156 dead, thousands injured in China quake

Hundreds of people are dead or injured after a 6.6 magnitude earthquake in China's Sichuan province. Source: AAP

A POWERFUL earthquake struck the steep hills of China's southwestern Sichuan province on Saturday, leaving at least 156 people dead and more than 5,500 injured, nearly five years after a devastating quake wreaked widespread damage across the region.

Saturday's quake, while not as destructive as the one in 2008, toppled buildings, triggered landslides and disrupted phone and power connections in mountainous Lushan county.

The village of Longmen was hit particularly hard, with authorities saying nearly all the buildings there had been destroyed in a frightening minute-long shaking by the quake.

"It was such a big quake that everyone was scared," said a woman who answered the phone at a kindergarten hours later and declined to give her name. "We all fled for our lives."

Rescuers turned the square outside the Lushan County Hospital into a triage centre, where medical personnel bandaged bleeding victims, according to footage on China Central Television.

Rescuers dynamited boulders that had fallen across roads to reach Longmen and other damaged areas lying farther up the mountain valleys, state media reported.

CCTV reported that at least 156 people had died. The government of Ya'an city, which administers Lushan, said in a statement that more than 2,600 people were injured, but other reports suggested the real figure was probably more than double that.

The quake - measured by the China Earthquake Administration at magnitude-7.0 and by the US Geological Survey at 6.6 - struck the steep hills of Lushan county shortly after 8am (1000 AEST), when many people were at home, sleeping or having breakfast.

People in their underwear and wrapped in blankets ran into the streets of Ya'an and even the provincial capital of Chengdu, 115km east of Lushan, according to photos, video and accounts posted online.

The quake's shallow depth, less than 13km, likely magnified the impact.

Chengdu's airport shut down for about an hour before reopening, though many flights were cancelled or delayed, and its railway station halted dozens of scheduled train rides Saturday, state media said.

Lushan reported the most deaths, 76, but there was concern that casualties in neighbouring Baoxing county might have been under-reported because of inaccessibility after roads were blocked and power and phone services cut off.

As the region went into the first night after the quake, rain started to fall, slowing rescue work. Forecasts called for more rain in the next several days, and the China Meteorological Administration warned of possible landslides and other geological disasters.

Tens of thousands of people moved into tents or cars, unable to return home or too afraid to go back as aftershocks continued to jolt the region.

Lushan, where the quake struck, lies where the fertile Sichuan plain meets foothills that eventually rise to the Tibetan plateau and sits atop the Longmenshan fault.

It was along that fault line that a devastating magnitude-7.9 quake struck on May 12, 2008, leaving more than 90,000 people dead or missing and presumed dead in one of the worst natural disasters to strike China in recent decades.

"It was just like May 12," Liu Xi, a writer in Ya'an city, who was jolted awake by Saturday's quake, said via a private message on his account on Sina Corporation's Twitter-like Weibo service. "All the home decorations fell at once, and the old house cracked."

The official Xinhua News Agency said the well-known Bifengxia panda preserve, which is near Lushan, was not affected by the quake. Dozens of pandas were moved to Bifengxia from another preserve, Wolong, after its habitat was wrecked by the 2008 quake.

As in most natural disasters, the government mobilised thousands of soldiers and others - 7,000 people by Saturday afternoon - sending excavators and other heavy machinery as well as tents, blankets and other emergency supplies.

Two soldiers died after the vehicle that they and more than a dozen others were in slipped off the road and rolled down a cliff, state media reported.

Premier Li Keqiang flew to Ya'an to direct rescue efforts, and he and President Xi Jinping ordered officials and rescuers to make saving people the top priority, Xinhua said.

The Chinese Red Cross said it had deployed relief teams with supplies of food, water, medicine and rescue equipment to the disaster areas.

With roads blocked for several hours after the quake, the military surveyed the disaster area by air.

Aerial photos released by the military and shown on state television showed individual houses in ruins in Lushan and outlying villages flattened into rubble.

The roofs of some taller buildings appeared to have slipped off, exposing the floors beneath them.

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Morsi to reshuffle Egypt cabinet: aide

EGYPT'S Islamist President Mohamed Morsi is set to announce a cabinet reshuffle, a presidential aide says, but it is unlikely to meet opposition demands for a complete overhaul of the government.

Morsi wrote on his Twitter account that he would make "a ministerial change" and replace provincial governors, adding the posts would go to "those who are most qualified".

A presidential palace official said Morsi's quote was taken from an interview that will be aired on Saturday night on the Qatar-based al-Jazeera television channel.

A senior presidential aide said Morsi may announce the changes by the end of the week.

"There will be six to eight ministers, and wide-ranging changes among (provincial) governors," he said.

"The ministries that will be affected include some important ones," he added.

"I can't mention which ones because, as you know, this is a sensitive matter."

Morsi has repeatedly declared his confidence in Prime Minister Hisham Qandil, whose sacking is demanded by a coalition of opposition groups as a condition for dropping a boycott of parliamentary elections.

Egyptian newspapers have reported that Morsi may replace Justice Minister Ahmed Mekki and other less prominent ministers.

The opposition remains steadfast in its demand for a national unity government, in a protracted deadlock with Morsi that has delayed a much needed $US4.8 billion ($A4.68 billion) loan from the International Monetary Fund.

