BBC News with David Legge.
An earthquake that struck the remote Chinese province of Qinghai is now known to have killed almost 600 people and injured thousands. The tremor wrecked the town of Jiegu. The BBC correspondent in the province says cold and rain are hampering relief operations. A local teacher told the BBC's Chinese service that almost all residential housing in Jiegu had collapsed, and so had its school.
The extents of the destruction of houses is very bad. More than 80% of the residential houses built with mud and brick have collapsed. And many people have been buried or trapped underneath. We are now helping people to carry out rescues on their own, but we lack heavy lifting equipment.
President Obama has urged top Republican and Democrat leaders to speed up majority regulatory reforms, major regulatory reforms of the US financial system, widely seen as his next big political challenge at home. In face to face talks with senior politicians, Mr Obama urged them to approve the reform bill, saying the United States could not afford another financial meltdown. At a news conference in Washington, the US Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner explained why he thought the bill was important.
I think it's a critical moment for reform, a promising moment. A lot of hard work, a lot of progress. It's been two and a half years since this crisis started, more than a year since we first laid out a comprehensive set of reforms and I think we know what we need to know about the choices we face. It's just time to decide and time to move.