Washington, Sep 12: The United States and China are holding talks about what to do if the government in Pyongyang collapses after North Korean leader Kim Jong Il became physically impaired from a stroke apparently suffered last month, FOX News reports.

A senior Bush Administration official said that although Kim may not be close to death, the US does not accept reports from South Korea that he’s on his way to a rapid recovery.

The official told FOX News the United States is naturally engaging the Chinese about what to do if there is ensuing instability in North Korea. There is no logical successor to Kim. He has not been grooming one of his sons to replace him, as Kim’s father, Kim Il Sung, groomed him.

Beijing - The death toll rose to 151 in a mudslide which buried a market and several buildings in the northern Chinese province Shanxi, the state-run Xinhua news agency said Friday.

Four days after the event, more than 3,000 rescuers, armed with spades and aided by 160 mechanical diggers, continued to search for victims buried under the heaps of dirt and mud.

Heavy rain caused a dam at a waste reservoir downstream of an illegally operating iron mine to burst, officials said earlier. About 268,000 cubic metres of mud covered an area of 30.2 hectares, destroying a market, an office building and several houses.

Lahore, Sep 12: Libya got its nuclear warhead documents from Pakistan’s disgraced nuclear scientist Dr Abdul Qadeer Khan’s supplier network and not China, said a US State Department official.

China gave Pakistan nuclear weapons technology and equipment in the 1980s as part of a strategic effort to counter India’s nuclear weapons, the Washington Times quoted the official, as saying.

Hamburg - People in Europe and North America are ignorant of China's enormous historical achievements, former German chancellor Helmut Schmidt said Thursday.

Addressing the Hamburg Summit, a meeting of business leaders from China and Germany, the elder statesman said China had made vast economic progress over the past 30 years.

He and other speakers called on European nations to intensify dialogue with China and improve relations, despite criticism in the West of China's human-rights policies, especially its controversial crackdown on protesters in Tibet this year.

France's minister of foreign trade, Anne-Marie Idrac, said the European Union was determined to step up investment in China as much as possible.

Washington, September 11 : A team of researchers have determined that the magnitude 7.9 earthquake in China’s Sichuan province on May 12 has brought several nearby faults closer to failure and could trigger another major quake in the region.

Researchers analyzing the May 2008 Wenchuan earthquake have found that geological stress has significantly increased on three major fault systems in the region.

Hong Kong - China can expect a post-Olympics boom in visitor numbers from some of the millions who were dazzled watching the Beijing games on TV, a survey released in Hong Kong indicated Thursday.

The survey of audiences in 16 worldwide markets found that while 45 per cent of viewers intended to one day visit China before the games started, 51 per cent said they would visit after seeing the closing ceremony.

Meanwhile, the number of viewers saying they had no interest in visiting China dropped from one third to around one quarter between the opening and closing ceremonies.