Beijing  - A court in central China's Hubei province on Monday sentenced to death a man convicted of killing eight people, including his former lover, six of his employees and a two-year-old boy.

The Intermediate People's Court in Hubei's Suizhou city convicted Xiong Zhenlin, 35, of murdering the eight people with axes and hammers on January 4, the official Xinhua news agency reported.

The victims included Xiong's former lover, Zhu Deqing, and her two-year-old grandson.

Beijing  - The Chinese government on Sunday fired cloud-seeding shells to stimulate rain and announced plans to divert water from major rivers to ease an extreme drought in northern and central provinces.

Nearly 3,000 cloud-seeding shells and rockets were launched in seven provinces on Saturday, the state meteorological office said.

More water will be diverted from the Yellow and Yangtze rivers to badly affected farming areas, the government's Xinhua news agency quoted a water ministry official as saying.

Beijing, Feb. 6 : The China Economic Monitoring and Analysis Center, a survey organization of the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS), has said in a report that 92 percent of the economists polled believed China''s economy will recover from the global financial crisis in 2009, backed by the government''s four-trillion-Yuan stimulus plan.

The survey was carried out at the end of December last year among 73 domestic economists who study the macro economy. Three percent of the polled economists said the stimulus package would pay off in 2010.

The polled economists believed China would embrace an early recovery before the global economy picked up speed.

Beijing  - The devastating Sichuan earthquake that killed more than 80,000 people in May might have been partly caused by a huge dam and reservoir, a Chinese expert said.

"The likelihood is very big," said Fan Xiao, chief engineer of the investigation team of the geological office of Sichuan province.

The waters of Zipingpu reservoir, which reach depths of more than 120 metres, put too much pressure on the geological faults underneath, Fan said. Furthermore, water entering crevices was weakening the rock layers, he said.

Beijing- Chinese officials Thursday declared a state of emergency in several regions affected by a severe drought in northern China.

About 4 million people in eight provinces did not have sufficient water supplies, state media said, quoting the Office of State Flood Control and Drought Relief.

Chinese President Hu Jintao and Prime Minister Wen Jiabao ordered all-out efforts to combat the drought, with the central government earmarking an additional 300 million yuan (about 44 million dollars) in relief funds to top up the 100 million yuan already allocated.

Beijing - A Chinese team of scientists has succeeded in cloning five human blastulas for research purposes, the Shandong Stem Cell Engineering Research Center disclosed Wednesday.

At a press conference held jointly with a hospital in Yantai, the experiment created five blastual clones from 135 eggs. A blastula is an embryo in the early stage of development.

Of the five blastulas, four were from skin fibrocytes of healthy donors while the fifth was from lymphocytes of patients with Parkinson disease, the researchers said in a press release.