JERUSALEM, Israel – Nassar and Ali Abu Alwa are devastated:  for the past 10 days they have had no income. The two Palestinian brothers live in East Jerusalem and for years have been a vital part of the tourist scene here.

If you have visited Jerusalem in the past 40 years, you probably have a picture of yourself posing with their pride and joy, known as “The Jerusalem Camel.”

Hundreds of tourists flock daily to the beautiful Mount of Olives observation point where the brothers work. It's a perfect vantage point to gaze at the Temple Mount, the Dome of the Rock Mosque, the Mount of Olives ancient Jewish cemetery and it offers a great 180-degree panorama of the walled Old City of Jerusalem.

Tourists hurry to snap pictures, but the best picture is always the one taken sitting on the camel with the Biblical view in the background. The camel's name is actually "Kojak" and has been in the business of hosting tourists on his back for pictures for the past 30 years.

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You can't beat the startled smile on a visitor’s face when the huge camel stands up from a kneeling position – laughter is heard everywhere.

The joke goes that for the price of $2 you can go up, but it costs $5 to get off.

But 10 days ago, the Jerusalem municipality decided they had had enough and detained Kojak, leaving Nassar and Ali heartbroken.

The official reasons for the seizure: the camel needs vaccinations, the brothers have no business permit and, last but not least, the camel has no third-party insurance. (Now come on, how do you insure a camel?!)

But Nassar and Ali claim the main reason for seizing the animal was to put pressure on them to hand over names of people the municipality suspects of pick-pocketing at the Mount of Olives observation point. The brothers won’t comment on the case for the meantime.

Enter Hila Zisberg. She belongs to “Youth for Jerusalem,” an Israeli organization that aims to bring young people to heritage sites.

Zisberg frequently brings young people on field trips to the Mount of Olives observation point. Recently, she was astonished to see Nassar and Ali, but not their beloved camel. She was angry when told that the camel had been detained.

"Kojak is a cornerstone of Jerusalem and he will die there," Ali Abu Alwa told Zisberg.

Zisberg decided to take on the Jerusalem municipality and demand the quick return of one of the city's icons. She is now busy with the strange task of finding an insurance company willing to insure a camel; she said most of the agents just laugh at her request.

But she is confident the issue will be resolved quickly and that Nassar and Ali will be reunited with their camel – so tourists can snap the perfect picture again soon.

The battle in Libya has reached the doors of Dr. Aiman's clinic in Misrata: A man was killed in its entrance late Wednesday, he said, probably by fire from the tanks that have surrounded the hospital, though it could have been snipers loyal to Col. Moammar Gadhafi.  

The snipers took up positions on tall buildings around the clinic Wednesday morning, posing a deadly threat to anyone coming in or out, said Aiman, who gave only one name out of concern for his safety.

"We came under attack from two tanks, heavy tanks, that bombed and shelled near the hospital," he told msnbc.com in a Skype call from the hospital in Libya's third-largest city.  "Two bombs fell 2, 3 meters away from the hospital. The situation is very, very bad. We have one person killed just in the entrance."

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The most recent round of fighting in Misrata began two days ago, when residents went to a key square to protest against Gadhafi, said engineer Nadir Abuzeid, who is acting as a spokesman for the rebels. Gadhafi forces bombed the square "randomly," killing 21 and wounding 112, he said.

"This is one of the bloodiest days since the protests began February 17," Abuzeid said, speaking through a translator and referring to the date of the first anti-Gadhafi demonstrations in Libya.

The situation at the hospital has steadily deteriorated since, said Aiman. Doctors on Wednesday were treating more than 120 wounded, though the clinic has only 60 beds, he said.

"The injured people -- we stopped counting them, it's overcount. We're just counting the dead people," he said. "Now we are treating people on the floor, no beds. ... We have no empty place. Even our operating theater, we are operating on three patients at the same time. We are operating on trolleys, not on operating beds."

He said doctors also were "using our flash mobile lights because we are working on a generator ... we don't have enough light."

The clinic no longer had anaesthesia, narcotics or sterilization. The patients were "crying from pain," he said. "We don't have anything we can do for them."

Misrata is located about 125 miles east of Tripoli, and is home to 300,000 people and iron, steel and textile factories, according to Libyaonline.com. Abuzeid said Gadhafi's forces appeared to be trying to establish a secure corridor along the road from Misrata to another strategic coastal city to the east: Sirte.

Gadhafi's forces were squeezing the southern part of Misrata, forcing residents to flee to the north. In the exodus, a man and his four children were killed by tank artillery on Tuesday, Abuzeid said.

"There is fear from this military action and more fear of the snipers ... The people are working together, they are feeding each other, they are helping each other," he said. "Everyone is a target."

Rear Adm. Gerard Hueber, a top U.S. officer in the military campaign in Libya, said international forces were attacking government troops that have been storming population centers in the country. On Wednesday evening, Libyan state television reported a "Crusader colonialist bombing targeting certain civil and military locations" in Tripoli's Tajoura district — scene of some of the heaviest past protests against Gadhafi.

"Libya has been dead for 42 years (since Gadhafi's rule began), so we consider ourselves dead," said Abuzeid. "It's an issue of freedom. We want to get rid of the tyranny."

It's not clear overall how many people have died or been wounded in the conflict in Misrata. But more than 85 people have been kidnapped, Abuzeid said. (Click to read previous article:Pro-Gadhafi kidnap gangs silencing foes.)

Though Hueber said the international coalition's targets included mechanized forces, mobile surface-to-air missile sites and lines of communications from Ajdabiya in the east to Misrata in the west, Aiman said his city remains blockaded.

"We are in an embargo from the west, from the south, from the east. Even our seaport (to the north), we cannot receive any help from" there, he said. "We have nothing."

Aiman said some people had been stuck in the hospital for 10 days because "it's not safe to go out or come into the hospital."

"If anyone goes out, maybe he cannot come back to the hospital ... (he) could be killed, could be kidnapped; maybe they don't have a safe way to get back to the hospital. We don't know about our families. There is no telecommunications, no landlines, nothing here. Everything is cut. The water, the electricity, no food. Nothing here in the city. It's a ghost city now."

Almost everyone in the town of Rikuzentakata on Japan’s northeast coast knew teacher Montgomery Dickson, or “Monty-san,” as the locals call him.

But the tall American hasn't been heard from since the March 11 quake and tsunami slammed the northeastern coast of the island nation, and any surviving villagers in the town of 23,000 who might have spotted his familiar face apparently have left. An International Medical Corps team that visited Rikuzentakata in the wake of the double disaster found it “was completely destroyed by the tsunami and no persons were present. Showing the depth of the tsunami wave and extent of the destruction, water marks were observed at a height of up to 10 meters (nearly 33 feet) on the sides of hills.”

