IT WAS 8.52am, and Rubi Noreen was walking home after delivering her six-year-old son to school when a powerful earthquake struck northern Pakistan and Kashmir. A building collapsed on her. Her right leg was crushed. She was buried for six hours before rescuers dragged her out. But as tomorrow's anniversary of that catastrophe approaches, the 28-year-old from the town of Balakot in North West Frontier Province has cause to wonder whether she would be better off dead.

MUZAFFARABAD, Pakistan (AFP) - President Pervez Musharraf led Pakistanis in a minute's silence to mourn the first anniversary of the South Asian earthquake, which killed 74,000 people.

Musharraf shunned his military uniform on Sunday and wore a traditional beige smock and trousers known as shalwar kameez for the memorial service in Muzaffarabad, the capital of Pakistani Kashmir.

A host of allegations has marred the relief operation being supervised by the Earthquake Reconstruction and Rehabilitation Authority (Erra).

Non-governmental organisations and independent watchdogs have expressed concern over bureaucratic delays that have hampered the rehabilitation process in the earthquake-devastated areas. But Erra Chairman Altaf Mohammad Saleem insists that, by and large, the relief effort has been smooth, methodically conducted and, above all, transparent.

HIGH on a hillside in the dirt-poor village of Kambrian Zamiri, accessible only by foot, stands a gleaming new school that replaced the one-room shelter that served before the earthquake. It cost about £1,400 to build, and the money came from the £347,830 raised after the disaster by Learning for Life, a small British charity.

The British public responded with conspicuous generosity to the catastrophe, donating nearly £60 million to the Disaster Emergency Committee appeal. That was the DEC’s third-most successful appeal.

ISLAMABAD (Reuters) - A moderate earthquake on Sunday shook parts of northern Pakistan devastated by a catastrophic tremor last October, but there were no immediate reports of damage or casualties.

The 5.0 magnitude quake had its epicenter in Hazara division, about 200 km (125 miles) northeast of the Pakistani city of Peshawar, Pakistan's Meteorological Office said.

ISLAMABAD, March. 19 Moderate earthquake rattled Pakistan's capital and parts of the country's northwest Sunday, but there were no immediate reports of injuries or damage, an official said.

MUZAFFARABAD, Pakistan - Heavy rain and snow buffeted Pakistan's earthquake-hit areas for a second day Monday, grounding helicopter aid flights and blocking roads as doctors reported increasing respiratory infections among survivors.

Aid workers have warned that cold weather in the Himalayan foothills, where temperatures have already fallen below freezing, may claim more lives after the Oct. 8 magnitude-7.6 quake left about 87,000 dead and 3.5 million homeless.

Poor visibility forced a suspension of flights by helicopters from the U.N., foreign militaries and Pakistan's army, which have been delivering winterized tents, clothes, food and other provisions to survivors, said Maj. Farooq Nasir, a Pakistani army spokesman.

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan--From the air, the town of Balakot, at the lip of the Kaghan Valley in Pakistan's mountainous North-West Frontier Province, resembles pictures of Hiroshima circa late summer 1945: All but a few buildings have been reduced absolutely to rubble. There were some 50,000 people in this town on the morning of Oct. 8; a six-second earthquake that day killed an estimated 16,000 outright. Now survivors live mainly in scattered tent villages, not all of them properly winterized. And winter has begun.

The people of Balakot and dozens of other devastated towns are much on the mind of Rear Adm. Michael A. LeFever, 51, the man in charge of the U.S. military's 1,000-man, $110 million-and-counting relief effort here. "I'll never forget landing and smelling gangrene and smelling death," he says of his first trip to the disaster zone where 73,000 died. "The first couple of days were overwhelming."

It was Pakistan's good fortune in those critical days that Adm. LeFever could call in heavy-lift helicopters, particularly the tandem-rotor Chinook, from bases in nearby Afghanistan. Every road into the Frontier Province and the neighboring Azad Kashmir region had been rendered impassable by huge landslides. Every hospital in the region except one had been destroyed. The Pakistan government, which lost nearly its entire civil administration in the region as well as hundreds of soldiers, lacked the airlift capacity to bring adequate relief north and the critically injured south. The Chinooks were among the few helicopters able to reach, supply and evacuate places that, even under normal conditions, are some of the most inaccessible on earth.

ISLAMABAD, Dec 13 : A strong earthquake of 6.7 magnitude struck upper Pakistan, Punjab province and Muzaffarabad at 2.51 am on early Tuesday.

The earthquake was felt in the upper Pakistan including entire Punjab, Islamabad, Ralwalpindi, Peshawar, Muzaffarabad, Mansehra, Balakot and Gilgit.