Officials in southern China appear to have averted environmental calamity by halting the spread of a toxic metal that had threatened to foul drinking water for tens of millions of people, the state media reported Monday.

Officials said they had successfully diluted the concentration of cadmium, a poisonous component of batteries, that has been coursing down the Longjiang River in the Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region.

Meetings between the chief nuclear envoys of North and South Korea were “constructive,” negotiators said, even though the talks did not produce any breakthroughs on the longstanding impasse over the North’s refusal to give up its nuclear program.

The talks on Wednesday, held at a private club in Beijing, were the second meeting of the two sides since 2009, when North Korea walked away from six-party disarmament talks that also involved the United States, Russia, Japan and China.

The earthquake that killed 87,000 people in Sichuan Province in China a year ago this week was a devastating tragedy that, through all the rubble, offered a few rays of hope.

CHENGDU, China: Can earthquakes be predicted, their destructive impact forewarned? Most scientists would say no. But if some insistent Chinese bloggers are to be believed, nature provided enough warning to have saved many of those who perished this week. In the days before the deadly earthquake shook much of mountainous Sichuan Province, their stories go, ponds inexplicably drained, cows flung themselves against their enclosures and swarms of toads invaded the streets of a town that was later devastated by the quake.

BEIJING: At least three dozen villages and towns in southwest China remained cut off from the outside world Thursday as tens of thousands of soldiers and emergency workers struggled against impassable roads and mountains of concrete and brick to reach the 40,000 people that officials say are still buried in the rubble or missing after a massive earthquake Monday.

BEIJING: Tens of thousands of people throughout southwest China remained buried beneath rubble Tuesday as rescue workers struggled to reach areas cut off by a powerful earthquake that has left thousands dead and hundreds of thousands injured and homeless. The authorities said that more than 18,000 people were still unaccounted for in the city of Mianzhu and that 2,300 were missing in the collapse of a school and two factories in the town of Shifang.

BEIJING: A fast-spreading viral outbreak in eastern China has killed 21 children, sickened nearly 3,000 others and caused panic among parents in an impoverished corner of Anhui Province, state news media reported Friday.