But Dickson's family and friends are holding out hopes that Dickson, who competed in bike races and joked with his family in Alaska about knowing the area so well that he gave directions to the locals, somehow survived the carnage, said his sister, Shelley Fredrickson, a 44-year-old sales representative in Anchorage.

"We still have hope, we haven’t given up hope by any means of finding him,” she said.

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The last one to speak to the 26-year-old Dickson, known as Monty, was his girlfriend, whom he called after his students had evacuated the school where he was teaching. Following evacuation procedure, Dickson -- a teacher with the Japan Exchange and Teaching Programme (JET) -- then went to the board of education office on the third floor at City Hall as a safe haven.

“When the tsunami hit, all contact with him was gone," Fredrickson said. "We found out that the tsunami was much larger than anybody ever predicted. It went over the third floor of the building where he was. So, that news was very ... damaging to us as a family.”

Overall, some 13,800 people are still listed as missing in the quake and tsunami, in addition to more than 9,200 confirmed deaths, according to the U.S. Agency for International Development. So far, Taylor Anderson, a 24-year-old JET teacher from Richmond, Va., is the only American known to have died in the tragedy, according to the U.S. State Department, which said it was looking into several other reports of missing Americans. 

Fredrickson said she and her brother have family in England and Hawaii who are helping to post word online about Dickson's disappearance, and they have been in touch with several U.S. agencies and Japanese authorities. She said U.S. consular officials went to the town last week to bring supplies and search -- checking shelters and the morgue –- but found no sign of him.

“You think that if he was walking around helping people -- everybody did know him and he does stand out -- that we would have heard word that somebody would have seen him,” she said. "We all put ourselves on Japanese time so that we can be awake when search crews were there."

His girlfriend also went to Rikuzentakata a few days ago with her brother to search for him. “She couldn’t find anything. She couldn’t find his apartment, she couldn't find his belongings, she couldn't find him,” she said.

One of Dickson's friends, fellow teacher Noriyasu Li, created a profile for him on the Google person finder application.

“Monty's a very outgoing, bright, and hardworking individual,” Li, who met Dickson when they studied together in Alaska before they joined the JET program in Japan in 2009, wrote to msnbc.com. “I believe he worked very hard as a teacher. His advanced Japanese skills must have also paid off, as I heard he was very well spoken in the community of Rikuzentakata ... and connected well with his students. Overall he is a fantastic individual, and I can only hope and pray that he is still somewhere surviving.”

Dickson, whose parents died at different times when he was a child, lived with Fredrickson in his late teens. She said he always worked hard in school to make his mother proud, excelling in academics, and continued to strive for academic achievement after her death -- finishing among the top of his class in high school and at the University of Alaska, Anchorage, where he received a bachelor's degree in language with an emphasis in Japanese.

She said he was a "good kid" with a good sense of humor who had first gotten interested in Japanese culture through video games, and then studied Japanese throughout his education, including spending about two years in the country as a student. He arrived in Japan in August 2009 as a JET teacher, and had planned on teaching there for three years. JET said he is the last of their teachers who is still missing.

Fredrickson said she didn't know if the family would go to Japan to look for him.

"It’s really hard because, we’re going to find him. What capacity, we don’t know," she said.

Stephen Colbert said it sounded like a “Carnival cruise ship.”
 
Jon Stewart likened it to the name of a bad “Yes” album.

And shortly after the first missiles were launched Saturday comedian Andy Borowitz asked, via Twitter, “Am I the only one who thinks Odyssey Dawn sounds like a stripper name?”

In the Pentagon, Operation Odyssey Dawn is the name of the U.S. military engagement in Libya.

The task of creating such names falls to the military command leading the initiative. In the case of Libya, that’s the United States Africa Command, one of the nine Unified Combatant Commands, and best known as AFRICOM.

Spokesman Eric Elliot laughed when he was reached by phone Tuesday in Stuttgart, Germany, where AFRICOM is based, and said the command had gotten a lot of questions about the name of the operation. He explained to there is nothing significant about the name at all and that it is actually meant to be completely random.  

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“The Joint Staff actually has a naming convention in place for naming exercises and operations. These are used for most of the day-to-day things we may be doing,” he said. “Each military command is given a series of letters that they can use for the first word of a name of an operation...The goal is to have a two-word nickname that is unclassified that can be used in an unclassified setting to describe something that is classified.”

Elliot explained that the naming convention is based on a series of letters assigned to different branches of the military.

“AFRICOM has been assigned, for the first word [that] the first two letters have to be between JS and JZ, NS and NZ, and OA and OF. So ‘Odyssey’ falls into the OA and OF category,” Elliot explained.
 
“So what they did was, they took the list, and they had done something with Js and Ns and so they went to O. They marked off all the words that had been used before and they chose ‘Odyssey.’” Once they have the first word, they can use anything for the second word. “They basically sit around and brainstorm something that sounds good with it,” Elliot said.

He added that, of course, there are certain criteria, “They can’t use anything that may have a trademark or a copyright, they can’t use anything that may be offensive, or has the potential to be misrepresented, and it can’t be something that would be overly aggressive.”

From there, the recommendation has to go through the chain of command at AFRICOM and gets the final stamp of approval at the Pentagon.

Not meant to convey the ‘Dawn of an Odyssey’
What about the irony that the term ‘Odyssey’ suggests a long saga, like Odysseus’ 10-year journey, the opposite of the message President Barack Obama is trying to convey about the mission?

Elliot said the name was meant to be “completely random. The goal is that if I go down the street in New York and say ‘Odyssey Dawn’ that it would not give any indication of what it is or where it is.” 

He did admit that the terminology has created some confusion. He said he’s gotten several calls from French journalists because when the words are translated, they get flip-flopped and become the “Dawn of an Odyssey” – exactly the opposite of the short, concise, precision military mission advocated by the United States. 

What do the folks at AFRICOM HQ who came up with the name think of all the jokes?

“Honestly I think they would be pretty flattered,” said Elliot. “They do a lot of these and most of them are small operations or small exercises – things that really don’t have much national or international limelight. I didn’t realize they are making fun of it on late night TV; I’ll have to tell the guys down the hall. We’ve all been overseas for so long…”

Related link from Parameters in 1995: The Art of Naming Operations

By NBC News’ Lubna Hussain 

RIYADH, Saudi Arabia – One week after the planned “Day of Rage” didn’t materialize on the streets of Saudi Arabia’s main cities, the police had to deal with a different kind of “demonstration” in the kingdom’s capital.

