Beijing, Mar. 13 : At least one in five Chinese athletes have lied about their age to participate in sports competitions, scientific screening has revealed.

An x-ray analysis of the bones of competitors at the Youth Games in the southern Chinese province of Guangdong discovered that 3,000 of the 15,000 athletes, or 20 per cent, had misrepresented their age.

Two thousand offenders were too old to be eligible for youth competitions, while one of them was seven years older than he claimed.

Age-faking caused embarrassment to China during last year''s Olympic Games in Beijing, when gold medallist gymnast He Kexin was accused of being just 14 years old and ineligible. She was eventually cleared by the International Olympic Committee.

Beijing  - Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao on Friday urged leaders of the world's 20 major economies to prioritise help for developing nations at the G20 summit next month in London.

"Developing countries are the worst hit in the financial crisis, however their difficulties tend to be easily neglected," Wen told reporters.

Beijing  - How large is China's economic stimulus package?

This question not only occupied the delegates of the National People's Congress, whose annual session ended Friday in Beijing, but also representatives of foreign companies who want to know what is going to be in the picture for China's economy.

In November, the programme designed to stimulate the economy was announced in the amount of 4 trillion yuan (586 billion dollars).

But concrete details were still lacking as congress delegates demanded "more transparency."

Beijing  - China's nominal parliament on Friday endorsed policies designed to bolster the economy against the global recession and approved an annual budget that included another large hike in military spending.

Reports on the budget and economic performance were approved by a large majority of the nearly 3,000 members of the National People's Congress (NPC), who took part in rapid electronic voting at the end of the parliament's nine-day annual session.

Beijing - Chinese courts recorded a huge rise in civil cases involving employment, health, housing and consumer rights last year, the country's top judge said on Tuesday.

following the introduction of a new employment law in January 2008, the courts settled 286,221 labour dispute cases, up 94 per cent, Supreme People's Court president Wang Shengjun, told the ongoing annual session of China's nominal parliament, the National People's Congress.

Beijing, Mar 10 : A research paper issued by the China Policy Institute of the University of Nottingham (UK) has revealed that China is likely to overtake Japan to become the world''s second largest economy, either this year or by 2010.

Yao Shujie, the author of the research paper told China Daily in a telephonic interview, "Right now, we don''t have figures for Japan''s GDP in 2008, but I think China may have already overtaken Japan last year."