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Article snippet: BEIJING — Hundreds of rescue workers tapped, poked and dug through the earth and rubble left by a landslide that smothered a village in southwestern China on Saturday, looking for signs of survivors among the 100 or more people who were missing. But as night fell and the search continued under lights, hopes of pulling many alive from the rocks and earth dimmed. “Currently, there are no signs of life,” the headquarters of the search operation reported, according to Xinhua, the official news agency. The village, Xinmo, in Mao County, Sichuan Province, lies in a region of brittle, unstable mountains vulnerable to landslides and tremors. But the landslide struck around 5:40 a.m. after a night of rain with no warning, and many residents of the 62 or so homes in the village were apparently sleeping or awakened too late by the roar of a falling hillside. “The entire village was shattered,” Deng Zusong, a 25-year-old resident of a nearby village, said in a telephone interview. “It was just like an earthquake.” Nearly 2,000 rescue workers and members of support teams had converged on Xinmo by Saturday afternoon, news reports said. Initially there were heartening bulletins of a survivor who yelled from under the debris and another who answered a telephone call. But as night came, the rescuers had little good news to share. The woman who answered the call appeared to have died, said Sichuan Online, a provincial news service. By late in the day, officials said that searchers... Link to the full article to read more