Chongqing (China), May 12: A massive earthquake toppled buildings across a wide area of central China on Monday, killing more than 8,533 people, trapping hundreds of students under the rubble of schools and causing a toxic chemical leak in one of the worst quakes in decades. The 7.8-magnitude earthquake devastated a region of small cities and towns set amid steep hills northeast of Sichuan’s provincial capital of Chengdu. The official Xinhua news agency reported 8,533 people died in Sichuan alone and dozens of others in surrounding areas.

[The Indian embassy in Beijing said that according to the information available so far, no Indians were affected by the earthquake, PTI reported from the Chinese capital. "No problem (has been reported) so far, as far as Indians are concerned," it quoted embassy sources as saying. Indian diplomats said they had checked with their contacts in Chengdu and elsewhere.] In Beichuan county, just east of the epicentre, 80 per cent of the buildings had collapsed and some 10,000 people were injured aside from 3,000 to 5,000 dead, Xinhua said. It and other state media said a chemical plant in Shifang city cratered, burying hundreds of people and spilling more than 80 tons of toxic liquid ammonia from the site.

In Juyuan town in Dujiangyan city, just south of the epicentre, the middle school collapsed, burying the students and immediately killing four ninth graders, Xinhua reported.  Xinhua said its reporters in Juyuan town saw buried teenagers struggling to break free from the rubble "while others were crying out for help."

Photos posted on the Internet and found on the Chinese search engine Baidu showed arms and a torso sticking out of the rubble of the school as dozens of people worked to free them, using small mechanical winches or their hands to move concrete slabs. Xinhua said 50 bodies had been pulled from the debris but did not say if they were alive. The quake struck shortly before 2.30 pm — when classrooms and office towers were full — and was centred on Wenchuan county, 92 km northwest of Chengdu. The quake emptied office buildings across the country in Beijing; could be felt as far away as Vietnam; crashed telephone networks; and hours later, left parts of Chengdu, a city of 10 million, in darkness.

The road to Wenchuan from Chengdu was cut off by landslides, state media said, slowing the rescue efforts.  Beijing mobilised nearly 8,000 soldiers and police to provide rescue in Sichuan and put the province on the second-highest level of emergency footing.

Washington, May 12: Senator Barack Obama’s campaign is considering a suggestion from Republican John McCain’s campaign for the two presidential hopefuls to participate in joint town meetings and debates across the country starting this summer, Mr Obama’s chief strategist said on Monday.  Mr McCain is the expected Republican presidential nominee. Mr Obama is closing in on the Democratic nod. Asked how seriously it was being considered, Obama camp chief, Mr David Axelrod said: "Very seriously." "We believe that is the most significant election we’ve faced in a long time," he said on Fox News Sunday.

Washington, May 12: A former candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination, Mr John Edwards, cautioned on Sunday that Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton "has to be really careful that she’s not damaging our prospects" by staying in the contest against Senator Barack Obama.  While Mr Edwards, a onetime senator from North Carolina, has not endorsed either candidate, he made it clear on the CBS News program Face the Nation that he saw little chance that Mrs Clinton could manage a come-from-behind victory.

"You can no longer make a compelling case for the math," Mr Edwards said, referring to delegate totals that increasingly favour Mr Obama. "The math is very, very hard for her." Some other leading Democrats, including the 1972 presidential candidate, Mr George McGovern, have also urged Mrs Clinton to rethink her campaign.

With Mr Obama appearing ever more likely to face off against Senator John McCain of Arizona, the presumptive Republican nominee, Mr McCain’s surrogates took to the Sunday morning news programmes to level some of their toughest attacks.  Mr Mitt Romney, who lost his fight with Mr McCain for the Republican nomination but now a supporter, said Mr Obama was "clearly out of his depth."

Mr Obama’s chief strategist, Mr David Axelrod, predicted Sunday that the long-lasting Democratic race would be over soon. The Obama campaign announced Saturday that the Illinois senator now had support from more of the crucial Democratic superdelegates than Mrs Clinton has. But Mr Howard Wolfson, a senior adviser of Senator Clinton, hit back saying if Mr Obama wanted Mrs Clinton out of the race, there was a simple way to ensure that: "Beat her. Beat her in West Virginia, beat her in Puerto Rico, beat her in Kentucky."

