Beijing, Jan. 31 : Chinese President Hu Jintao held a telephone conversation with his US counterpart Barack Obama on Friday over bilateral ties.

The Chinese president said China is ready to strengthen dialogue, promote mutual trust and expand cooperation with the US to confront various global challenges together and push forward a stable development of the Sino-US relationship, the Xinhua reports.

Beijing, Jan. 26: The Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) has launched an initiative to boost the development of solar energy technology, in a bid to turn it into a major energy source in China by 2050.

The official Xinhua news agency quoted a CAS official as saying that the academy had organized academicians and experts to make an action plan and will set up a platform to support scientific innovations involving solar energy.

The plan will be carried out in three phases, including "distributed utilization" by 2015, "alternative utilization" by 2025 and "large-scale utilization" by 2035, respectively," the official said.

Beijing, Jan. 26 : Beijing's population is nearing the 17 million mark, and according to demographic experts, one in four residents is a migrant from another country.

According a report by the official Xinhua news agency, the population of Beijing is currently pegged at 16.95 million as of December 2008, which is up by 620,000 from a year earlier.

Beijing, Jan. 26 : Chinese officials and leaders of the banned Protestant Church appear to be on the reconciliation path after several decades.

According to The Times, they have had their first meeting in an office in Beijing.

The timing of the meeting is being termed as significant, as this year is the 60th anniversary of Communist power and the Chinese Government is keen to avoid disturbances to mar its celebrations.

Beijing, Jan. 24 : Chinese government has expressed "serious concern" over safeguard measures placed by India on products like Chinese-made sodium nitrite and sodium carbonate.

Chinese commerce ministry spokesman, Yao Jian has stated that China had urged domestic business authorities to contact their Indian peers and solve trade issues through talks and cooperation, the chinaview. com reports.

"But India didn''t respond to Chinese efforts and launched its first anti-subsidy probe over Chinese-made sodium nitrite. China expresses dissatisfaction over it," Yao said.

Beijing  - China's economic growth fell to 6.8 per cent in the final quarter of 2008, its slowest expansion since 2001, as the global economic downturn hit China's exports, the national statistics bureau said Thursday.

The year-on-year growth rate compared to 9-per-cent growth in the third quarter, the bureau said.

For all of 2008, China's economy expanded at a 9-per-cent pace, reaching 30.07 trillion yuan (4.42 trillion dollars), the first time since 2003 that it had not hit double-digit growth.