Asia, Japan | featured news

A cold wind blowing at her back, Tayo Kitamura knelt beside her mother's body and pressed her palm against the blue plastic tarp rescue workers had just wrapped the corpse in. She leaned in as if to hug the body, then closed her eyes tightly as tears slid down her cheeks.

A top Japanese official acknowledged Friday that the government was overwhelmed by the scale of last week's twin disasters, slowing its response ...

One day after the earthquake and tsunami, search-and-rescue teams are fanning out in what will be a lengthy and complex endeavor.

A clamor for iodine salt leads to long lines and mob scenes at stores across China after rumors spread of a radioactive cloud from Japan's quake-damaged nuclear plant. The hordes are under the false impression that consuming the seasoning would protect against radiation poisoning.

Gregory Jaczko, head of the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission, says the crisis is worse than Japanese officials appear to be letting on. 'This is a situation where people may be called in to sacrifice their lives,' he says of the crew working there.

Concerns over the deteriorating condition of Japan's stricken nuclear reactors, and the effect on global economies, sparked the Dow's biggest selloff since August and left the S&P 500 in the red for 2011.

A small band of experts is risking their lives to prevent a nuclear disaster at Japan's damaged Fukushima Daiichi plant.

Australia advised its citizens in Japan on Wednesday to consider leaving Tokyo and earthquake-affected areas, joining a growing number of governments and businesses telling their people it may be safer elsewhere.

Japan's devastating earthquake and deepening nuclear crisis could result in losses of up to $200 billion for the world's third largest economy but the global impact remains hard to gauge five days after a massive tsunami battered the northeast coast.

It seems too impossible to believe, but according to reports from CNN, Reuters and the AP tonight, the last workers at the Fukashima-Daiichi reactors have been withdrawn from the scene, halting efforts to continue cooling partially melted fuel rods with ocean water. Just a day earlier 750 more workers had been removed. Exhaustion, radiation exposure, hopelessness–we don’t yet know the reason for this latest move. Earlier in the day new fires, explosions and clouds of smoke or steam were spotted. Maybe the evacuation means that the worst of the danger is over (how else could they leave?) — but that doesn’t seem likely.