Japan begins grim relief mission with towns flooded, thousands reported missing

TOKYO - Rescue teams searched through matchstick rubble Saturday for thousands of people missing in flooded areas of northeastern Japan, beginning one of the most complex relief efforts in history.

A day after the 8.9-magnitude earthquake and massive tsunami, entire towns remained impossible to reach and some were feared to be wiped off the map. Most estimates put the death toll at 1,700, but news services quoted police in Miyagi Prefecture - one of the hardest-hit areas - as saying they expect the number to exceed 10,000 in that region alone.

About 200,000 people are living in temporary shelters. A strip of Japan's main Honshu island has almost no electricity, with scarce means to communicate. Many shelters do not have heat. Survivors at an elementary school in the devastated coastal town of Minamisanriku used chalk to write their message on a dirt playground: "SOS."

An explosion at a nuclear power plant in Fukushima Prefecture and concerns about potential radiation leakage prompted evacuations within a 12.5-mile radius. As many as 160 people near Fukushima's nuclear plants have been exposed to radiation.

In other areas north of Tokyo, closest to the epicenter of Friday's earthquake, witnesses said the massive wave had swallowed and chewed up entire neighborhoods. Attempts to reach those stranded, trapped or short on supplies were complicated by damage to the roads and rail lines.

Roughly 9,500 people in Minamisanriku - a town of 17,000 in Miyagi Prefecture - remain unaccounted for, the Kyodo news agency reported, citing local government officials. Phone lines are dead at schools. Footage taken by helicopters allowed for a before-and-after comparison: Where there was once a fishing and tourist village, there is now a lake, with only a few buildings poking out from the murky black.

"Even the medical relief is going to be a longtime battle," said Toshikazu Yamamoto, a Japanese Red Cross official in charge of disaster relief. "This earthquake is much larger than the Kobe earthquake [in 1995]. And Kobe took 10, 15 years to recover, and it actually hasn't recovered completely even now. Recovery from this earthquake is going to take a long, long time."

Attempts to map out the damage were only beginning as Japan dispatched 50,000 troops to the disaster zone. The coastal town of Rikuzentakata, in Iwate Prefecture, was entirely submerged by water, according to local authorities. One TV reporter who arrived at Iwaki, in Fukushima Prefecture, said the town was gone.

A derailed train in Miyagi Prefecture, closest to the quake's epicenter, was seen waylaid against the side of a house. There were no reports on the whereabouts of passengers.

With roads pretzeled and fuel in high demand along the undamaged routes heading north, the government will depend on ships and aircraft for the rescue work. Japan is sending 195 aircraft and 25 vessels to the disaster area, according to Kyodo. U.S. ships will join them for search-and-rescue missions.

Japanese power companies warned of severe outages in the coming days, with energy sources in diminished supply.

On Saturday, Japan's northeastern coastline, viewed from above, had the look of a dark scar. The fiercest wave sent a wall of water upward of 20 feet high toward the shoreline, and it spread some six miles inland. At 6 a.m. local time, Prime Minister Naoto Kan surveyed the area by helicopter. Those on the ground told of screams from trapped survivors, houses turned to splinters and overtaxed hospitals and shelters.

Japan begins grim relief mission with towns flooded, thousands reported missing

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TOKYO - Rescue teams searched through matchstick rubble Saturday for thousands of people missing in flooded areas of northeastern Japan, beginning one of the most complex relief efforts in history.

A day after the 8.9-magnitude earthquake and massive tsunami, entire towns remained impossible to reach and some were feared to be wiped off the map. Most estimates put the death toll at 1,700, but news services quoted police in Miyagi Prefecture - one of the hardest-hit areas - as saying they expect the number to exceed 10,000 in that region alone.

About 200,000 people are living in temporary shelters. A strip of Japan's main Honshu island has almost no electricity, with scarce means to communicate. Many shelters do not have heat. Survivors at an elementary school in the devastated coastal town of Minamisanriku used chalk to write their message on a dirt playground: "SOS."

An explosion at a nuclear power plant in Fukushima Prefecture and concerns about potential radiation leakage prompted evacuations within a 12.5-mile radius. As many as 160 people near Fukushima's nuclear plants have been exposed to radiation.

In other areas north of Tokyo, closest to the epicenter of Friday's earthquake, witnesses said the massive wave had swallowed and chewed up entire neighborhoods. Attempts to reach those stranded, trapped or short on supplies were complicated by damage to the roads and rail lines.

Roughly 9,500 people in Minamisanriku - a town of 17,000 in Miyagi Prefecture - remain unaccounted for, the Kyodo news agency reported, citing local government officials. Phone lines are dead at schools. Footage taken by helicopters allowed for a before-and-after comparison: Where there was once a fishing and tourist village, there is now a lake, with only a few buildings poking out from the murky black.

