The Yomiuri Shimbun

A supplementary budget the government and the Democratic Party of Japan are crafting for postquake reconstruction likely will total more than 3 trillion yen, sources said Wednesday.

The extra budget, the first for this fiscal year, would be used mainly for disposing of rubble and constructing temporary housing for survivors of the March 11 earthquake and tsunami.

The government and the ruling party have decided not to issue government bonds to finance the budget, the sources said.

Instead, they are considering using 2.5 trillion yen allocated to shoulder 50 percent of basic pension benefits and could revise policies from the DPJ's manifesto for the 2009 House of Representatives election, such as making expressways toll-free, according to the sources.

The government intends to enact the supplemental budget late this month or early next month after holding talks with opposition parties.

But some members in both the ruling and opposition camps have criticized the funding plans.

Initially, the government was considering an extra budget of more than 1 trillion yen, but later revised the amount upward in the face of the enormous damage to areas affected by the disaster.

The Yomiuri Shimbun
April 07

Production of various medicines at pharmaceutical factories in the Tohoku and northern Kanto regions is at a standstill because of damage caused by the March 11 earthquake and tsunami.

Pharmaceutical companies are trying to import medicines in case domestic supply falls short, and doctors have been asked to avoid issuing long-term prescriptions, to help stretch the limited stock of certain medicines.

One of the most serious shortages is of levothyroxine sodium, a hypothyroidism medicine. Aska Pharmaceutical Co. accounts for 98 percent of the domestic supply of Thyradin S, a branded version of levothyroxine sodium, but damage suffered by the company's factory in Iwaki, Fukushima Prefecture, has paralyzed operations there.

About 300,000 patients nationwide are believed to be taking Thyradin S, and a lack of the medicine will pose a direct risk to those patients' lives.

A number of professional associations, including Japanese Medical and Dental Practitioners for the Improvement of Medical Care, have asked the central government to support emergency imports of levothyroxine sodium.

Tokyo, April 4 (Reuters): Japan has asked nuclear superpower Russia to send a special radiation treatment ship used to decommission nuclear submarines to help in its fight to contain the world’s worst atomic crisis since Chernobyl, Japanese media said late on Monday.       

Japanese engineers at the Fukushima nuclear plant have been forced to release radioactive wastewater into the sea. At the same time they are resorting to desperate measures to contain the damage, such as using bath salts to try to locate the source of leaks at the crippled complex 240km north of Tokyo.       

Three weeks after a 9.0 magnitude earthquake and massive tsunami hit northeast Japan, sending some of the plant’s reactors into partial meltdown, engineers are no closer to regaining control of the power plant or stopping radioactive leaks.       

The quake and tsunami left nearly 28,000 people dead or missing and Japan’s northeast coast a wreck.       

March 31, 2011

Japanese officials are testing the soil contaminated by radiation from the crippled Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant to try to determine whether spring farming can begin as alarmingly high radiation levels were detected outside the evacuation zone today.

"As a ratio, it was about two times higher" than levels at which the agency recommends evacuations," International Atomic Energy Agency Official Elena Buglova said at a news conference.

Separately, the amount of iodine found in seawater near the plant has reached a new high; 4,385 times the legal limit. Officials said earlier this week that dangerous plutonium was found in soil near the reactors.

Residents within 12 miles of the nuclear plant were evacuated after a 9.0-magnitude earthquake and tsunami knocked out the reactor's cooling system March 11.

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TOKYO March 31, 2011, 08:47

As Japan grapples with an unprecedented triple disaster — earthquake, tsunami, nuclear crisis — the Web has spawned creativity and innovation online amid a collective desire to ease suffering.

Once the magnitude of the March 11 disaster became clear, the online world began asking, "How can we help?"

And for that, social media offered the ideal platform for good ideas to spread quickly, supplementing efforts launched by giants like Google and Facebook.

A British teacher living in Abiko city, just east of Tokyo, is leading a volunteer team of bloggers, writers and editors producing "Quakebook," a collection of reflections, essays and images of the earthquake that will be sold in the coming days as a digital publication. Proceeds from the project will go to the Japanese Red Cross, said the 40-year-old, who goes by the pseudonym "Our Man in Abiko."

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 Mon Mar 28, 2011 11:10am EDT

 TOKYO (Reuters) - Highly radioactive water has leaked from a reactor at Japan's crippled nuclear complex, the plant's operator said on Monday, while environmental group Greenpeace said it had detected high levels of radiation outside an exclusion zone.

 Reflecting growing unease about efforts to control the six-reactor Fukushima Daiichi complex, plant operator Tokyo Electric Power Co (9501.T) (TEPCO) had appealed to French companies for help, the Kyodo news agency said.

The plant, 240 km (150 miles) north of Tokyo, was damaged in a March 11 earthquake and tsunami that left more than 28,000 people dead or missing across northeastern Japan.

Fires, explosions and radiation leaks have repeatedly forced engineers to suspend efforts to stabilize the plant, including on Sunday when radiation levels spiked to 100,000 times above normal in water inside reactor No. 2.