Taipei  - A city councilman who allegedly incited a mob to attack a visiting Chinese official last week claimed Tuesday that he was beaten by gangsters linked to China.

"They punched me twice in the chest and demanded that I apologize to Zhang Mingqing or I would be killed," Wang Ting-yu, a city councilman of the southern city of Tainan, said in a news conference in Taipei.

He said he received a phone call from an acquaintance identified as Huang Ju-yi, who asked for a meeting in Taipei last Thursday. When he went to Huang's office, he was taken to another room where some 20 men who he said looked like gangsters surrounded him.

Beijing/Khartoum - Five Chinese oil workers kidnapped in Sudan have been slain by their abductors, the Chinese embassy in Khartoum said.

Sudanese authorities told the embassy Monday that five of nine Chinese workers abducted on October 19 were killed, China's official Xinhua news agency reported.

Two more of the abducted workers were missing, and two escaped, the Sudanese government said.

The Sudan Tribune, quoting Foreign Ministry officials, said the bodies and the two escaped workers, who were injured, were found in a small village in the Kordofan area.

The embassy "strongly condemned" slayings and asked Khartoum to continue search operations for the two missing workers.

Moscow - Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao arrived in Moscow on Monday to seek a long-delayed deal on energy ties with Russia and discuss the global financial crisis.

Wen will hold talks with his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin and President Dmitry Medvedev in his two-day visit to the capital before heading to oil-rich Kazakhstan for a meeting of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, a security grouping of Central Asian states.

Taipei - Taiwan and China agreed Monday to hold a second round of high-level talks in Taipei next week, despite threats by pro-independence activists to disrupt the meeting.

"The Chinese mainland's Association for Relations Across the Taiwan Straits (ARATS) chairman Chen Yunlin will lead a delegation to Taiwan from December 3 to 7, the first meeting on the island between the two parties," the official Chinese news agency Xinhua reported.

Paris - By a significant margin, the French believe that China has supplanted the United States as the most powerful country in the world, according to a survey made public on Monday.

Taipei - Taiwan's state-funded Straits Exchange Foundation said Monday that China had apologized to Taiwan for the losses and troubles caused by the recent tainted milk scandal.

The foundation said it received a letter of apology to Taiwan's consumers and manufacturers Monday from the Association for Relations Across the Taiwan Straits.