"Even the medical relief is going to be a longtime battle," said Toshikazu Yamamoto, a Japanese Red Cross official in charge of disaster relief. "This earthquake is much larger than the Kobe earthquake [in 1995]. And Kobe took 10, 15 years to recover, and it actually hasn't recovered completely even now. Recovery from this earthquake is going to take a long, long time."

Attempts to map out the damage were only beginning as Japan dispatched 50,000 troops to the disaster zone. The coastal town of Rikuzentakata, in Iwate Prefecture, was entirely submerged by water, according to local authorities. One TV reporter who arrived at Iwaki, in Fukushima Prefecture, said the town was gone.

A derailed train in Miyagi Prefecture, closest to the quake's epicenter, was seen waylaid against the side of a house. There were no reports on the whereabouts of passengers.

With roads pretzeled and fuel in high demand along the undamaged routes heading north, the government will depend on ships and aircraft for the rescue work. Japan is sending 195 aircraft and 25 vessels to the disaster area, according to Kyodo. U.S. ships will join them for search-and-rescue missions.

Japanese power companies warned of severe outages in the coming days, with energy sources in diminished supply.

On Saturday, Japan's northeastern coastline, viewed from above, had the look of a dark scar. The fiercest wave sent a wall of water upward of 20 feet high toward the shoreline, and it spread some six miles inland. At 6 a.m. local time, Prime Minister Naoto Kan surveyed the area by helicopter. Those on the ground told of screams from trapped survivors, houses turned to splinters and overtaxed hospitals and shelters.

Subterranean jail a sign of Gaddafi's grip

 

IN BENGHAZI, LIBYA Peering into a subterranean jail, Adil Gnaybor shuddered with fear. Rusted prison bars once covered with earth were now exposed, dug up by rebels who had discovered the secret labyrinth of cells. The space was too small for Gnaybor's 5-foot frame, and a white tube provided the only source of air.

"If I go inside there, perhaps I will die," Gnaybor said, staring into the hole.

Thousands of Libyans have been arriving here at a complex of palatial homes, known as the Katiba El Fadil bu Omar, where Libyan leader Moammar Gaddafi stayed during visits to this port city. It is here that Gaddafi also had an underground prison.

The compound is perhaps the most vivid symbol in eastern Libya of triumph over the Gaddafi regime. His houses have been torched and looted. Graffiti denouncing his regime is spray-painted on nearly every wall. One declared, "Libya will be free."

But amid the faded opulence, Libyans expressed fear that their revolution was losing ground on two fronts and could be reversed.

For many visitors, the underground jails were not only a chilling reminder of the brutality of Gaddafi's government. They also foreshadowed the terror Gaddafi is capable of inflicting in the future if his forces retake the city, Libya's second largest.

"I feel nervous. Look what happened in Zawiyah and in Ras Lanuf," said Gnaybor, 50, referring to two cities - the first in the west, the second in the east - that Gaddafi's forces have retaken over the past two days. "Everywhere we are losing a lot of people."

Al-Badri, a 62-year-old who came with his three daughters, said: "I expect anything from Gaddafi. He could bomb Benghazi, even use chemical weapons." He declined to give his full name, for fear that he would be targeted if Gaddafi returned.

"What is America waiting for?" he continued. "Until Gaddafi manages to kill all the Libyan people?"

Worries in Benghazi

Of all the cities that have revolted against Gaddafi, it is Benghazi that most Libyans expect will bear the full brunt of his wrath if he retains his grip on power. Libya's three-week-old populist revolution was born here, and it managed to reach the threshold of Gaddafi's nexus of power in western Libya with its brief takeover of Zawiyah, 30 miles from the capital, Tripoli.

Benghazi is also the headquarters of the Libyan National Council, a 31-member body that seeks to replace Gaddafi's regime.

In 1996, an estimated 1,200 prisoners who had protested Gaddafi's rule were killed at Tripoli's Abu Salim prison. Many were from Benghazi. Such memories of savagery helped trigger the uprising.

Japanese nuclear plants' operator scrambles to avert meltdowns

 

TOKYO - Japanese authorities said Sunday that efforts to restart the cooling system at one of the reactors damaged by Friday's earthquake had failed, even as officials struggled to bring several other damaged reactors under control.

Workers at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant have not found a way to stabilize overheated reactors and feared the possibility of partial nuclear meltdown, which could potentially cause a further release of radioactive material, Japan's top government spokesman said Sunday. Engineers were having trouble, in particular, with two units at the nuclear facility - one of which lost its outer containment wall Saturday in an explosion.

