After months of ignoring China's warnings to give up its nuclear program, North Korean leader Kim Jong Un sent a high-level confidant to Beijing on Wednesday, in a possible effort to mend strained ties with its most important ally and the latest sign that Pyongyang may be giving diplomacy a chance.

A record 923,000 foreigners traveled to Japan in April, up 18.1 percent from a year earlier, taking advantage of a weaker yen and an increase in chartered flights, a government agency said Wednesday.

Mamun was hailed a hero for pulling survivors from the ruins of Bangladesh's Rana Plaza factory complex but now he struggles to sleep, haunted by the memory of sawing off a young woman's hand.

Japan's parliament on Wednesday approved an international treaty on child abductions after decades of pressure from the United States and other Western nations.

A Japanese cancer specialist said Wednesday she has started the world's first clinical trial of a powerful, nonsurgical, short-term radiation therapy for breast cancer.

Farmers have resumed planting rice for market only 15 kilometers (9 miles) from Japan's crippled Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear power plant, a local official said Wednesday.

Japan's nuclear watchdog said Wednesday that one reactor was sitting directly above an active tectonic fault, effectively ruling out a restart forever.

Rescuers on Wednesday recovered the last of 28 miners killed last week when an underground room of a giant Indonesian gold and copper mine collapsed, the operator of the U.S.-owned facility said.

India's scandal-rocked Congress party marked its last anniversary in power Wednesday before facing voters in 2014, amid dismal poll ratings and a growing clamor for Prime Minister Manmohan Singh to quit.

North Korea sent one of its top military officials as a "special envoy" from its leader Kim Jong-un to Beijing on Wednesday, accompanied by a high-powered delegation in what appeared to be a bid to mend frayed relations with its most important ally.