The youth of the kingdom, draped in green and white flags and clutching poster-sized portraits of their king, poured into the streets Friday in a show of solidarity and support for his rule.

Earlier in the day, the 86-year-old ruler of this deeply conservative oil-rich kingdom had announced a series of measures to boost welfare benefits, create more jobs, build new housing, improve healthcare and establish a new agency to tackle corruption – at a cost of $93 billion.  

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Many cynics dismissed these initiatives as a cosmetic glossing over of the real problems that exist within Saudi society. With unemployment estimated to be above 10 percent and a burgeoning youth population, the median age is 25, the country faces serious challenges.  

But as one senior Saudi official put it on Monday, the reform package “could buy us the time we need before any serious political reforms are implemented.”

Unlike elsewhere in the region, Saudi Arabia has the economic clout to be able carry out its promise of pouring billions of dollars into public projects, at least for the foreseeable future. With the price of oil at more than $100 per barrel, even a $93 billion series of initiatives is affordable for this oil-rich nation.

Soft power of the king
But what distinguishes the kingdom from other countries, asides from its impressive oil reserves, and what most so-called “Saudi experts” consistently underestimate and have failed to fathom, is the soft power of the king himself.

“I love my King Abdullah!” shouted 18-year-old Thamer Al Said, when asked why he was out on the streets with his friends. “All the people love him because he is a great man and he loves his people,” he continued, raising a picture of the king high above his head.

His sentiments were echoed by many on Riyadh’s streets Friday. Cars were spray-painted green and white and some owners had even gone as far as to have pictures of the king etched onto their rear windows. Stereos blared patriotic songs lauding the attributes of King Abdullah: “We love you, father of the nation. May Allah Bless you with a long life!”

Mohammed Al Harthy, a computer engineer who has been unemployed for two years had mixed feelings about the decrees. “I know that our government is trying its best to help the people, but life here is very expensive these days and it’s very hard when you don’t have a job after studying all these years. I want to work. I don’t want to have to accept charity from anyone.”

So did he think that regime change was the solution?

“I think everybody here loves the king and you know, we all believe in him. We have a lot of problems, like anywhere else, but we want to find our own solutions. What King Abdullah has done is a great step, but there are lots of things that need to change. We don’t want our king to change, but we want him to make the changes that we need.”

An  American family  was in mourning Monday after  learning that their daughter and sibling, a teacher and lifelong student of Japanese culture,  had been found dead in Japan –- the first known American victim of the March 11 earthquake and tsunami.

Taylor Anderson, a 24-year-old from Richmond, Va., had lived in Japan since August 2008. She was last seen after the powerful earthquake struck Japan on March 11, riding her bike away from the school where she taught after helping to get her students home.

“It is with deep regret that we inform you that earlier this morning we received a call from the U.S. Embassy in Japan that they had found our beloved Taylor's body,” the Anderson family wrote in a statement. “We would like to thank all those (whose)  prayers and support have carried us through this crisis.  Please continue to pray for all who remain missing and for the people of Japan.”

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 Anderson’s family, who had mounted a long-distance search for Anderson, could not immediately be reached for comment.

But a Facebook poster, who gave his name as Ramon Badcock, said he met Anderson in Japan and will remember her positive spirit.

"She was of a rare breed of people, always happy and positive, kind and generous, with a smile that seemed to go on forever," he wrote in an email to msnbc.com. "I will mourn, but more importantly I will celebrate her life, for it was a beautiful life and I know she would prefer that."

Until Monday's announcement, none of the estimated 50,000-plus Americans living in or visiting Japan when the quake hit had been confirmed killed. The U.S. State Department said it was seeking further information regarding the death.

Most of Taylor’s friends and colleagues in the JET Programme (the Japan Exchange and Teaching Programme), stayed at their schools overnight after the quake, but not Taylor, said her sister, Julia Anderson.

“Taylor helped in the evacuation of the students onto the athletic field, waited for parents to pick up the students and whoever was leftover went to higher ground. Taylor decided to go back to her apartment, but by her bike, and so we know she left her school and that’s the last we know,” Anderson said  late last week.

“Shortly thereafter, the tsunami warning sirens started to sound," her father, Andy, a 53-year-old real estate developer, said last week. “She probably had 10, 15 minutes of bike riding before the water hit.”

Taylor, who was living in Ishinomaki in Miyagi prefecture, started learning Japanese when she was in middle school, and eventually minored in Asian Studies at college. When she left for Japan, the departure was emotional but the family was proud of her. 

“She was living the life that she always wanted and she was getting to know a culture she was always fascinated with,” Julia said last week. “Her students loved her.”

 

It was faith that landed Patrick Hiltbrand in the path of a tsunami last week, but arguably it was also his faith that got him out —as he survived the deluge in the upper floor of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in the small town of Tagajo.  Despite the ordeal he has survived, he so far has no intention of leaving Japan soon, and that too has to do with his religious convictions.

“Right now, I’m here in Japan for two years to serve God,” said the 20-year-old speaking from a mission in Sapporo. He is determined to return to the disaster zone to help with recovery, but awaits instruction: “My (mission) leaders are receiving guidance from God,” he said.

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For members of the Mormon church, going on “mission” is a rite of passage. At any given moment there are about 52,000 Mormon missionaries working around the world — most of them between 19 and 21 years old. In order to remain focused of their religious work, they are asked not to watch television, follow the news or call their families and friends. On their one day off a week, they can write letters or email.

Hiltbrand, from Pocatello, Idaho, is the third son in the family to go on mission, but the first to be sent overseas. Being chosen for Japan was "beyond his wildest dreams," said his mom, Corrie Hiltbrand. He had been evangelizing in Sendai area of Japan for about 15 months when the quake struck.

Dressed in the standard issue white-shirt-and-tie, he and his “companion” Yuji Aiura — Mormon missionaries always travel in pairs — had arrived by bicycle to a small restaurant in Tagajo, a river town about two miles from the ocean.

They were discussing the power of God with two local Japanese when the shaking began. They ignored it at first says Hiltbrand — there are so many small quakes in this region — but not for long.

The growing fury of the rumbling drove them to take shelter under a table. Then they decided to run outside.

“There was a loud bang and everything was moving in every direction,” Hiltbrand says. “Cars were rocking on the street.”

When it stopped, the two missionaries jumped on their bikes and rode to check on their apartment, then headed to the Mormon church in Tagajo, dodging newly created crevices and open manholes.

