BBC - More than four thousand children are believed to have died in China's devastating earthquake

More than four thousand children are believed to have died in China's devastating earthquake.

DUJIANGYAN, China,
June 1 -- Tears of grief and anger mixed with smoke from ritual fires
lit on the ruins of Xinjian Primary School on Sunday, as hundreds of
parents commemorated the deaths of their children and pleaded for the
government to punish those responsible for the building's collapse in
last month's earthquake.

But placing blame may not be easy. Most of the dozens of schools
that collapsed in the quake, killing an estimated 9,000 children, were
built more than a decade ago, with multiple layers of government and
private companies

In
the town of Wufu, they shouted slogans about corrupt politicians. In
Mianzhu, they staged a sit-in. And at Juyuan, they were shooed away by
soldiers who sealed off the grounds of a middle school so workers could
search for the bodies of six children still missing. By the evening,
one of them had been recovered.

Over the weekend, the government raised the death toll from the May
12 earthquake to a little more than 69,000, with 18,800 others missing
and thought to be dead. Meanwhile, the state media reported that a
helicopter evacuating injured survivors had crashed in the fog,
although the fate of the 4 crew members and 10 passengers was unclear.

Also Sunday, government news agencies reported the successful
completion of a canal designed to drain water away from a blocked river
that has been threatening more than a million people downstream.