Bejing, Mar 31: China has shut down 162 websites that it found providing pornographic and lewd content in their audio or video segments.

According to a statement issued by the special operation office for crackdown on online porn and lewd content here on Monday said that the blocked websites had not acquired permits to broadcast audio and video programs issued by the State Administration of Radio, Film and Television (SARFT).

The websites include www. baigujing. com, www. bt990. com and other sites based mainly in Beijing, Shanghai, Jiangsu, Zhejiang and Guangdong Provinces.

Sydney  - Fortescue Metals Group Ltd said Tuesday that it had received Australian government approval for Chinese steel maker Hunan Valin Iron and Steel to pay 645 million Australian dollars (441 million US dollars) for a 17.5-per-cent stake in the nation's third-largest iron ore miner.

Under what's known as a stand-still agreement, Valin will undertake to hold no more than 17.5 per cent of Fortescue.

Fortescue chief executive Andrew Forrest, who owns 35 per cent of Fortescue, said in August his company would remain Australian controlled.

Berlin, March 31 : An international team of scientists has suggested that the largest known mass extinction in the history of the earth could have been triggered off by giant salt lakes, whose emissions of halogenated gases changed the atmospheric composition so dramatically that vegetation was irretrievably damaged.

At the Permian/Triassic boundary, 250 million years, ago about 90 percent of the animal and plant species ashore became extinct.

Taipei  - Taiwan on Tuesday recalled a Canada-based diplomat for lying about writing articles calling on China to attack Taiwan.

Hundreds of angry Taiwan natives met Kuo Kuan-ying, 50, when he arrived at the Taipei international airport, shouting "Kuo Kuan-ying, Kuo Kuan-ying!" ("Apologize, apologize!").

Kuo, head of the press office for Taiwan's representative office in Toronto, reportedly has been writing articles in recent years under seven alias to slander Taiwan.

Beijing - China and the European Union are at loggerheads over their satellite-navigation systems after China's announcement that it plans to use the same broadcast frequency that the European Union earmarked for its Galileo system, officials said Monday.

The conflict over the EU's Galileo and China's Compass navigation systems has become a "classic diplomatic problem," EU External Relations Commissioner Benita Ferrero-Waldner told reporters in Beijing.