Along the way, Hiltbrand registered the shock and fear on faces all around him, wracking his brain for the right course of action.

“As we started toward the church I turned to my companion and said ‘our job today is to help people be happy as we can,'” said Hiltbrand. “I tried to smile and say hi to everyone.”

It is in Hiltbrand's character  to try to cheer people, said his mother. She describes him as tough in the face of adversity, outgoing and enthusiastic about whatever task is at hand. Right before leaving on mission, the electronics student needed to make some money—and the only job he could get was standing on a corner wearing a big sign for a local pizza joint.

“He stood on a street corner flipping and spinning that sign. He never stopped moving,” said Corrie Hiltbrand. “He said, ‘If this is what I have to do for my job, then I’m going to go all out,’ and that’s what Patrick does.”

Any illusion that the disaster was over quickly passed as traffic built—with cars heading inland toward Sendai. Then police and fire vehicle sirens began blaring tsunami warnings.

Hiltbrand and Aiura climbed to the second story of the church, a building that is raised 4 to 5 feet off the ground.

The watched out the window as the water level rose rapidly, aided by the river that wraps around the town—and sucked their bicycles into a torrent, along with cars and debris.

Water began pouring through the church’s mail slot in the door of the first floor.

“From the second floor it sounded like a waterfall,” said Hiltbrand. “I went downstairs, and as I watched it coming in … the glass on the door shattered and water came pouring in.”

The water rose to about four feet before it started to subside he said.

It was 20 hours before the young missionaries could venture outside. They were not able to go to the emergency meeting site designated by their mission because they were isolated on the wrong side of the swollen river. There was no cell service to get instruction from higher-ups at the church.

“It was a real ‘what do I do’ moment,” Hiltbrand said in a matter-of-fact voice. “(Aiura) said, ‘We need to get to Sendai,'” about 20 miles away.

They trudged through standing water, navigating through the piles of cars and wreckage. Japanese residents were also wading through the remaining water, some carrying elderly family members on their backs.

A local church member driving toward Tagajo from Sendai spotted Hiltbrand and Aiura as he neared the town. He turned around them and drove them to the unscathed mission in Sendai city, about 24 hours after the quake. 

The church has since moved all 200 of its young evangelists from Tokyo and the Sendai area to missions they believe to be a safe distance from the radiation leak at the Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear power plant.

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Hiltbrand is now at a mission in Sapporo — on the northern island of Hokkaido. On Friday he and other evacuees were getting health evaluations and briefings on the full scope of the disaster, including the radiation leaking from Fukushima — a crisis that has prompted the U.S. government to offer U.S. citizens evacuation from Japan.

Hiltbrand said he has no thought of going back to Utah early. And his mother said she is 100 percent supportive of his plans—even after a tense and prayer-filled 24 hours of uncertainty about her son’s survival.

“(To ask) for him to come home never even went through our minds,” she said. “Patrick is where he has planned to be all his life…. We knew he was where needed to be and when we heard from him that he had been protected.  And we know that he will be protected.”

For his part, Hiltbrand is itching to get back to the disaster zone.

“I really want to be in Tagajo helping people,” he says. “I have many friends in Tagajo and I don’t know how they are. I don’t know how they will clean it all up and I want to help.”

But, as senior leaders of the LDS church told msnbc.com earlier in the week, the missionaries, although enthusiastic, may be more of a burden than a help at this stage.

So Hiltbrand waits until the church says it is OK for him to change his mission — from saving souls to salvaging lives.

“All I know is I’m now in Sapporo because I’m supposed to be,” he said.

American teacher Taylor Anderson helped her students get home after last Friday’s powerful earthquake rumbled through Japan and then left the school on her bike. 

That was the last time the 24-year-old from Richmond, Va., who has lived in Japan since August 2008 and was a lifelong student of Japanese culture, has been seen or heard from. 

“We’re just in shock, you go into a state of where you don’t think about it,” her sister, Julia, 22, said Friday in a telephone interview from Richmond. “We don’t sleep. We just work constantly. We think positive thoughts, have the occasional breakdown, but then we keep going.”

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The Andersons stepped up their efforts to find Taylor, who was teaching in Ishinomaki in northeastern Miyagi prefecture, after a false report earlier in the week that she was spotted at a junior high school. 

“I think the worst part was Tuesday, when we heard that she was found and then 12 hours later we found out that was false,” she said. “It was terrible. It was bad. That was a really rough night for all of us. It just hit us in the face. We were like, ‘We haven’t done enough.’ … after that we got the ball moving.” 

The Andersons have used the Internet to step up their search for Taylor, have contacted the U.S. Embassy in Japan and local officials, and have been in touch with her friends and colleagues to learn details about her routines, and the routes she would take home since she rotated between eight schools. 

U.S. consular officials went Thursday to the school where she was teaching when the quake hit on March 11 and interviewed teachers there. They said she left school after the children went home, said her father Andy Anderson, a 53-year-old real estate developer. 

“Shortly thereafter, the tsunami warning sirens started to sound. She probably had 10, 15 minutes of bike riding before the water hit. The question is, where was she?” he said. 

Anderson said he had learned from the consular officials that her case has been turned over to local police. He said he was upset by the move, and felt U.S. resources should be used to find Taylor and any other Americans reported missing. 

“She could be holed up somewhere, she could be dead, I don’t know but we need to find out,” he said.  

It’s unclear how many Americans are missing in the wake of the earthquake and tsunami. So far, none of the estimated 50,000-plus Americans living in or visiting Japan when the quake hit have been confirmed killed. 

Leslie Phillips, a U.S. State Department spokeswoman, said the government was “aware of several Americans that are unaccounted for at this point” but that the department does not “have an accurate, up-to-date number every moment of the day.” 

James D. Pettit, deputy assistant secretary for Overseas Citizens Services, said that task forces “have been … receiving inquiries on missing U.S. citizens, tabulating those, sending that information out to our consular field teams.  …. At present, we have consular field teams at both airports in the Tokyo area, as well as in the north in the affected areas.” 

“As time goes by, and we learn that there are individuals from whom no one has heard, we focus more on those individuals.  And in fact, our teams on the ground are going to specific addresses to see if the buildings are still standing or if anyone knows the whereabouts of the missing individuals.”

Most of Taylor’s friends and colleagues in the JET Programme (the Japan Exchange and Teaching Programme), stayed at their schools overnight after the quake, Julia Anderson said. Two of Taylor’s neighbors went back to their apartments three days after the quake.