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Thousands rally at scandal-hit UK hospital

THOUSANDS of people have flooded a British town centre in a demonstration aimed at keeping major services at a scandal-hit hospital.

Campaigners of all ages packed into the Market Square in Stafford for the rally and public march, many holding placards and banners emblazoned with slogans showing their opposition to the withdrawal of services including maternity care from Stafford Hospital.

A public inquiry into the hospital, which was placed into administration five days ago, found it had provided "appalling" standards of care and caused unnecessary suffering to hundreds of patients over a five-year period up to 2009.

Health regulator Monitor has given two special administrators 45 working days to produce a plan for the sustainable "reorganisation" of future services.

The issue is of extreme importance to people living in and around the town and has now become apolitical, according to Sue Hawkins, chair of the Support Stafford Hospital group which arranged the demonstration.

Speaking in the busy Market Square, where supporters gathered ahead of the kilometre-long march to the hospital, Hawkins said it was important to move on from mistakes of the past.

"I think we've got to talk about 2013," she said.

"What happened, happened. The numbers will be debatable but what we've got to do is move forward and look to the future for our community.

"We've got a safe hospital today and we're looking to the future."

She said she hoped the march would send a clear message that the majority of people in Stafford want to retain acute services in the town and that they did not accept the proposal of a downgrade to a local hospital.

"We need to have an Intensive Care Unit here, we need to have an Accident and Emergency 24 hours a day and we believe that's possible.

"We know there have to be changes, we know there may have to be some alliance with another hospital to achieve that."

The march set off from the town centre at around 2pm in blazing sunshine and many taking part chanted slogans, waved their banners and sang songs as they walked.

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Special team to query US bombing suspect

ARMED guards are protecting the hospital where the wounded surviving Boston marathon bombing suspect is in serious condition and unable to be questioned to determine the motives behind the blasts.

US officials said a special interrogation team for high-value suspects was waiting to question 19-year-old Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, whose older brother and alleged accomplice was killed on Friday morning in a wild shootout in suburban Boston.

Authorities planned to invoke a rare public safety exception to enable the team to interrogate Tsarnaev without first advising him of his right to remain silent to avoid self-incrimination and be provided a lawyer, a warning typically given to criminal suspects .

The FBI's website says the exception "permits law enforcement to engage in a limited and focused unwarned interrogation" of a suspect and introduce any statements gathered as evidence in a criminal prosecution.

The FBI says "police officers confronting situations that create a danger to themselves or others may ask questions designed to neutralise the threat without first providing a warning of rights".

The capture of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev lifted days of anxiety for Boston, but little was known about the motivation of the ethnic Chechen brothers.

President Barack Obama vowed investigators would solve that mystery.

"The families of those killed so senselessly deserve answers," said Obama, who branded the suspects "terrorists".

Obama said the capture closed "an important chapter in this tragedy," but he said there are many unanswered questions about the Boston bombings, including whether the two men had help from others.

"When a tragedy like this happens, with public safety at risk and the stakes so high, it's important that we do this right," he said.

"That's why we take care not to rush to judgment - not about the motivations of these individuals, certainly not about entire groups of people."

Late on Friday, less than an hour after authorities said the search for the 19-year-old college student had proved fruitless and lifted a daylong order that had kept Boston-area residents in their homes, a man emerged from his Watertown home and noticed blood on the pleasure boat parked in his backyard.

He lifted the tarp and found the wounded Tsarnaev, known the world over as Suspect No. 2.

Soon after that, the 24-hour drama that had shut down a metropolitan area of millions while legions of police went house to house looking for the remaining suspected Boston marathon bomber was over.

Boston police announced via Twitter that Tsarnaev was in custody. They later wrote: "CAPTURED. The hunt is over. The search is done. The terror is over. And justice has won. Suspect in custody."

Dzhokhar Tsarnaev's capture touched off raucous celebrations in and around Boston, with chants of "USA, USA" as residents flooded the streets in relief and jubilation after four tense days since twin explosions ripped through the marathon's crowd at the finish line on Monday, killing three people and wounding more than 180.

Dzhokhar and his brother, 26-year-old Tamerlan Tsarnaev, were identified by authorities and relatives as ethnic Chechens from southern Russia who had been in the US for about a decade and were believed to be living in Cambridge, just outside Boston.

Tamerlan Tsarnaev died early in the day of gunshot wounds and a possible blast injury.

He was run over by his younger brother in a car as he lay wounded, according to investigators.

During a long night of violence on Thursday and into Friday, the brothers carjacked a man in a Mercedes-Benz in Cambridge, just across the Charles River from Boston, then released him unharmed at a petrol station, authorities said.

They also shot to death a Massachusetts Institute of Technology police officer, 26-year-old Sean Collier, while he was responding to a report of a disturbance, investigators said.

The search for the Mercedes led to a chase that ended in Watertown, where authorities said the suspects threw explosive devices from the car and exchanged gunfire with police.

A transit police officer, 33-year-old Richard Donohue, was shot and critically wounded, authorities said.

As his brother lay dying, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev abandoned his car and fled on foot, authorities said.

Watertown residents who had been told on Friday morning to stay inside behind locked doors poured out of their homes and lined the streets to cheer police vehicles as they rolled away from the scene.

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