Meanwhile, officials declared a state of emergency at a nuclear power plant in Onagawa, where excessive radiation levels were reported.

Chief Cabinet Secretary Yukio Edano said a similar explosion could soon occur at Fukushima Daiichi's unit 3, the result of hydrogen levels that are increasing within the unit's reactor vessel amid last-ditch efforts to keep fuel rods submerged in water. Already, trace amounts of radioactive material have leaked from the No. 3 reactor, Edano said.

"At the risk of raising further public concern, we cannot rule out the possibility of an explosion," Edano said.

But Edano also insisted that an explosion would have no impact on human health. Based on initial findings from the government and from Japan's nuclear agency, the Saturday explosion in unit 1 did not damage the reactor vessel, and the government said that the unit 3 reactor vessel would also withstand an explosion. The reactor vessels of No. 3 and No. 1 are being flooded with seawater and boron in an emergency attempt to keep the units cool after the plant lost its main power supply and a backup system failed.

Though the third unit is being filled with water, its gauge inside does not register the rising levels, Edano said. He did not have an explanation.

"If the cooling system is not maintained, there is a good chance the core could start melting down," said Masahi Gota, a former Toshiba engineer who was involved in the design of the containment vessel for these nuclear reactors.

Richard Lester, co-chair of the Department of Nuclear Science and Engineering at MIT, said: "The most important task that the operators have - and have had for last 36 hours - is to keep the fuel in the reactor covered, submerged in water. If they succeed in doing that, keeping the fuel rods covered in water, the likelihood of significant damage to the fuel is low. If they cannot keep the fuel covered with water, then you have the possibility of melting."

Some 170,000 people have been evacuated around a 12-mile radius of the plant. They join more than 450,000 other evacuees from other quake- and tsunami-affected regions. A spokesman for Japan's nuclear agency said as many as 160 people may have been exposed to radiation and were being tested at a hospital to determine if levels were dangerous.

"Only the gravest danger would justify an evacuation at such a moment," said Peter Bradford, a former commissioner at the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission.

Edano said officials were acting on the assumption that a meltdown could be underway at Fukushima Daiichi's unit 3, and that it was "highly possible" a meltdown was underway at its unit 1 reactor, where an explosion destroyed a building a day earlier.

Who will reach the Final Four?

 

Old Dominion and George Mason both have a great chance to earn single-digit seeds today. In today's story, I wrote that the only time Old Dominion received a single-digit seed was in 1980. ODU also received a single-digit seed (eighth) in 1986.

I've started to think about potential Final Four picks. First, let me point out which teams I predicted before the season would make the Final Four: Duke, Michigan State, Pittsburgh and San Diego State. Duke is not the same team without Kyrie Irving. Michigan is not the same team everyone thought it would be. Pittsburgh's been fine. San Diego State has exceeded even my very high expectations for the Aztecs.

So it will depend on matchups and bracketing, but here are the teams I am strongly considering to select as Final Four teams:

Ohio State
Kansas
San Diego State
North Carolina
Purdue
Florida
Louisville
U-Conn.

Teams I will not pick to advance deep:
BYU
Villanova
Missouri

Other teams I like to win one or more games:
Old Dominion
Kansas State
George Mason
Oakland
Belmont
Butler

Teams that still baffle me:
Washington
Tennessee
Michigan State
Texas

For autistic kids' parents, trial hits home

When a Stafford County jury this month found an autistic teenager guilty of assaulting a law enforcement officer and recommended that he spend 101/2 years in prison, a woman in the second row sobbed.

It wasn't the defendant's mother. She wouldn't cry until she reached her car. It was Teresa Champion.

Champion had sat through the trial for days and couldn't help drawing parallels between the defendant, Reginald "Neli" Latson, 19, and her son James, a 17-year-old with autism.

James might have said this, she thought. James might have done that. She had fresh bruises on her body that showed that James, too, had lost his temper to the point of violence.

"This is what we live with," said Champion, of Springfield. "When they go over the edge, there is no pulling back. "

The cause of autism - a complex developmental disability that affects a person's ability to communicate and interact with others - remains the subject of heated debate. What's not in dispute is the soaring number of children found to have the disorder. In 1985, autism had been diagnosed in one out of 2,500 people in the United States; now the rate is one in 110.

Champion said parents are just beginning to acknowledge what she calls the "dark side of autism," their children's capacity for aggression when they are frustrated, angry or overstimulated. Her son recently hit his attendant and attacked his father in front of a movie theater. Other parents describe scary episodes of biting, kicking and hitting.

It's not easy to talk about children lashing out, Champion said. But it's necessary because many are getting older and bigger and yearn for more independence, which leads to private struggles becoming public.