“She lived right on the coast you could see the ocean from her apartment,” she said. “Her apartment is still standing and still OK, but she wasn’t there.” 

Taylor started learning Japanese when she was in middle school, and eventually got a minor in Asian Studies at college. When she left for Japan, the departure was emotional but the family was proud of her. 

“She was living the life that she always wanted and she was getting to know a culture she was always fascinated with,” Julia Anderson said. “Her students loved her.” 

Andy Anderson said the family was focused on finding Taylor and did not sit around and “doom and gloom it."

“If that means that I got to go to Japan and hitch onto some truck or whatever, I’m going to do it,” he said. “We just want to find her.”

BEIJING – China is in the midst of a salt rush.

Despite the Chinese government’s effort to educate the population and reassure them they will not be exposed to radiation from the nuclear plant in northern Japan, many fearful Chinese have come to believe baseless rumors that the iodine in salt could save them from radiation sickness – so they are hoarding iodized salt.
 
The frantic buying has left grocery shelves empty of salt in China’s coastal provinces, just across the Yellow Sea and the East China Sea from Japan. But the panic is spreading quickly westwards to the country’s inland where salt sales are catching up at a crazy speed.
 
“April Gourmet,” a chain supermarket frequented by Beijing’s expatriate community, told NBC News that its salt supply was sold out as of Thursday morning.  “I’m not sure when we’ll have salt again because our suppliers’ stocks have been sold out, too and now the price is higher. Even the soy sauce is sold out by customers who worry they won’t have salt for cooking,” Ms. Zhao, a public relations manager for the store said in a phone interview.

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“Merry Mart,” another big Chinese supermarket chain favored by older Beijingers, also reported that all the salt was sold out.
The spike in demand may be due to the misunderstanding of reports that note the thyroid gland is susceptible to radioactive iodine – just one of several types of radiation that could be produced by the crippled reactors – and that potassium iodide tablets can block the radioactive iodine if taken before exposure.

Salt containing iodine, however, would not shield against the radiation, medical experts say, adding that there was no reason for alarm in China, which is thousands of miles away from the damaged reactors.
 
On Taobao.com, China’s largest online business-to-business platform, some sellers from coastal provinces are even promoting their products by advertising, “Buy one, get one bag of salt free.” On the Sina microblog, a Twitter-like message sharing site, “salt” has become the most frequently discussed word and people from all over the country are reporting on how the panic buying has caused shortages in their hometowns.

Meantime, nuclear scientists have repeatedly explained on TV that even if a nuke explosion did take place, the level of radiation that could spread to China’s coastal cities would be diluted to a minor extent and simply taking salt would not help preventing damage.

Fang Zhouzi, a Beijing-based scientist famous for educating the public about scientific facts, wrote in his microblog that “you’d have to take 5-13 pounds of salt to have enough iodine to resist the radiation.” The Chinese government has also set-up telephone hotlines and web sites that address the public’s concerns about possible radioactivity from Japan.
 
The National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC), the country's economic policy agency, has also warned consumers about price gauging and has encouraged them not to give into the fear mongering. "Don't believe rumors, don't spread rumors, and don't panic buy," said the NDRC in an emailed statement, Reuters reported.

Still, the Chinese government’s education efforts seem to have done very little to deter people’s determination to hoard salt. News keep pouring in about how salt is sold out everywhere, and the China Salt Industry Corp., China’s biggest state-owned salt producer, continues to promise citizens a stable market will be back soon and that therea are ample reserves.
 
Meantime, China announced on Wednesday that it will readjust and amend mid- and long-term development plans for nuclear power. The State Council announced that approval for all new nuclear power plants, including those in preliminary development, will be temporarily suspended until safety standards are revised and strengthened.

Robert Bazell, NBC News Chief Science Correspondent, is in Tokyo covering the disaster at the Fukushima Dai-ichi power plant and the growing fears of a massive radiation leak. He spoke to msnbc.com by phone Thursday morning to discuss the crisis.

There seems to be a lot of confusion over what is happening at Fukushima Dai-ichi power plant. What is the government doing to fix the problem at this point?
There are really two voices of authority on the nuclear reactor – the Japanese government and the Tokyo Electrical Power Company, which owns and operates the power plant. The company doesn’t have press conferences; they issue press releases that get translated into English and so far the information has been very confusing.
 
But today the government met with foreign reporters for the first time. That’s important because it shows that they want to communicate with the outside world. That came after the chairman of the United States Nuclear Regulatory Commission Gregory Jaczko raised concerns that there may be little or no water in Number 4 reactor’s cooling pool. That would be an extremely serious situation because the rods could get extremely hot, melt and release a lot of radiation into the atmosphere if they are not covered by water.

At the press conference today the Japanese minister said that there were two views within the Japanese government: One, that there was no water, and the one that there is some water in the No. 4 reactor. They said that was based interpretations of photographs they somehow got from inside the plant.

That was a big admission – they had never said before that anyone thought there was no water. But it revealed how bad the potential is – and it’s still just potential, no one is saying for sure that these reactors are going to blow out a significant amount of radiation. We just don’t know what may happen.

Today, we saw dramatic shots of helicopters dropping water on one of the reactors. Many here had a visceral response to those photos because that’s what we saw at Chernobyl, which was the worst nuclear disaster ever.

This will never be as bad as Chernobyl, because even though we may have some complaints about how forthright the Japanese have been, they did announce immediately that they had a problem. The then-Soviet Union tried to keep Chernobyl a secret for a long time, so people couldn’t even get out of the way if they wanted to.

But as soon as they recognized there was a problem, the Japanese government set up a zone where they urged people to evacuate who weren’t working on the power plant.

So it is a question of how big the threat of a massive radiation leak is. But it’s not for certain it’s going to happen.
 
And the Japanese government, even though they have given conflicting – and perhaps less forthright answers sometimes – at least they have been giving answers.  

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How are people dealing with the situation in Tokyo? How are they determining what’s real vs. rumors and the immediate risks? Are people trying to prepare themselves? Rushing to buy things at stores?
It varies from person to person. Quite a lot of people are being very stoic and believe the government. Others, if they have a place to go, and the means to do it, they are trying to get out of Tokyo.
 
Right now, the wind is blowing in such a way that if there was a big radiation release, it would head to the Tokyo area. An estimated 30 million people live in the Tokyo area. It is one of the greatest concentrations of human beings on earth. So you have to think of the seriousness of that.