Beirut, May 12: Heavy fighting broke out between government supporters and opponents on Monday in Lebanon’s northern city of Tripoli, after soldiers quelled similar battles that killed at least 11 people in mountains overlooking the capital, security officials and paramedics said. Residents said they heard strong explosions reverberating through Tripoli, Lebanon’s second-largest city.

Rocket-propelled gr-enades, heavy machine guns and mortars were being used, security officials said on condition of anonymity because they were not authorised to talk to media. Earlier fighting in Tripoli had stopped on Sunday morning after Lebanese troops deployed between the two sides, but it broke again a day later after soldiers pulled back.

In the mountains near Beirut, fighting lulled on late Sunday after Druse leader Walid Jumblatt called on his Druse opponents in the mountains, who are allied with Hezbollah, to mediate a ceasefire and hand over the region to Lebanese troops. At least 11 people were killed in the town of Chouweifat near Beirut before a ceasefire went into effect there on late Sunday, paramedics said. More than 20 people were also wounded, they said on the same condition of anonymity.

Iran’s state-run Press TV reported on its website that 17 opposition fighters were killed in the mountain clashes.  The latest deaths pushed the number of people killed since violence erupted on Wednesday to 49.

Yangon, May 12: The first US military aid flight landed in Burma on Monday, but relief supplies continued to just dribble into the reclusive state nine days after a devastating cyclone.  A C-130 military transport plane left Thailand’s Vietnam War-era U-Tapao airbase carrying 12,700 kg of water, mosquito nets and blankets.

The US aid officials said they hope it will the first of many US flights to the Army-ruled Burma. Greeting the plane at Yangon airport was Navy commander-in-chief Soe Thein, who promised to deliver the supplies "as soon as possible" to the cyclone-hit region, a US embassy official in Yangon said.

"This is Burma’s hour of need and the need is urgent," the US Agency for International Development administrator, Ms Henrietta Fore, said before flying with a Thai-US delegation to the cyclone-hit city of Yangon. While Burma’s reclusive military government is accepting aid from the outside world, it will not let in foreign logistics teams, who were queuing up in Bangkok hoping to get visas from the Burmese embassy.

It is said that "the number of deaths could range from 63,290 to 101,682, and 220,000 people are reported to be missing".  "Unless there is a massive and fast infusion of aid, experts and supplies into the hardest-hit areas, there’s going to be a tragedy on an unimaginable scale," said Mr Greg Beck of the International Rescue Committee.

Most of the victims were killed by the 12-foot wall of sea-water that hit the delta along with the Category 4 cyclone’s 190 kph winds.

Warsaw (Poland), May 12: Irena Sendler, a Polish social worker who organised the rescue of some 2,500 Jewish children from the Nazis and was later honoured by Israel’s Yad Vashem memorial, has died. Sendler’s daughter, Ms Janina Zgrzembska, said her mother died at a Warsaw hospital on Monday. She was 98.

Sendler had lived at a Warsaw nursing home run by the Catholic Brothers of St. John of God since 2003, but had been in the hospital since April with pneumonia. She was born Irena Krzyzanowska in Warsaw on February 15, 1910.  As a social worker with Warsaw’s welfare department, Sendler masterminded risky rescue operations of Jewish children from the Warsaw Ghetto during Nazi Germany’s brutal World War II occupation.

Records show Sendler’s team of some 20 people saved almost 2,500 children from the Warsaw Ghetto between October 1940 and April 1943, when the Nazis burned the ghetto, shooting the residents or sending them to death camps.  Under the pretext of inspecting the ghetto’s sanitary conditions during a typhoid outbreak, Sendler and her assistants entered in search of children who could be smuggled out and be given a chance to survive by living as Catholics.  They were placed in families, orphanages, hospitals or convents. In hopes of one day uniting the children with their families most of whom perished in the Nazis’ death camps, Sendler wrote the children’s real names on slips of paper that she kept at home.

When German police came to arrest her in 1943, an assistant managed to hide the slips which Sendler later buried in a jar under an apple tree in an associate’s yard. Irena Sendler is survived by her daughter and a granddaughter.