Disaster in Japan Live Blog: March 18

From Al-Jazeera :

" (All times are local in Japan GMT+9)

10:01pm
There's no reason to ban travel to Japan, says the World Health Organisation.
Tokyo's radiation levels are increasing but still not a health risk, says the WHO, which "is not advisingtravel restrictions to Japan'' outside the 30km exclusion zone around the Fukushima nuclear plant.

"In general, travellers returning from Japan do not represent a health hazard," the agency added.

9:01pm
Prime minister Naoto Kan says that the government has been disclosing all the information it has on the accident at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant.

"We have been honestly saying that the situation with the nuclear plant accident remains very serious."

7:27pm
The head of the International Atomic Energy Agency says that the UN atomic watchdog plans to hold an extraordinary meeting on Japan's nuclear plants next Monday. Yukiya Amano, the head of the agency, announced plans for the meeting during a news conference in Tokyo.

7:16pm
We have seen horrifying videos of areas in Japan being torn up by the tsunami and magnitude 9 earthquake, but what did it actually sound like? Check out this website.

6:16pm
Japan's nuclear safety agency has raised the Fukushima accident level to five from four on the international scale of gravity for atomic accidents, which goes as high as seven.

The agency's decision puts the Fukushima crisis on the same level as the 1979 accident at Three Mile Island in Pennsylvania. France's Nuclear Safety Authority rates the Fukushima crisis at six on the scale. The Chernobyl disaster is put at seven, the highest.

Level 5 indicates "an accident with wider consequences", according to the International Nuclear Event Scale (INES), while level four means there has been an "accident with local consequences".

5:23pm
National Police Agency says 6,539 people died and 10,354 are still missing. Some of the missing may have been out of the region at the time of the disaster."