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BEIJING -- Prime Minister Yoshihiko Noda of Japan arrived in Beijing on Sunday for a two-day state visit that was originally aimed at improving bilateral ties, but is now expected to focus on the uncertainty over North Korea's intentions after the death of Kim Jong-il. Speaking before he left Tokyo, Mr. Noda told reporters that he planned ''to exchange views and information in detail so as to avert a harmful effect on peace and stability on the Korean Peninsula.'' [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

YOKOTA AIR BASE, Japan -- China was never mentioned, but when a sailor in the Japanese Navy asked Defense Secretary Leon E. Panetta here on Monday whether the United States planned to cut back its forces in Asia, Mr. Panetta knew exactly what he meant. ''I want to make very clear that the United States is going to remain a presence in the Pacific for a long time,'' Mr. Panetta responded. ''That means, just so you understand, that we are not anticipating any cutbacks in this region. If anything, we're going to strengthen our presence in the Pacific.'' [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

TOWA, Japan -- If Japan's leaders regard the collapse of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear complex as this nation's greatest crisis in decades, Saichi Sato has a different perspective. From where he sits in this leafy village of 8,000 about 25 miles from Daiichi, he says, this is the greatest crisis in 400 years. Mr. Sato, 59, is a 17th-generation family farmer, a proprietor of 14 acres of greenhouses and fields where he grows rice, tomatoes, spinach and other vegetables. Or did grow: Last week, the national government banned the sale of farm products not just from Towa, but also from a stretch of north-central Japan extending south almost to Tokyo, for fear that they had been tainted with radiation. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

RIKUZENTAKATA, Japan -- Koji Yamaguchi, a 76-year-old survivor of the tsunami that all but eradicated this town on March 11, was unavailable for interviews. He was out walking his dog. Which would be unsurprising, were Mr. Yamaguchi not an evacuee himself, living on a 9-by-9-foot grass mat in a junior high school gymnasium here with 1,000 other people. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

HIGASHI-MATSUSHIMA, Japan -- It was neither the place nor the time for a proper goodbye: not here, on a homely hilltop that used to house the city garbage incinerator. And not now, fully 12 days after a tsunami erased this town's seacoast and forever sundered hundreds of families and friendships. Yet on this raw, wind-whipped Wednesday afternoon, Fujimi and Ekuko Kimura watched as a procession of soldiers unloaded the coffin of Taishi Kimura, husband and son, from the back of an army truck, and laid it with 35 others in a narrow trench, partitioned into graves with pieces of plywood. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

RIKUZENTAKATA, Japan -- On the afternoon of Friday, March 11, the Takata High School swim team walked a half-mile to practice at the city's nearly new natatorium, overlooking the broad sand beach of Hirota Bay. That was the last anyone saw of them. But that is not unusual: in this town of 23,000, more than one in 10 people is either dead or has not been seen since that afternoon, now 10 days ago, when a tsunami flattened three-quarters of the city in minutes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

KESENNUMA, Japan -- A week after the tsunami obliterated most of this northern Japanese city's seafront and not a little of its inland, the first handful of shopkeepers and their employees were outdoors shoveling mud and hauling wreckage from their businesses, signs of rebirth after this region's worst catastrophe in memory. Kunio Imakawa, a 75-year-old barber, was not among them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

KESENNUMA, Japan -- The Shishiori River starts life nestled between 1,500-foot hills north of here, and runs a bare 7 1/2-mile course southward until it empties into Kesennuma Bay. The end is a mean one, a short trip down a 50-foot-wide culvert, shackled in by manmade banks and girdled by highway bridges. It was on Friday that Japan's monster tsunami inundated that last concrete stretch, swamping the river with overturned cars and fishing boats and demolishing hundreds of homes on both banks. And it was this Wednesday that searchers, entering a battered home there, found the bodies of a man and his wife in their 70s -- the last of 81 victims they recovered in the river basin. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

MINAMISANRIKU, Japan -- Jin Sato, mayor of this quiet fishing port, had just given a speech to the town assembly on the need to strengthen tsunami preparation when the earthquake struck. The tsunami came just over a half-hour later, far exceeding even their worst fears. He and other survivors described a wall of frothing brown water that tore through this town of more than 17,000 so fast that few could escape. Town officials say as many as 10,000 people may have been swallowed by the sea. Even many of those who reached higher ground were not spared by waves that survivors said reached more than 60 feet high. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

KESENNUMA, Japan -- The death toll from last Friday's tsunami is presumed high in this petite coastal city of 75,000, where life was centered on a slender, pine-fringed Pacific Ocean inlet that supports fishing, shipping and tourism. But officials here are not worrying about that now. There is too much else to do. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

HIGASHI-MATSUSHIMA, Japan -- Outside the public gymnasium here, on a hillock about a mile from the Pacific Ocean, survivors of the tsunami came and went all day on Monday, searching for the dead. Two hundred and sixteen sheets of printer paper were stuck on a wall, one for every body brought to the gymnasium so far, some with names, most bearing only physical descriptions. Hands anxiously clutched to mouths, people pored over them until, finding nothing, most turned away in relief. Syunsuke Doi, 22, did not. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

KORIYAMA, Japan -- When the earthquake and tsunami struck Friday, Kumiko Fukaya ignored the evacuation order that afternoon and instead gathered up her teenage son and daughter, her mother and her older sister. Afraid to sleep in the house, they spent the night in her blue 2010 Toyota hatchback. When loudspeakers throughout the town blared another call for evacuation at 7:30 a.m. Saturday -- this time citing problems at nuclear reactors just a few miles from her home -- she was skeptical. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents news briefs from across the world. Panama has been formally elected by the United Nations' General Assembly to serve on the organizations' Security Council till 2008. A rare tornado in Japan has killed 9 people and injured more than 20 people. Nikolai P. Patrushev, director of Russia's security service, warned that terrorists are planning to bomb dams in southern parts of the country.

TOKYO -- A second explosion rocked a troubled nuclear power plant Monday, blowing the roof off a containment building but not harming the reactor, Japanese nuclear officials announced on public television. The explosion underscores the difficulties Japanese authorities are having in bringing several stricken reactors under control three days after a massive earthquake and a tsunami hit Japan's northeast coast and shut down the electricity that runs the crucial cooling systems for reactors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article offers world news briefs. Saudi Arabian officials have arrested several suspects in the shooting attack on a group of French citizens which killed four people. Michiko, empress of Japan is suffering from intestinal bleeding and other ailments apparently due to stress. Taiwan Vice President Annette Lu has announced that she will contest the elections to succeed President Chen Shui-bian.

TOKYO -- Japanese officials struggled on Sunday to contain a widening nuclear crisis in the aftermath of a devastating earthquake and tsunami, saying they presumed that partial meltdowns had occurred at two crippled reactors and that they were facing serious cooling problems at three more. The emergency appeared to be the worst involving a nuclear plant since the Chernobyl disaster 25 years ago. The developments at two separate nuclear plants prompted the evacuation of more than 200,000 people. Japanese officials said they had also ordered up the largest mobilization of their Self-Defense Forces since World War II to assist in the relief effort. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

NAKAMINATO, Japan -- While nuclear experts were grappling with possible meltdowns at two reactors after the devastating earthquake and ensuing tsunami in northern Japan, the country was mobilizing a nationwide rescue effort to pluck survivors from collapsed buildings and rush food and water to hundreds of thousands of people without water, electricity, heat or telephone service. Entire villages in parts of Japan's northern Pacific coast have vanished under a wall of water, and many communities are cut off, leaving the country trying to absorb the scale of the destruction even as fears grew over the unfolding nuclear emergency. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]