HONG KONG

Hong Kong’s leading airlines Cathay Pacific and Dragonair has invited nearly 20,000 employees to take between one and four weeks of unpaid leave as part of cost-cutting measures. The moves came as the airlines announced that first quarter revenue on Cathay Pacific and Dragonair for passenger and cargo services fell 22.4 per cent from 2008. More than 1,000 Cathay Pacific flight attendants and around 200 pilots took voluntary unpaid leave when it was offered in December in an earlier move to reduce costs.

JAKARTA, Indonesia

One candidate committed suicide and two others died of heart attacks after losing in Indonesia’s legislative elections. Sri Wahyuni, a legislative candidate for a district council in West Java province, was found hanging from a ceiling after early vote counting from last week’s elections showed she was faring badly, the state-run Antara news agency said. Two other candidates have died of heart attacks since the elections after finding out that they did not get enough votes to win seats, local television channels reported. Many of the candidates running for seats in national, provincial and district councils sold their possessions to fund their campaigns.

SUVA, Fiji

Fiji’s central bank slashed one-fifth of the value from the country’s currency last week to try to save the economy from collapse amid a deepening political crisis over the military ruler’s refusal to hold elections any time soon. Armed forces chief Commodore Frank Bainimarama, meanwhile, accused the foreign, hired judges on Fiji’s Court of Appeals of siding with critics abroad demanding that he call quick elections to restore democracy. Bainimarama, insists he will restore democracy only after he has rewritten the constitution and electoral laws.

HANOI, Vietnam

A Vietnamese airline passenger was found carrying an infant’s dead body in his luggage, a senior security official said. Security staff at southern Ho Chi Minh City’s Tan Son Nhat airport discovered the tiny corpse when checking the luggage of a man about to fly to the northern port city of Hai Phong. According to the Thanh Nien newspaper, Vu Van Tho, 36, was trying to carry home for burial the body of his son, who died when his mother prematurely gave birth in her 27th week of pregnancy.

SHAH ALAM, Malaysia

Conservationists helped Wildlife and National Parks Department officials nab three Vietnamese poachers at the Kuala Garing mangrove swamp area in Rawang. About 400 black-crowned night heron eggs and eight month-old chicks were seized from the Vietnamese, aged 21, 22 and 34. All three men admitted to poaching for self-consumption. They planned to cook the Asian migratory bird, a protected species, by frying it with chillies.

TOKYO, Japan

Japan’s whaling catch in its latest Antarctic hunt fell far short of its target after disruptions by anti-whaling activists. Japan, which considers whaling to be a cherished cultural tradition, killed 679 minke whales despite plans to capture 850. It caught just one fin whale compared with a target of 50 in the hunt that began in November.

SINGAPORE

Southeast Asian militants have grown more sophisticated in using the Internet to spread radical ideas, recruit and train supporters, according to a new study urging governments to take action. The Internet’s role as a training and recruitment tool is likely to increase in significance and could threaten the region if it is not countered effectively, the study said. Southeast Asia is home to extremist groups. The number of radical websites detected and monitored by the report’s authors numbered 117 in 2008, up sharply from only 15 in 2007.

BEIJING, China

China’s official media and outspoken bloggers have protested against a German ad promoting the use of condoms, which shows revolutionary leader Mao Zedong as a sperm cell alongside Adolf Hitler and Osama bin Laden. The Communist Party’s People’s Daily devoted a page to the storm, quoting Internet commentaries which called for the makers of the ad to apologize to China.