>9,500 unaccounted for in Japanese port city: report

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More than 9,500 people are unaccounted for in Minamisanriku, a town of some 17,000 people, Japan’s Kyodo News agency reported Saturday.
CTV’s Tom Walters said the town is located on Japan’s northeast Pacific coast.
“All eyes here are on reports from Miyagi Prefecture and 9,500 people missing there,” Walters told CTV News Channel. “This of course is the region that was so devastated by the tsunami wave in the immediate aftermath of the earthquake.”
No other details were available.
Elsewhere in Japan thousands remained missing and millions without power on Saturday in the aftermath of Japan’s devastating earthquake and tsunami.
An estimated 5.5 million households were still without electricity. More than 1 million homes had had their water supply cut off.
The death toll from Friday’s combined disasters has reached 686 so far, but it is feared that the number of dead could climb much higher.
Police said they found 200 to 300 bodies washed up on beaches, but authorities are only now getting a look at the extent of the devastation in Sendai and along the coast.
Japanese Prime Minister Naoto Kan said late Saturday evening, local time, that more than 3,000 people had been rescued.
“We will do our very best to rescue all survivors,” Kan said to reporters upon touring the devastated area.
“We’d first like to focus on saving lives and secondly the comfort of the evacuees,” Kan said. “There will be many resources that will be needed for this evacuation process.”
Rescue workers dug through the rubble Saturday while military helicopters plucked survivors, stranded by floodwaters, from rooftops.
Fires continued to burn in residential areas as further earthquakes and aftershocks, some registering upwards of magnitude six, continued to rattle the area.
Some 3,400 buildings have been damaged or destroyed and 200 fires have been reported in the stricken area. Officials said 181 welfare facilities, including nursing homes, have been damaged.
On Saturday, an estimated 6.4-magnitude quake hit near the east coast of Honshu at about 10:15 p.m. local time, just 82 kilometers from Fukushima, home of the already damaged nuclear reactor that stoked fears of a meltdown. Another quake on Saturday registered 6.1.
“We are still getting a lot of aftershocks,” one resident told Associated Press, en route to an evacuation center. “It’s very frightening. People are panicking, shivering in the cold.”
Phone reception was cut in stricken areas while hundreds of people lined up outside the few still-operating supermarkets for basic necessities. The gas stations on streets not covered with water were packed with people waiting to fill their cars.
As many as 300,000 people have been displaced by the disaster, many from the area surrounding Fukushima.
Friday’s 8.9 magnitude quake — the worst in modern Japanese history — and the resulting tsunami laid waste to whole sections of northern Japan.
In the immediate wake of the disaster rail operators lost contact with four trains running on coastal lines and still had not found them by Saturday afternoon local time according to Kyodo News agency. The East Japan Railway Co. said it did not know how many people were aboard.
The fate of the trains remains unclear though there are reports of passengers and crew members being rescued.
Bullet train services in the area remained suspended Saturday, nine expressways were closed and as many as 464 flights had been cancelled.
Most buildings out of range of the tsunami appeared to have survived the quake without much damage, though some older wooden structures were toppled. Paved roads had buckled in some places.
Japan has sent some 50,000 soldiers into the area to assist with rescue effort and recalled the search and rescue workers it sent to New Zealand in the wake of that country’s recent quake. The U.S. on Saturday said eight warships bearing relief supplies are near or headed to Japan, while additional rescue teams from Australia, New Zealand, South Korea and the U.S. are on their way, part of an effort coordinated by the United Nations.
Sniffer dogs, personnel and other help is also reportedly on its way from Singapore, Switzerland and the U.K.

>Twitter to Devs: No New Third-Party Apps

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Will we see the death of Twitter clients like TweetDeck or Echofon soon? Twitter on Friday issued a clear statement to developers that placed a moratorium on third-party apps.
Apps like Foursquare or Instagram are free to integrate Twitter into their services. Twitter is also fine with companies like Klout creating analytics tools. But Twitter’s director of platform Ryan Sarver made the company’s stance on apps that show and send tweets clear in a note sent to developers.
“Developers ask us if they should build client apps that mimic or reproduce the mainstream Twitter consumer client experience,” he said. “The answer is no.”
Sarver said 90 percent of tweeters use the company’s official apps. Which is why, for example Twitter acquired iPhone client Tweetie and started making its own “official” apps last spring. Twitter wants to continue to be the primary provider of access to the service, whether it’s on the desktop, a phone, a tablet, or any other device, Sarver said. The goal in this policy is to give users a seamless experience.
“We need to ensure that tweets and tweet actions, are rendered in a consistent way so that people have the same experience with tweets no matter what they are,” Sarver continued. “For example, some developers display ‘comment,’ ‘like,’ or other terms with tweets instead of ‘follow, favorite, rewet, reply,’ – thus changing the core functions of a tweet.”
Accordingly, Twitter has updated its terms of service. The announcement leaves no doubt that existing third-party clients like Twitterific or UberSocial must change their apps to reflect the updated policy or they’ll get API access yanked.