Death and missing toll reaches in Japan

Death & missing toll reaches in Japan has reached about 20,000. Workers were close to restoring power to a nuclear plant s overheating reactors Sunday as the toll of dead or missing from Japan s worst natural disaster in nearly a century passed 21,000. Amid the devastation on the northeast coast left by a massive quake and tsunami, police reported an astonishing tale of survival with the discovery of an 80-year-old woman and her 16-year-old grandson alive under the rubble. But with half a million tsunami survivors huddled in threadbare, chilly shelters and the threat of disaster at the Fukushima No. 1 nuclear plant stretching frayed nerves, the mood in the world s third-biggest economy remained grim. The discovery of traces of radioactive iodine in Tokyo tap water, well to the southwest of the crippled atomic power plant on the Pacific coast, compounded public anxiety but authorities said there was no danger to health.   The Fukushima plant was struck on March 11 by the 9.0-magnitude earthquake and tsunami which, with 8,450 people confirmed killed, is Japan s deadliest natural disaster since the Great Kanto quake levelled much of Tokyo in 1923. Another 12,931 are missing, feared swept out to sea by the 10-metre (33-foot) tsunami or buried in the wreckage of buildings. The government has insisted that there is no widespread threat of radiation. But the discovery of the tainted fava beans by Taiwanese customs officers will do nothing to calm public anxiety that has already spread far beyond Japan.