Paper Monitor
A series highlighting the riches of the daily press.
The impact of the earthquake and tsunami in Japan is brought home in today's newspapers through a series of incredible images. The many photographs in all the papers are astounding, utterly arresting and heartbreaking in equal measure.
Under the headline "Japan fights for its life", the Daily Telegraph has an image of a and standing amid the devastation in Ishimaki City. Inside it has a shot of hundreds of cars that had been ready for export, now burnt out and piled up in one massive heap.
The Daily Mirror has a remarkable shot of the large boat washed up on top of a building, while one of the Sun's most poignant shots is of the hand of a victim reaching out of the rubble. The Guardian's front page is dominated by a photo of rescue workers carrying an elderly woman from a mass of debris as far as the eye can see. How she survived and how they found her is simply mind-boggling.
But incredible stories of survival are starting to emerge. On its front page, the Sun has the tale of a man found clinging to the roof of his house and floating 10 miles out at sea. He had been there for two days and said:
Helicopters and ships passed but none noticed me, I thought that day was going to be the last of my life
The Guardian has a graphic on page seven that shows the epicentres of the quakes and aftershocks in Japan over the last few days. It's a blur of small orange and red circles, the red ones showing the most severe. It's impossible to count how many there have been and equally impossible to get your head round.
The Daily Telegraph also brings home the size of what has happened in a column headed: . It includes statistics like 9.8 - the number of inches the earth was thrown off its axis by the powerful earthquake.
No exaggerated headlines and words are needed by any of the papers today. The size of this disaster speaks for itself.