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The Chinese President Hu Jintao has urged North Korea to return to the negotiating table over its controversial nuclear programme. Mr Hu told North Korean Premier Kim Yong-il to co-operate with efforts to resume stalled six-party talks on the North's nuclear activities.

Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao told Mr Kim a day earlier that China wants to "actively push forward" the deadlocked negotiations. China's chief delegate to the nuclear talks, Wu Dawei, visited North Korea without fanfare in February seeking a breakthrough, South Korean and Japanese media reported at the time. Beijing has not confirmed the trip.

China has been hosting the talks which had been making progress until North Korea abruptly stopped disabling its nuclear programme last August. Talks in December failed to resolve a dispute with the US over how to verify the North's full range of past nuclear activities.

Perhaps trying not to overload a Pakistani government that has shown itself to be overwhelmed by daily political and terrorist attacks, Mr. Obama made only oblique mention of a concern voiced frequently inside the White House: That Al Qaeda and other terrorists view Pakistan’s arsenal of 60 to 100 weapons as the ultimate goal of a campaign to destabilize that government.

In London last week, Mr. Obama raised the imminent test with President Hu Jintao of China, whom the United States has relied on to influence the North. A senior administration official, briefing reporters, said he believed the Chinese had expressed concerns to the North, urging it to halt the flight.

If so, Beijing was ignored — as it was twice in 2006, when it told the North not to conduct missile tests and then its nuclear test. That suggests, one of Mr. Obama’s aides said Sunday, “that either the Chinese aren’t trying very hard, or the North Koreans aren’t listening very well.”

Along with Tibet, Xinjiang is one of the most politically sensitive regions in China. It is strategically located at the borders of Russia, Mongolia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Afghanistan, Pakistan and India, has abundant oil reserves and is China's largest natural gas-producing region.

But controlling the anger on both sides of the ethnic divide will now make controlling Xinjiang, with its gas reserves and trade and energy ties to central Asia, all the more testing for the ruling Communist Party.

Xinjiang has long been a tightly controlled hotbed of ethnic tensions, fostered by an economic gap between many Uighurs and Han Chinese, government controls on religion and culture and an influx of Han migrants who now are the majority in most key cities, including Urumqi. There were attacks in the region before and during last year's Summer Olympics in Beijing.

David Miliband today described China as the 21st century's "indispensable power" with a decisive say on the future of the global economy, climate change and world trade.The foreign secretary predicted that over the next few decades China would become one of the two "powers that count", along with the US, and Europe could emerge as a third only if it learned to speak with one voice.

Miliband said a pivotal moment in China's rise came at the G20 summit last month in London. Hu Jintao, China's president, arrived as the head of the only major power still enjoying strong growth (expected to be 8% this year), backed by substantial financial reserves."The G20 was a very significant coming of economic age in an international forum for China. If you looked around the 20 ­people sitting at the table … what was striking was that when China spoke everybody listened," Miliband said.

"Historians will look back at 2009 and see that China played an incredibly important role in stabilising global capitalism. That is very significant and sort of ironic," Miliband said. "There's a joke that goes: 'After 1989, capitalism saved China. After 2009, China saved capitalism.'"

the country's president, Hu Jintao, out to sea for the parade. "Both now and in the future, no matter to what extent we develop, China will never seek hegemony," state media quoted him as saying.

U.S. President Barack Obama and Brown both favor driving on fiscal stimulus, even if the governor of the Bank of England is cautioning his prime minister he can't afford to throw any more money at the problem

Brown and Obama have limited room for maneuver since both their countries have such hefty current account and budget deficits. They just don't have the money to do it themselves, and they may have trouble persuading those who do have the cash to use it.

In an uncomfortable reminder of serious divisions over the Iraq war, Germany's Chancellor Angela Merkel and France's President Nicolas Sarkozy, each with more national traditions than Obama and Brown, and with their welfare states already pumping money into their economies as unemployment increases, are pursuing a different agenda. Blaming "Anglo-Saxon economics" and dodgy banking practices for the mess, they don't want more funds injected.