The biggest problem is gasoline. There is almost no gasoline to be had – except for taxi cabs and emergency vehicles. A lot of commuter trains aren’t running and there are rolling blackouts, so a lot of businesses aren’t operating. Those things are not as much a result of the risk of radiation, but the consequences of the earthquake and tsunami. The Japanese schools are still open. But schools for children of foreigners are closed for two weeks and then they will reassess the situation. A lot of foreigners have left already.

There are reports that at least 19 workers at the power plant in Japan have been injured, more than 20 exposed to radiation and two have gone missing during the battle to prevent a nuclear disaster. Who does that leave to deal with the crisis there?
At the government news conference today they said there are at least 270 working to try to contain the problem. They have to rotate and work in shifts because the radiation the level is so high that they can’t work for very long. There are limits to how much exposure each individual can take.

How are you and the crews protecting yourselves?
Right now there is no radiation in Tokyo. We have instruments to measure it and there is none here.

The Japanese government also has at least one radiation activity monitoring system in every prefecture in the country. The results from those tools are posted every hour, 24/7, on the Internet. So you can log-on and see where the government says it’s detecting radiation. Even more so, we have our own detectors.

So if there was a radiation cloud coming, first of all, I think we’d get a warning about it. Secondly, you would take the precaution of going indoors.

People who have studied Chernobyl and other radioactive leak events say that if you are in a well-sealed building, your exposure goes down by 95 percent because the exposure is mostly particular matter you need to avoid.

Are you still being screened for radiation daily? 
No, the NBC people who got screened were those reporters who had traveled from the quake area in the north back to Tokyo. And they were screened by our own private nuclear experts. They found slightly elevated doses on a few people’s shoes – but again these doses are not anything that anyone would consider to be a health risk.

You are still there in Tokyo reporting and as you said there is no radiation there, but are you starting to get a little nervous?
Personally, I’m not nervous about this. During my graduate studies I worked at what was then called the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory, now known as the Berkeley Lab. http://www.lbl.gov/ Because I was trained in science, I am familiar with what radiation can and can’t do.

I think there is a lot of irrational fear about radiation. You definitely have to be careful – radiation is a threat that you can’t see, you can’t feel, you can’t smell. As a result, people fear it a lot more than they would fear other things that are probably a much bigger threat to them.
 
I’m not trying to be blasé or casual about it, but you just have to be knowledgeable about it.
 
So what are the steps that need to be taken to contain the radiation threat?
Obviously today was desperation day because of the helicopters. They weren’t getting enough water into the reactor pools that contain the spent fuel rods which are enormously hot. If the rods are not covered in water, they melt and they could create a chain reaction. That would be really bad because the explosion would be huge.

So they have to fight to keep water in there. Water is actually the only thing you can battle this threat with – they need to just keep circulating water around the fuel rods.

Seeing the helicopters made everyone realize that pumping sea water in wasn’t working. Then they brought in water cannons that are usually used to suppress riots.

Apparently they have now finally gotten a huge electrical cable near the plant. That should enable them to run water pumps in a much simpler way than using fire trucks. So if they can get pumps up and running, which they are supposed to start doing tomorrow, that could reduce the threat considerably. So it’s sort of a race against time.

If it works out, there will be electrical pumps finally working again that could circulate enough water to cool down the reactors and greatly diminish the threat.

It’s a race to get water in there.

By Jim Maceda, NBC News Correspondent
TRIPOLI, Libya – So what has the mercurial Libyan strongman Moammar Gadhafi been up to while the world has focused on Japan?

One could rightly ask, as did a Swiss reader of the New York Times did in Wednesday’s Opinion section, if some dictators in the Arab World see ‘‘the unfolding catastrophe in Japan … as convenient camouflage to ramp up actions that would otherwise be more widely condemned?”

It’s a tempting idea that might well apply to recent crackdowns in Bahrain, Yemen and Saudi Arabia. But it really hasn’t applied here. True to himself as always, Gadhafi continues to march to the beat of his own drum.

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Gadhafi forces continue steady onslaught
Forces loyal to Gadhafi stopped the rebel advance on Tripoli in a small town called Bin Jawad over a week ago, and ever since, the regime seems to have snapped out of its slumber, or initial confusion, or rope-a-dope strategy. Now Gadhafi’s forces are driving back the rebels with a withering combination of artillery, tank fire, rockets and bombs from the air and sea.

From Bin Jawad, to Ras Lanuf, to Brega and now Ajdabiya – one key oil port after the next – Gadhafi’s forces have moved at a steady, fast pace. They’ve continued their advancement before, during and after the Japanese earthquake and tsunami – both when Libya was the lead story, and now that it’s become the “bumped” story.

As the loyalist juggernaut moves like a freight train along Libya’s Mediterranean coast toward the final rebel stronghold of Benghazi, it’s the unfolding events in New York at the U.N., not Japan that may be driving it.

Gadhafi’s son, Saif, boasted to French-based TV channel Euronews Wednesday that “everything will be over in 48 hours.”

The regime seems worried that the international community might somehow vote for, and quickly impose, a no-fly zone over Libya. That, plus other military options on NATO’s table – a maritime ban, and giving the rebels some $32 billion in frozen Gadhafi assets to purchase heavy weapons – might inspire the rebels to put up a better fight.

This is why Libya analysts say Gadhafi’s forces have been building steam – in order to encircle and besiege the rebels in Benghazi before any of those “game-changers” might make a difference.

But, frankly,  the regime would likely win this war even with both a no-fly zone and a maritime ban to deal with. Gadhafi’s forces are still trained and disciplined soldiers, while the rebels read weapons manuals on the battlefield.

Government minders glad for the break
None of this means that the current Libya news “blackout” hasn’t come as a boon to our local “minders” – those government handlers and their bosses whose job it is to spout the regime’s line, and make sure no journalist gets too close to the truth, all in the name of showing us the truth.

They have expended Herculean energy in an attempt to “prove” to 130-odd foreign reporters that:
1) There was never a group of peaceful protesters in Libya.
2) Even if there were peaceful protesters, they were never crushed by plainclothes security at the very start of their marches.
3) The rebels are not Libyan freedom-fighters but “rats” – trained terrorists from Afghanistan, Pakistan and other al-Qaida havens.

In doing so, they’ve cut off our cell phones, kept us in our hotel by offering a string of meaningless press conferences and have yet to take us near the actual front lines.

(And some journalists have met tough resistance from local authorities. The New York Times said four of its journalists were missing in Libya on Wednesday. The Times said it had spoken with Libya government officials who said they were attempting to find out more about the journalists).

After three weeks of trying to keep all these probing reporters and cameramen in line, all the minders seem to be exhausted. Now, the tragedy in Japan has bought them a little time, and a lot fewer rockets from their own bosses in Tripoli, who had complained of too much “negative coverage of Libya” … until that coverage effectively stopped, this past weekend.

