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BERLIN -- Shortly after the earthquake and tsunami struck the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant in Japan in March, stores in faraway Germany began selling out of radiation-tracking Geiger counters. Sales of iodine pills to limit the absorption of radiation surged briskly, too, propelled by anxiety that people might find themselves engulfed in clouds of long-range radioactive fallout. No matter that the incipient nuclear catastrophe was about 5,500 miles away, or that Germany, unlike Japan, did not lie on known tectonic fault lines. On the streets of major cities, hundreds of thousands of protesters, casting events in Japan as a portent of what might happen here, turned out ahead of state elections to demand a halt to Germany's own nuclear power program, the source of nearly a quarter of the nation's electricity. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

IITATE, Japan -- The mayor sprang into action the moment he heard that scientists from the International Atomic Energy Agency were in the village hall's parking lot. He rushed outside to confront the group, three Europeans and a Japanese, who wore surgical masks and cloth booties as they waved around a Geiger counter. ''Who gave you permission to come here?'' the mayor, Norio Kanno, yelled at the four, chasing them into a van with the markings of the atomic energy agency, or I.A.E.A., the Vienna-based nuclear watchdog. ''You are causing trouble for us!'' [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]