Monday, May 12, 2008

China Earthquake,

CHONGQING, China — Thousands of soldiers and police were dispatched to central China after a massive earthquake Monday killed at least 107 people and buried nearly 900 schoolchildren. The death toll was expected to rise sharply.

The 7.8-magnitude earthquake struck in the middle of the afternoon — when classes and office towers were full — 57 miles northwest of the Sichuan provincial capital of Chengdu.

Xinhua News Agency said four of the dead were ninth-grade students killed when the Juyuan Middle School building collapsed. Photographs showed heavy cranes trying to move rubble from the ruined structure.

It did not say how many of the 900 trapped students were feared dead.

The earthquake comes less than three months before the start of the Beijing Summer Olympics, when China hopes to use to showcase its rise in the world.

Click for additional earthquake information and shake maps from the USGS

Xinhua said its reporters in Juyuan township about 60 miles from the epicenter in Wenchuan county in Sichuan province saw buried teenagers struggling to break loose from underneath the rubble of the three-story school "while others were crying out for help."

FOX NEWS

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