I happened to break the news of the Japanese earthquake and tsunami – and how the tragedy had literally washed Libya off our broadcasts  – to a government spokesman here on Friday. I’ll never forget his reaction. “Thanks, God!” he said, looking to the heavens.

Jim Maceda is an NBC News Correspondent based in London, currently on assignment in Libya.

Minami Sanriku, Japan, was a picturesque fishing town with about 17,000 residents until the tsunami essentially wiped it off the map last Friday. The town, which is on Japan’s East Coast, was one of the first to bear the brunt of the 30-foot wave – more than 10,000 residents remain missing and are feared dead. Amateur video that has been widely show in TV reports and across the web shows the destructive wall of mud pick up buildings and homes as screaming onlookers watch.

NBC News’ correspondent Lee Cowan visited the town and got a firsthand look at its destruction. He spoke by telephone with msnbc.com Tuesday – during what turned out to be a 6.0 earthquake – one of the most powerful aftershocks to hit the country since Friday’s quake and tsunami.  

What happened in Minami Sanriku?
The geography of Minami Sanriku was such that it juts out a little bit, comes to point, and there is a bay right on the side of the town. It was the first place to really take the full brunt of the tsunami.

Residents had about a half hour warning before the tsunami hit. This wasn’t a small fishing village by any stretch of the imagination – this was a proper city of about 17,000 people, so they certainly had all the warning devices in place.

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The problem was that because of the geography of the town, there was only one road leading out and up into the hills. So as everyone was clogging the road trying to get out, everything just came to a stop. And that’s where a lot of people ended up losing their lives.

The people who did survive told us that things just got to a point where they couldn’t get out, and everything came to a halt. Some people in the front of the line actually thought they had gone far enough and had reached high enough ground – but they hadn’t.

A scar across the trees shows you where the wave was and where it wasn’t. You can look and see pine trees that from the top, almost all the way down are perfectly fine – and then there is a point where everything below is just stripped bare. The bark is totally gone, the branches are gone, and the leaves are gone.  And it’s at the exact same spot on every single tree still standing.

So you can see exactly how high the water was and how it stripped everything away.

Some areas that we saw were absolutely nothing but mud. And just five feet away, there would be a house that seemed almost untouched. Not quite, but almost. It was just that close – what could have made the difference between life and death. It’s just really extraordinary how discriminate the wave really was in terms of its elevation.

What was it like when you visited the town yesterday? Was it like a ghost town? Were people there?
It was eerie. We had to hike in about a mile to even get to the city because the road was basically destroyed.   

We saw other people going in as it was getting dark and we were actually leaving. They didn’t have flashlights. They had blankets, a few personal belongings with them and they were just strolling off into the darkness.

We asked, “What are you doing? There is nothing there.”  They said they just had to go see. They had to take a look.

We just sat there and thought, what are they thinking? We could barely walk through during the daylight because it was nothing but a sea of debris and twisted metal, wood, nails, bricks, mortar and everything else.

And these people were going in almost in the middle of the night just to be there. That was touching in a way, but also a little scary because it almost seemed like they were in a daze.
It didn’t seem like they could grasp what had happened and how it had happened so quickly. You know, one day it’s a perfectly fine sunny day and the next day the town is literally erased.

After the devastating Sichuan earthquake in China in 2008, people were setting off fireworks and conducting ritual burials. Have you seen any burials or funerals there?
No. And I think the reason we haven’t seen any burials is because there has been so little body recovery at this point. I think it’s so overwhelming and some of these areas are so hard to get to that the rescue crews just haven’t gotten in yet.

We visited the remains of the hospital in the town. When we finally got to the top floor, we could see that someone had collected the bodies that they could find and had laid them all out and covered them.

But there were plenty of other bodies in the rubble that they hadn’t found yet. Out of the 10,000 or so who are still missing, most of them are probably under the mud and will never be found.

How does it compare to other natural disasters you’ve reported on?
I was in Banda Aceh, Indonesia, after that terrible tsunami claimed over 200,000 back in 2004.

The destruction in Banda Aceh was one of the worst things I’d ever seen.  But a lot of the towns I went to weren’t big cities. They were mostly smaller communities, fishing villages that were wiped off the map. You’d look at them and say – well, they were smaller buildings that weren’t built very well.
But this was a city with seven, eight, ten-story buildings, with a modern hospital and roads. To see it completely gone is just something you are not used to seeing. It really hits you.

MAINZ, Germany – In Germany, football (or soccer) is often called the “greatest minor matter in the world.” On Saturday, which traditionally is the weekly game day in the country, Germany’s number one sport really became a minor matter with regard to the worrying news updates that were flocking in from Japan.
 
On several occasions, the moderator of the top rated sports program “Sportschau” on public television ARD reminded viewers of the catastrophic situation in the Far East country. And, many of the after-game interviews with coaches or players were focused on questions about the status of friends and relatives in Japan instead of game results.
 
“This is terrible; we could follow the whole drama of events through the pictures on TV. Especially the situation in the megacity Sendai affects me a lot, as I played for the Brummell team there,” said Wolfsburg coach Pierre Littbarski, a former German soccer star, who is married to a Japanese woman. 

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Makoto Hasebe (VFL Wolfsburg), Shinji Kagawa (Borussia Dortmund), Shinji Okasaki (VFB Stuttgart) – all well-known Japanese players, who are big stars in Germany’s top league, the Bundesliga, and favorites of many German soccer fans.
 
“The good news first: Shinji Kagawa is in good health after the earthquake in Japan” read the headline on the official website of leading German soccer team Borussia Dortmund. A note of comfort for the team’s fans, as Kagawa is currently recuperating in Japan from a sports injury.
 
With respect for their Japanese teammates and the Japanese people in general, most players wore a black “mourning band” around their arms during the matches and in many stadiums a minute of silence was observed before kick-off on Saturday.
 
All eyes on Japan  
“Pray for Japan” was the Sunday headline of Germany’s mass circulation BILD newspaper.

Germany has a large Japanese community, one of the largest in Europe, and many were following updates from Japanese TV on the Internet all weekend.

The biggest concentration of Japanese ex-pats can be found in Dusseldorf, where more than 8,200 Japanese alone have found a home. More than 490 Japanese companies are operating in this western German city, which is located on the banks of the Rhine River.

Organizers of this year’s “Japan Week” – scheduled to take place from May 21-28 marking 150 years of German-Japanese friendship – say that they are not certain, if celebrations will now be able to take place as planned.
 
