TAIPEI, Taiwan

 

Singapore

 

 

Regular convicts are having to vacate their already choked space for former ministers and lawmakers who are being prosecuted for graft by the caretaker government. More than 200,000 people have been nabbed in the drive against crime and corruption since February last year. As a result, the other prisoners sleep in three shifts and wait in long queues to use toilets or have a bath.

 

A Malaysian Indian girl has had to drop out of school here because her birth certificate registered her as a boy. T Gomathy has not managed to get her record corrected despite six years of appeals to the national registration department (NRD). Now 18, she remains under-educated. The mistake in Gomathy’s birth certificate was detected only when she was 12, when she applied for her national identity card. The problem of registration and identity card is an old one among the Indian settlers in Malaysia who came here during the British era.

 

Flamboyant dotcom tycoon Takafumi Horie has lost his appeal against a two-and-a-half-year prison term for fraud in a scandal that rocked Japan’s stock market. The Tokyo High Court declined to overturn the sentence that Horie, the 35-year-old founder of former Internet high-flyer Livedoor, was handed in March 2007. The brash Horie was once the darling of the Japanese media, which portrayed him as a harbinger of a new, rougher style of business in a country known for consensus and playing by the rules.

 

A 12-year old schoolboy is able to memorize up to 250 words in a matter of a few minutes and recollect them all without mistake in the same order. Jose Lawrence claims to have broken the world record set by 13-year-old Nischal Narayanam at the World Memory Championship held in Bahrain last year. Lawrence practises his memory skills for 150 minutes every night before going to bed. He wants to become a computer engineer and he is already familiar with the operating systems.