Quake death toll climbs to 18 as search continues

TOUGH CONDITIONS: More than 8,800 residents sought refuge as utilities failed and crews, including some from Taiwan, helped searched for survivors AP and Reuters, KUMAMOTO and YATSUSHIRO, Japan Add TT as Preferred Source Soldiers and emergency workers yesterday combed through a badly damaged shopping mall and collapsed houses looking for trapped survivors after a powerful earthquake that killed at least 18 people, including a foreigner, in southwestern Japan, knocking out power to thousands of homes and rupturing roads across the region. The magnitude 7.1 earthquake that hit a day earlier in the Kumamoto area on the southern main island of Kyushu also left at least 62 people injured, six of them seriously, the prefectural government said. The tally has been steadily growing, fanning fears