Taipei - Taiwan will hold talks with China on financial market investments, including permission for China investment in local stocks and Taiwanese investments in mainland securities and banking institutions, a top official said Sunday.

"They will be included in our upcoming talks as the follow-up agenda," said Lai Shin-yuan, chairwoman of the Mainland Affairs Council (MAC), the island's top China policy planning body.

China is all set to become a leading trade partner of India in next five years. US is a top trade partner of India by now. The mutual trade between two countries is expected to touch $100-bn mark by 2013-14. The bilateral trade between the two countries would reach at 50 billion dollar mark in the fiscal ending March 2009.

India has a significant economic partnership with European Union with 56 billion euro trade. The trade would reach at 100-billion euro in the next five years as per the target of recent India-EU Summit at Marseilles (France).

Beijing  - China plans to build homes in towns and villages for nearly 500,000 members of Tibetan herding families in the south-western province of Sichuan, state media said on Saturday.

The Sichuan provincial government said it will help 470,000 Tibetans to "settle down in permanent brick houses" in the next four years, the official Xinhua news agency reported.

The province will invest some 5 billion yuan (735 million dollars) in the project, which will include new primary schools, clinics, offices and "other public service infrastructure", the agency said.

London, October 11 : Chinese and American researchers have discovered a new carbon material that is potentially lighter and stronger than conventional carbon fibres.

Huisheng Peng and his colleagues at Shanghai-based Tongji University have found that a carbon vapour made by heating ethylene and paraffin oil can condense into tubes of pure carbon, tens of micrometers wide and up to several centimetres long.

The researchers say that individual tubes have a tensile strength greater than that of conventional carbon fibres, and that they show ductile behaviour just like metal wires when pulled.

India attained 50th place in the annual Global Competitiveness 2008-09 ranking. It was at 48th place last year. The list is compiled by the World Economic Forum with its network of Partner Institutes in various countries. 

China has improved its ranking and got 30th spot in the latest list. It attained highest rank among the BRIC economies. US topped the list of 134 countries. The country got the first rank despite financial crisis in the economy.

Beijing, Oct. 11 : A new traffic restriction went into effect in Beijing from Saturday, which is expected to help sustain the hard-won smooth traffic and good air quality during the Olympic Games.

Under the new traffic restriction, 70 percent of government vehicles, as well as all corporate and private cars, will take turns off the roads one out of the five weekdays as of Oct. 11, according to the Beijing Municipal Committee of Communications.