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Just 45 days old and swaddled in pink, Sang Ruifeng already has a purpose in life: to bring to justice those responsible for the death of his 11-year-old brother. Ruifeng will have to ensure, his father said, that the Chinese government gives a full accounting for why thousands of students died in school collapses during the earthquake that devastated southwest China one year ago. The brother that Ruifeng never knew was among 126 students crushed to death in Fuxin No. 2 Primary School outside this lush farming town. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Li Wanzhi has learned to do certain things with just one arm. Dressing herself, for example. That was easy. Washing clothes was something else entirely. For that, she needed the help of her mother-in-law. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

He lost his wife of 35 years when their home collapsed during the earthquake in May. She lost her husband of 20 years the same day in a cascade of debris at a construction site. They are distant relatives from the same town whose eyes still tear up when they talk about their dead spouses. But within months of the earthquake, which was the deadliest natural disaster to befall China in more than three decades, Jiang Zhongfu, 60, began courting Zhu Xiaoqiong, 42. Last month, he moved into Ms. Zhu's prefabricated housing cube in a refugee camp in these scarred hills. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

A Chinese government committee said Thursday that a rush to build schools during the country's recent economic boom might have led to shoddy construction that resulted in the deaths of thousands of students during a devastating earthquake in May. The statement by Ma Zongjin, the chairman of an official committee of experts assessing damage from the May 12 earthquake, is the first time that a representative of the Chinese government has acknowledged that poor construction may have led to the collapses. Until now, officials in Beijing and in southwest China's Sichuan Province, which suffered the most damage, had said the sheer force of the 7.9-magnitude quake caused the collapses. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The official came for Yu Tingyun in his village one evening last week. He asked Mr. Yu to get into his car. He was clutching the contract and a pen. Mr. Yu's daughter had died in a cascade of concrete and bricks, one of at least 240 students at a high school here who lost their lives in the May 12 earthquake. Mr. Yu became a leader of grieving parents demanding to know if the school, like so many others, had crumbled because of poor construction. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The students lined up row by row on the outdoor basketball courts of Sangzao Middle School in the minutes after the earthquake. When the head count was complete, their fate was clear: all 2,323 were alive. Parents covered in blood and dust hugged them and cried. So did the school principal, Ye Zhiping. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

They gathered by the hundreds on the riverbank here to face the latest insult delivered to them by nature. First came the earthquake on May 12. And now this: a muddy river surging down from the mountains, swollen by sudden rainfall, has risen quickly toward the bank, forcing thousands of residents in this corner of the earthquake zone to evacuate their homes on Friday. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

It is a simple strand of red plastic hanging between two trees, but for residents of this battered town, it is the line between life and potential death. On one side are 11,000 residents who have been huddling under plastic sheets since the May 12 earthquake devastated northern Sichuan Province. On the other is a lush plain of farmland and homes that government officials say will be washed away should a swollen reservoir of trapped river water break through the wall of rock, dirt and trees that holds it in place. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Faced with the prospect of massive flooding from a blocked river in the highlands of Sichuan Province, the authorities have announced plans to evacuate more than a million people should the rock-and-mud embankment give way, a threat that grew more urgent on Wednesday. The herculean task of moving so many people, officials said, would have to be accomplished within four hours, the time it would take for the wall of water to inundate scores of cities and rural villages that are already grappling with the devastation caused by the May 12 earthquake. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

After a year of obfuscation, the authorities on Thursday released the first official tally of student deaths from the earthquake last May, saying that 5,335 children either were dead or remained missing. An additional 546 were left disabled, they said. Previous estimates placed the number of students who died in the collapse of school buildings during the May 12 earthquake in Sichuan Province as high as 10,000. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]