During Latson's three-day trial, no one disputed that he assaulted a Stafford deputy one morning in May. The deputy was bleeding so profusely that responding officers thought he had been shot.

But why Latson - who has Asperger's syndrome, a relatively mild form of autism - did it and whether he could have stopped himself played a central role in his defense and has engaged the sympathy of parents in the Washington region and beyond.

"Everyone is like, 'Oh my God, that is my son,' " said Ann Gibbons of the advocacy group Autism Speaks. She said the case calls attention to two crucial issues: "How do we protect the community, and how do we protect the impaired individual?"

"And in this case, we didn't protect either," she said.

Dying for a long life

 A chemical that stains Alzheimer's-associated proteins may help cells to cope with toxic trash.

Worms fed a yellow dye that stains misfolded proteins had extended lives.Carolina Biological/Visuals Unlimited/Corbis

A chemical dye that lights up the protein clumps characteristic of Alzheimer's disease also slows ageing in worms.

The lifespan-boosting effects of the dye — called Thioflavin T or Basic Yellow 1 — support the idea that the build-up of misshapen proteins underlies ageing. Drugs that recognize such toxic detritus and alert the cell's natural repair and protein-recycling systems could, therefore, be used to treat diseases of old age, says Gordon Lithgow, a molecular geneticist at the Buck Institute in Novato, California, who led the study, published today in Nature1.

Proteins are essential for almost everything a cell does, from communicating with other cells to generating energy. But sometimes proteins form the wrong three-dimensional shapes. Misfolded proteins don't function properly and, worse, tend to accumulate and gum up other cellular systems. To prevent this from happening, cells deploy 'chaperones', whose job it is to refold misshapen proteins. In more extreme cases, cells can degrade these potentially dangerous proteins.

"There's a growing appreciation that protein misfolding may be one of the very fundamental events of ageing," says Richard Morimoto, a molecular biologist at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, who was not involved with the study. Worms genetically engineered to have a revved-up protein-recycling system, for instance, live longer than normal worms23.

Silvestre Alavez, a member of Lithgow's lab, had the idea that Thioflavin T that colours misshapen clumps of the protein amyloid-β (Aβ) — which is found in the brains of people with Alzheimer's disease — might also trigger this system.

Lithgow was sceptical that the dye could extend the lifespan of the Caenorhabditis elegans roundworms that his lab studies because the worms do not produce Aβ.

Yet small doses of Thioflavin T boosted the lifespan of roundworms by as much as 78%, Alavez found. Worms that did not receive the dye were all dead within 20 days, yet more than 80% of worms consuming a diet that included an optimum dose of Thioflavin T were still alive after the same period. However, Thioflavin T needed to be carefully measured — too large a dose proved toxic and shortened the worms' lives considerably.

Lithgow and Alavez suspect that Thioflavin T boosts lifespan by recognizing all kinds of toxic protein clumps, not just Aβ. For instance, the dye reversed the effects of mutations that cause muscle proteins to misfold, and to become paralysed at a particular temperature. Potentially toxic aggregates of proteins build up naturally in aged worms, they found, an effect that was markedly decreased in worms of a similar age fed Thioflavin T.

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"We think there may be some stabilization of misfolded proteins, and that induces the cells to take out the garbage," Lithgow says. His team also found that worms that lack genes important to dealing with misshapen proteins do not live longer when fed Thioflavin T.

Rudolph Tanzi, a neuroscientist at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston who was not involved in the work, describes it as an "incredibly cool experiment". Scientists have traditionally focused on the build-up of proteins such as Aβ because they form visible plaques in the brain. Lately, however, scientists have realized that much smaller protein clumps do the most damage to cells. "This goes way beyond Alzheimer's disease," Tanzi says. "There may be a whole slew of protein aggregates that never show up on a pathology slide."

Drugs that mimic the effects of Thioflavin T may find their way into the clinic, Lithgow says. His team found that similar compounds, including an ingredient in the spice turmeric, lengthened the lifespans of roundworms. These chemicals or other drugs that ramp up the cell's protein recycling pathways could help treat disease of old age, such as Alzheimer's. "It's incredibly early days," Lithgow says.?

Alavez, S. , Vantipalli, M. C. , Zucker, D. J. S. , Klang, I. M. & Lithgow, G. J. Nature doi:10.1038/nature09873 (2011).Hsu, A.-L. , Murphy, C. T. & Kenyon, C. Science 300, 1142-1145 (2003).Morley, J. F. & Morimoto, R. I. Mol. Biol. Cell 15, 657-664 (2004).If you find something abusive or inappropriate or which does not otherwise comply with our Terms or Community Guidelines, please select the relevant 'Report this comment' link.

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