Mother Nature goes to extremes in the summer, spoiling the gift of good weather with hurricanes, heat waves, fires and floods. This year she started early. On May 2, Cyclone Nargis laid waste to large parts of Myanmar. According to the latest counts, the disaster left 2.4 million people destitute, more than 50,000 missing and [...]

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Just ten months before a deadly earthquake struck Sichuan Province’s Beichuan county on May 12, a scientific study warned that the Chinese region was ripe for a major quake.
“The faults are sufficiently long to sustain a strong ground-shaking earthquake, making them potentially serious sources of regional seismic hazard,” the Chinese, European, and U.S. geoscientists wrote [...]

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As the death toll soars from the powerful earthquake that ravaged central China’s Sichuan province, the scale of the devastation is raising questions about the quality of China’s recent construction boom.
“This building is just a piece of junk,” one newly homeless resident of Dujiangyan yelled today, her body quivering with rage. Her family salvaged clothing [...]

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A powerful earthquake struck Monday close to densely populated areas of southwestern China, flattening schools and homes and killing more than 100 people, according to early estimates.
The quake, with a magnitude of 7.8 on the Richter scale, was felt in cities across a swathe of southeast Asia including the Thai capital Bangkok, more than 1,800 [...]

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Fresh ethnic violence has erupted in a Tibetan region of southwestern China, with disputed reports of eight people shot dead by the police, and the Chinese government on Friday vowed swift and severe punishment of Tibetans accused of rioting and taking part in last month’s antigovernment protests.
Police officers on Thursday evening fired on a crowd [...]

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