CHENGDU, China - A powerful earthquake toppled buildings, schools and a chemical plant Monday in central China, killing more than 8,700 people and trapping untold numbers in mounds of concrete, steel and earth in the worst quake in three decades.

The 7.9-magnitude quake devastated a region of small cities and towns set amid steep hills north of Sichuan's provincial capital of Chengdu. Striking in midafternoon, it emptied office buildings across the country in Beijing and could be felt as far away as Vietnam.

In the town of Juyuan, south of the epicenter, a three-story high school collapsed, burying as many as 900 students and killing at least 50, Xinhua said. Photos showed people using cranes, mechanical hoists and their hands to remove slabs of concrete and steel.

In Beichuan county, northeast of the epicenter, 80 percent of the buildings fell, and 10,000 people were injured, Xinhua said. Men younger than 50 were ordered to bring tools to the area to help dig out any survivors.

Xinhua reported 8,533 people died in Sichuan alone and 216 others in three other provinces and the mega-city of Chongqing.

Premier Wen Jiabao, a geologist by training, called the quake "a major geological disaster," and traveled to the disaster area to oversee rescue and relief operations.

Some 660 miles to the east in Anhui province, chandeliers swayed in the lobby of the Buckingham Palace Hotel. "We've never felt anything like this our whole lives," said a hotel employee surnamed Zhu.

According to a transcript prepared by the Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI), Al-Faqir said Palestine from the Jordan to the Mediterranean is an Islamic land.  "Spain - Andalusia - is also the land of Islam," he said.

"Islamic lands that were occupied by the enemies will once again become Islamic. Furthermore, we will reach beyond these countries, which are lost at one point. We proclaim that we will conquer Rome, like Constantinople was conquered once, and as it will be conquered again.

"America has occupied, thundered, and foamed with rage, and proclaimed, like Pharaoh, 'I am your supreme God,' but it will come to its end, and they have begun to realize that their end is near," he said.

"This morning on Al-Jazeera TV, I saw American scientists and strategic theoreticians, who said that America would soon come to its end. They said it before about the USSR, and, indeed, it has come to its end, and we say now that America and the EU will come to an end, and only the rising force of Islam will prevail."

"His vision of a great cosmic harmony reflecting the beauty of the Creator and the love freely bestowed on us in Christ, can also inspire our efforts to work for unity, reconciliation and peace in our world."

If a majority of state residents vote positively on the ban, the amendment will overturn and nullify the decision by the California Supreme Court.

"We have not been able to count on the legislature or the courts of California to adhere to the will of the people," Prentice told the Los Angeles Times. "This is yet another example why the people need to go to the polls in November to defend the historic and natural definition of marriage."

The ancestors of humans, apes and monkeys may have taken to the trees because of their small body size.

They say there was no difference in energy consumption for small primates, giving clues to how their ancestors entered the trees 65 million years ago.

Dr Jandy Hanna of Duke University, Durham, North Carolina, said the data suggested that the earliest primates were able to exploit a new environment without added cost if they remained small.

"The earliest primates differentiated from other mammals partly due to their exploitation of a new arboreal niche - that of the terminal branches of trees," she told BBC News. Early primates, which would have been about the size of large rats, then underwent a number of evolutionary changes as they adapted to their new environment. These changes included nails rather than claws and grasping hands and feet.

"The benefit/payoff of invading this new environment (and the appearance of these anatomical changes) was an insect- and fruit-rich environment," said Dr Hanna.

They are here to be in Christ's presence, to offer prayers, to draw closer to God and for spiritual nourishment.

They are among the hundreds of St. Elizabeth parishioners and thousands of Wichita-area Catholics who are part of a special devotion called Perpetual Eucharistic Adoration.

In adoration, the focus is on the Holy Eucharist -- a consecrated host that rests in a holder called a monstrance. In adoration, Catholics believe that Christ is present in body and blood, soul and divinity.

"So many want that quiet time with Jesus," she said, "and they know they're not going to have interruptions."

Conley said he sees several benefits of such devoted prayer. First, he said, is that it increases devotion among the faithful to the Eucharist. Second, he cited the number of prayers of all sorts that are being offered up. Third, he said, people have an opportunity to spend extended time in prayer, which then helps to nourish their spiritual lives.

"I know there are different places in the U.S., when this was a promoted practice, one of the almost immediate results was an increase of vocations to the priesthood," Jackels said in an interview last year.

"It was useful to catch the magnitude of the devastation. It's huge," Bernard Delpuech, head of the European Commission Humanitarian Office in Yangon, said of the trip. "For the recovery you can't expect it to be six months or a year. It will take longer," he told Reuters from Yangon, the former Rangoon.

However, near the town of Kunyangon this week columns of men, women and children stretched for miles alongside the road, begging in the mud and rain for scraps of food or clothing from the occasional passing aid vehicle.

In a rare sign of agreement with international aid agencies, the junta on Friday night sharply raised the official toll from the disaster to 77,738 dead and 55,917 missing.

Myanmar's paranoid military junta has been slow to accept outside aid, granting very few visas to relief workers desperate to help. No foreign experts from the World Health Organization have been given approval to enter the country. And because only local staff have been allowed into the worst areas, data collection has been slow.

Many children are suffering from diarrhea, and some foreign aid agencies have reported a few cholera cases, but no major outbreaks have been reported.

"With hundreds of thousands of people still not receiving aid many of these children will not survive much longer," the charity said in a statement. "Children may already be dying as a result of a lack of food."

Access to regular supplies of safe drinking water and proper sanitation is essential for preventing waterborne diseases like cholera, which spreads rapidly through water contaminated with feces. Malaria and dengue fever outbreaks also will be a major concern in the coming weeks after mosquitoes have time to breed in the stagnant water that flooded the low-lying delta region.