Natural Disaster, Japan Nuclear Crisis | featured news

With a minute of silence, tolling bells and prayers, Japan will on Sunday mark the first anniversary of an earthquake and tsunami that killed thousands and set off a nuclear crisis that shattered public trust in atomic power and the nation's leaders.

A contraction in the first quarter at an annual rate of 3.7 percent was worse than economists had expected.

Japan's shelters are still packed, with no firm word on when evacuees may return home. Cleaning up the most serious nuclear accident since Chernobyl is likely to take decades and cost Japan an untold fortune.

U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton said Sunday that America would stand by Japan, saying she was confident the country will fully recover from its tsunami and nuclear disasters....

Japan hoped power lines restored to its stricken nuclear plant may help solve the world's worst atomic crisis in 25 years, triggered by an earthquake and tsunami that also left more than 21,000 people dead or missing.

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

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according to reports from CNN, Reuters and the AP tonight, the last workers at the Fukashima-Daiichi reactors have been withdrawn from the scene, halting efforts to continue cooling partially melted fuel rods with ocean water.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.

The last thing Japan needed was more bad news on its threatened nuclear reactors. But Monday and early today, that's just what this nation got.