Taipei - A senior Chinese official was assaulted Tuesday by a group of pro-independence activists during a visit in the southern Taiwan city of Tainan, threatening to undermine high-level China-Taiwan talks planned for this month in Taipei.

Zhang Mingqing, vice chairman of the Association of Relations Across the Taiwan Straits (ARATS), was mobbed by a group of activists led by city councilor Wang Ting-yu of the pro-independence Democratic Progressive Party during a sightseeing trip in Tainan.

ARATS is a state-funded mainland agency charged with dealing with the island in the absence of formal diplomatic ties.

With the aim to study the weakening solar wind that protects planets in the solar system from dangerous cosmic rays, the Interstellar Boundary Explorer (Ibex) was launched by Ibex.

The Ibex spacecraft will carry out very extremely high-altitude orbits above Earth over the next two years, in order to examine and capture first images of processes taking place at the interstellar boundary - the farthest reaches of the solar system.

Many leading airlines are considering salary cuts of their employees to reduce operating cost. Earlier, they want to start a retrenchment drive to deal with the crisis in the aviation sector. But they seem to drop idea after stiff opposition from the political class of the country. Jet Airways has already taken back its sacked staff.

Recently, two ultra portable multimedia projectors dubbed as the Epson EB-1725 and EB-1735W were announced to be launched soon by Epson, which has been specially created for people who travel quite often or need mobile presentations.

The weight of these projectors, which provide about 2000:1 contrast, is 1.8 kgs.

The new projectors, which give the options of standard or widescreen presentations, have been equipped with 3,000 ANSI lumens of brightness.

Gaya, Oct 21: Police have recovered a huge cache of arms hidden by Maoists in Bihar's Gaya District.

Acting on a tip-off, the police seized the explosives from a water tank in the Bhalua forest area of the district.

"We recovered a 250-litres tank. On opening it was found it had 200 detonators, 126 tiffin bombs, timers and few wires. It was dumped so that they could easily take out and use it," said R. Mallar Vijji, Superintendent of Police.

London, Oct 21 : Gay sex can produce offsprings, at least in the case of beetles, says a new study, which found that the ‘kinky’ activity gives males a chance to indirectly fertilise females they may never encounter directly.

Biologists have speculated that homosexual copulation in beetles might help males practise for straight sex, or they might offer males a way to assert dominance over one another.

In order to test these explanations, Sara Lewis, an evolutionary ecologist at Tufts University in Boston and colleagues investigated flour beetles (Tribolium castaneum)