Taipei - Taiwan and China plan to hold talks in October to sign a pact on launching direct shipping and cargo charter flights across the Taiwan Strait, an official said Tuesday.

After a meeting in Beijing in May which led to launching weekend charter flights on July 4, Taiwan's top negotiator Chiang Ping-kun and his Chinese counterpart Chen Yunlin are expected to hold their second roundof talks in Taipei, Kao Kung-lien, vice chairman of the Mainland Affairs Council, told a seminar.

Beijing - Beijing authorities have received 77 applications for demonstrations since August 1, a spokesperson with the municipal public security bureau was quoted by Xinhua news agency as saying on Monday.

But none of the applications materialized into protests, according to the report.

Under pressure to hold an Olympics of international standard,

China had set tough conditions including a minimum notice of five days for any group wanting to protest at three designated parks during the Beijing Olympics.

Beijing, Aug. 18: China will not suffer from a "post-Olympic recession", senior officials have said.

"The Olympic Games won''t be a watershed for China''s economic growth," Wang Yiming, vice-president of the Academy of Macroeconomic Research, said.

"The fundamentals propelling the country''s economic development over the past 30 years will remain" even after the Games, The China Daily quoted him as saying further.

The country''s economy grew 11.9 percent last year. But after the growth slowed to 10.1 percent in the second half of this year, it raised concern that the economy could suffer after the Games, which in some ways has acted as booster.

Beijing - Authorities have given the green light to begin construction of a magnetic-levitation train route in Zhejiang province on east China's seaboard in 2010, three years later than planned, the official Xinhua news agency reported Monday.

The section linking the eastern cities of Shanghai and Hangzhou was approved by Beijing in March 2006; however, protests by residents over radiation concerns had put the project on hold.

Construction of the Shanghai-Hangzhou line was expected to start in 2010 and be completed by 2015 at a cost of 22 billion yuan (3.14 billion US dollars).

Taipei - A Taiwanese baseball fan died of a heart attack as his side suffered what was widely considered a humiliating defeat to China in the Olympic baseball comptitition, it emerged Saturday.

The 74-year-old pensioner from Kaohsiung - identified only by his surname Huang - had been a baseball fan all his life and never missed a game on TV, the Central News Agency (CNA) said.