Japan announces $49b quake budget

TOKYO, April 22 (AFP): Japan announced Friday a $49 billion budget to help fund reconstruction after last month's earthquake and tsunami as Prime Minister Naoto Kan said the country was facing a "crisis within a crisis". It was the first reconstruction budget approved by Kan's cabinet since the catastrophe in northeast Japan on March 11 that devastated entire towns and left more than 27,000 people dead or missing. The government also said it planned to widen the evacuation zone around the Fukushima atomic plant, which has been leaking radiation since it was hammered by the magnitude 9.0 quake and tsunami in the country's worst post-war disaster. "This crisis is not just one crisis. This is a crisis within a crisis," Kan told a news conference. "Our country has been faced with a lot of issues for the past 20 years. Economic growth has been in the doldrums. The number of suicides has not declined" and stayed above 30,000 annually for years, he said. "We have been experiencing a crisis. Then the crisis of the great disaster and the nuclear power accident came. We regard this crisis as happening within a crisis. And we are required to resolve the two crises at the same time," he said, adding it was "a kind of destiny" to serve at such a time.