Over the past few days, journalists and residents of the city have been rushing to Japanese restaurants, supermarkets and Japanese travel agents, asking their Japanese neighbors about the status of their families back home.
 
“We are constantly updating our guests and our 45 Japanese employees with what we know from Japan, which is a lot and nothing” says Bertold Reul, the general manager of the Japanese hotel Nikko that has been operating in Dusseldorf for 33 years.

"All of our flat screens at the hotel are tuned to German, English and Japanese channels that are carrying news from Japan," Reul told NBC News.

Natori, a coastal town in Japan, was virtually wiped out by the earthquake and tsunami. Rescue workers began to arrive on Monday, but they found few people to rescue. NBC News’ Ian Williams is one of the few reporters to reach what is left of the coastal town. He spoke by phone on Monday.

What is the scene like?
We are in Natori, a coastal area, up the coast from Sendai. The area close to the coast is just a complete wasteland – and this is one of the worst hit areas in the vicinity. The wave wiped just about everything away.

What was interesting today was seeing some of the first rescue teams going into the worst-affected parts. There is nothing much left – the tsunami pretty much razed the entire area closest to the sea.

A couple of houses are still standing. One of them actually had a school bus literally wrapped around the wall that it was slammed into by the wave. 

The people in Natori had about half an hour warning that the tsunami was coming after the quake hit. So there were alarms and everyone tried to get out. But there is only one narrow road that leads back out of the coastal part of town.

A lot of people did get out, but a lot were also caught up in the wave. Officials don’t know the precise number of dead; they said there are still a lot of bodies they haven’t yet been recovered. 

One of the strange things about this disaster is that no place is as well prepared as Japan for this kind of natural disaster. In many respects they have been rehearsing for this for years – in terms of the building standards, in terms of preparedness for tsunamis. But when it struck, it was so violent that not even the best system in the world was able to respond sufficiently quickly.

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Have you met any survivors?
Yes, we met a number of people today who were coming back in for the first time to see what remained of their homes. Because of the mad scramble to get out ahead of the wave, a lot of families were split up – so a lot of people were still looking for loved ones.

We met one woman who was looking for two brothers. She found one of them – but not the other. And we went with her when she returned to what was left of their house –which was just a few pieces of wall. She broke down when she saw that because it was the first time she had been back since the wave hit. She was continuing to search for her brother and hadn’t given up hope that he would be in one of the shelters. There have been several shelters set up around the area mainly in schools or gymnasiums.

We met another family of six who had been separated from their mother, but they found her in one of the shelters on Sunday. They returned to what was left of their house – which was one of the few still standing in their area. They were removing possessions, including photograph albums, which were some of the most valuable things they wanted to salvage.

There was one other unlikely survivor – a dog.
We were looking across one of the lakes left by the tsunami covered by burning debris when we saw what appeared to be a man carrying a dog. By the time we caught up with the man, he was joined by a woman who had the dog on a leash.  She was really emotional and said, “I can’t believe it. I am so happy.”

The dog was called “May” – a girl. They lost her as they scrambled to leave town when the tsunami hit and they had just gone back today to look for her. There she was rustling around in the remains of their house. They don’t know how she survived. She looked pretty nervous – she was shaking – but she made it through the earthquake and the tsunami somehow.  

We also met a few city officials from the area. They told us it was just impossible to say how many people they had lost because families had scattered and been divided. A lot of the bodies would have been swept out to sea. They reckoned it would be some time before they would have a full count of the number of dead.

They also told us they were facing quite a critical situation taking care of survivors who were staying in shelters.

This is what surprised me because we think of Japan as a rich first world country, but they said that they have a shortage of blankets, water and certain medicines. The total number of people displaced by the quake is about 450,000. There are also about another 80,000 who have been forced to move away from the nuclear power plants. 

What about the nuclear plants? Are people very nervous about them on top of everything else? 
I think so. The Fukushima nuclear power plant is some distance from here. But people have been looking nervously at the images that have been played out endlessly on Japanese television of the explosions at the plants. The government is putting out lots of reassurances that this is not a Chernobyl, that the situation is  under control, and that there is not going to be a major release of radio activity.

But I think there is a fair amount of skepticism here because over the years the nuclear industry in Japan has not always been terribly transparent and honest. As a result, a number of incidents in the industry over the years have not been reported or covered up. So I think the government is aware of that problem and are trying to make information available in a timely manner.  But the experience in Japan over the years has left people a bit suspicious.

What about the rescue effort? Who are the rescue workers and how are they doing it?
They are all Japanese rescue workers from the local and national authorities. We saw them with dogs and heavy lifting equipment. They were working slowly and methodically around the buildings. Obviously, they have to be very careful because what remains standing in an area that’s largely been wiped from the map is very precarious and there are aftershocks all the time. 

The dogs themselves have been trained to sniff for live bodies –but they didn’t find any of those today. They go around and periodically release the dogs to run up and down if there is any structure of a building left. Every now and again you see little bits of excitement when the dog appears to kind of perk up and then it loses interest again – just a false alarm.  

When we arrived today there was a tsunami alert. There have been several of those. We were caught up in one yesterday with emergency vehicles wailing down the street. Saying, “Move out! Move now! Tsunami is coming!” Of course it didn’t.

But it’s a measure of just how jittery and anxious people here are. If there is any suggestion that more water could be on the way, it gets people moving toward higher ground.

It happened this morning again as well. Rescue efforts were stopped and then resumed again after lunch. Later in the day, there were a lot more emergency vehicles and a lot more teams out. But some areas were still inaccessible because of all the debris – mountains of wood, beams, just about everything.

You think of a tsunami as mountains of water coming ashore, but sometimes the water is the least of your problems. It’s everything else the water is carrying – like that bus we saw embedded in the roof of one of the buildings left standing.

I know you covered the tsunami in Banda Aceh, Indonesia in 2004 and the devastating 8.0 earthquake in Sichuan, China in 2008. How does this compare to some of those other disasters you’ve covered?
It’s bad. In a sense you go to a country like China, Indonesia, India – countries that are not as rich as Japan – and you expect the death and injury figures you hear initially to be highly preliminary. You expect the figure to end up much higher as rescue workers get to remote places. 

I think what has been so surprising about this is that even in a rich country like Japan, a country that was so well prepared, we are still struggling to reach some of the more difficult and inaccessible areas.  And really, we still have no idea how many people have died. I think that the figures we are seeing now are at best guesstimates and will rise much higher.

It shows just how vulnerable even a country like Japan is to a violent act of nature like this.