Sectarian Violence Spreads in Myanmar

As a picture of chaos and anarchy emerged from a city in central Myanmar on Friday, President Thein Sein declared a state of emergency in the area and ordered the military to assist in quelling rioting that residents say has left at least 20 people dead.

Rioting and arson attacks spread on Friday to villages outside Meiktila, as mobs of Buddhists, some led by monks, continued a three-day rampage through Muslim areas. “Mobs were destroying buildings and killing people in cold blood,” said U Nyan Lynn, a former political prisoner who witnessed what he described as massacres. “Nobody stopped them — I saw hundreds of riot police there.”

While some signs Friday night pointed to a calming of the situation, many Muslims and Buddhists in the affected area remained wary and separated. Muslims have been put in Meiktila’s sports stadium, where, according to one report, food and water are scarce.

State news agencies in Myanmar said the fighting began on Wednesday after a dispute in a Muslim-owned gold shop. The Associated Press said the customers were Buddhist. But the severity of the violence suggests that deeply held hatred in the city, buried during five decades of military rule, is surfacing with the country’s newfound democratic freedoms.

-Thomas Fuller, The New York Times

Japan Marks 2nd Anniversary of 2011 Tsunami

Japan has observed a moment of silence to mark the second anniversary of a devastating earthquake and tsunami that claimed nearly 19,000 lives and caused the worst nuclear accident since the 1986 Chernobyl disaster.

At a national ceremony in Tokyo Monday, attended by Emperor Akihito, Empress Michiko and other top government officials, attendees stood in silence at 2:46 p.m., the exact time the 9.0-magnitude earthquake on March 11, 2011 off Japan’s northeastern Pacific coast.

Two years later, rebuilding the northeast - a region already suffering from a fast-ageing population and stagnant local industries including farming - is patchy. Almost 300,000 people still live in temporary housing.

“We are standing at the crossroads of having to decide how we will live and what actions we should take,” said Sakari Minato, 49, an auto dealer from Yamada in Iwate prefecture, now living in a house damaged by the tsunami.

Photographed: A little boy prays for his relatives killed by the 2011 tsunami at a cemetery in Minamisoma in Fukushima prefecture. An elderly man sits as he and with his wife (not pictured) visit a cemetery to pay respects to their son who was killed in the March 2011 tsunami, in Minamisoma in Fukushima prefecture. People join hands to pray for the March 11, 2011 earthquake and tsunami victims and for recovery in front of the sea at dawn in Iwaki, Fukushima prefecture. A woman prays during a rally against nuclear power plants as victims of the March 11, 2011 earthquake and tsunami are remembered, at a park in Tokyo. Relatives of tsunami victims pray at a memorial alter at the Okawa elementary school, where at least 70 students died in the 2011 tsunami, in Ishinomaki, Miyagi prefecture. Police officers in Ishinomaki, Miyagi prefecture, carry bouquets of flowers after offering a minute of silence. [AP]