the group's Central Executive Committee from seven members to 15, with an addition five reserve members, in a revitalization and reform effort ahead of the 2015 general election.

A cruise ship has returned to South Florida after concluding a Caribbean voyage that saw more than a hundred people develop a gastrointestinal illness on board.

Royal Caribbean International reported Friday that 105 of 1,991 guests and three of 772 crew members experienced a possible short-lived norovirus illness during the 11-night trip.

A rough, whitish block recovered from an Elizabethan shipwreck may be a sunstone, the fabled crystal believed by some to have helped Vikings and other medieval seafarers navigate the high seas, researchers say.

In a paper published earlier this week, a Franco-British group argued that the Alderney Crystal — a chunk of Icelandic calcite found amid a 16th century wreck at the bottom of the English Channel — worked as a kind of solar compass, allowing sailors to determine the position of the sun even when it was hidden by heavy cloud, masked by fog, or below the horizon.

The 17-year-old beaten to death for refusing to marry a man old enough to be her grandfather. The teen dragged by her family to be raped to force her into marrying an elderly man. They are among 39,000 girls forced into marriage every day around the world, sold like cattle to enrich their families.

More than one-third of all girls are married in 42 countries, according to the U.N. Population Fund, referring to females under the age of 18. The highest number of cases occurs in some of the poorest countries, the agency figures show, with the West African nation of Niger at the bottom of the list with 75 percent of girls married before they turn 18. In Bangladesh the figure is 66 percent and in Central African Republic and Chad it is 68 percent.

Kelly Osbourne says she had a seizure and doctors are trying to figure out why.

The 28-year-old TV personality posted a photo on Twitter late Thursday of an IV in her tattooed left arm. She thanked her fans for their "beautiful well wishes."

Clashes raged on Saturday between Syrian troops and rebels in Daraa in the south, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said, adding that loud blasts were heard in Damascus province.

Meanwhile, government forces used heavy artillery against rebel positions in the eastern city of Deir Ezzor, it added.

Polish doctors say a 25-year-old man has undergone a three-hour operation to remove a screwdriver lodged about five centimeters (two inches) into his head.

Dr. Jan Kochanowicz, one of the doctors who treated the man in the Polish city of Bialystok, said the man apparently fell and lost consciousness, but does not remember that.