Hanoi  - Vietnam and China have signed an agreement to establish a hotline between the countries' leaders for discussions of urgent disagreements, Vietnamese state media said Friday.

The state-run newspaper Vietnam News reported the agreement was signed in Hanoi Thursday as part of a visit by Chinese State Councilor Dai Bingguo.

The hotline has been under discussion since a June meeting between Vietnamese Communist Party General Secretary Nong Duc Manh and Chinese President Hu Jintao in Beijing.

Beijing - Chinese President Hu Jintao on Thursday urged North Korea and other involved nations to resume the stalled dialogue aimed at ending Pyongyang's nuclear weapons programme, state media said.

"How to overcome the current difficulties and realize the early resumption of the six-party talks is a subject that all parties are facing together," the semi-official China News Service quoted Hu as telling North Korean Premier Kim Yong Il.

"China is willing to make joint efforts with North Korea and other parties to push forward the six-party talks," Hu said.

New Delhi, Mar 19 : Commerce Secretary G K Pillai today said that in order to minimize the effects of global slowdown, both India and China need to strengthen the bilateral trade and economic relations.

Speaking at the India-China bilateral meeting here, Pillai requested the Chinese side to explore the possibility of more diversified exports from India.

Beijing, Mar. 19 : China has rejected Coca-Cola''s plan to acquire beverage maker China Huiyuan Juice Group Ltd for 2.4 billion dollars, citing the country''s anti-monopoly law.

According to a China Daily report, the acquisition would have been the largest ever buyout of a Chinese company by a foreign rival.

Chinese government sources were quoted as saying that had the planned takeover gone through, it would have violated the provisions of the Anti-Monopoly Law.

Geneva, Mar 19 : The issue of a ban imposed by India on Chinese toys has been taken to the World Trade Organisation (WTO) by China.

China used a meeting of the WTO's technical barriers to trade committee to raise the issue of a ban imposed by India, stopping short of launching a formal trade dispute.

The row has been closely watched as an example of trade tensions between developing countries at a time when fears are growing that protectionist measures could worsen the economic crisis, a foreign news agency reported.

Washington, Mar. 19: The Chinese intelligence service spends most of its time not only trying to steal secrets from overseas but also on ways to bolster Communist Party rule by repressing religious and political dissent internally, claims a spy who has defected to the United States.

"In some sense you can say that intelligence work between two countries is just like war but without the fire," Li Fengzhi told The Washington Times in an interview aided by an interpreter.

Li worked for years as an Ministry of State Security intelligence officer inside China before defecting to the United States, where is he awaiting a response to his request for political asylum.