Asia Weekly

Japanese lessons

How the US is trying to avoid a ‘lost decade'

What was learned from Japan's financial crisis?

It's a good thing US Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke was an expert on Japan's "lost decade" of financial crisis when he was a professor at Princeton University - he'll need every bit of that knowledge to get the US out of its current mess. Both the US subprime mortgage crisis and Japan's financial crisis in the 1990s were prompted by surplus liquidity and collapses in their respective real estate bubbles.

Has Ma fallen off his horse?

Taiwan president Ma Ying-jeou is feeling the public's dissatisfaction after he "stumbled" over the issue of tainted milk products from mainland China and failed to deal with the "economic fallout from recent typhoons," says Cindy Sui in Asia Times Online. Ma's handling of the milk crisis "frustrated the public."

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The Week to Come

Japan will celebrate Health and Sports Day, or Taiiku no hi, on October 13, a national holiday commemorating the 1964 Tokyo Olympic Games

Shanghai gets ready to host the Formula 1 Sinopec Chinese Grand Prix, set to kick off on October 17

The 16th annual Pacific Basin Nuclear Conference will take place from October 13-18 in Aomori, Japan; the topic of this year's conference is Pacific Partnership Toward a Sustainable Nuclear Future

Vietnamese Prime Minister Nguyen Tan Dung will make an official visit to Australia f

The man Singapore politicians loved to hate

Unrelenting Singaporean opposition politician Joshua B Jeyaretnam died before he had the chance to "fulfill his greatest dream of returning to parliament," writes Meera Vijayan in The Star (Malaysia).

Abdullah calls time on leadership

Facing mounting pressure from within his own party, Malaysia's Prime Minister Abdullah Ahmad Badawi has decided not to defend his post in party elections in March 2009, reports The Associated Press...

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Stressed pandas... Mao's plane

Stressed pandas: With a constant stream of people watching their every move, it's little wonder that Wuhan Zoo's two pandas have frazzled nerves. But their keepers have found that giving "Hope" and "Greatness" .....

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Asian Celebrity News

Milkshake murderer - Hong Kong's notorious "Milkshake Murderer," Nancy Kissel, lost an appeal against her 2005 sentence to life in prison, reports China Daily.

Tibetan tales

Woeser is a Tibetan poet and outspoken critic of the Chinese government who lives in Beijing. But it's her writing that's most important to her. "The first thing is that I am a writer. I write articles and books," she told Clifford Coonan of The Irish Times.

Would you believe it?

Milking the property market - Faced with a sluggish housing market, developers in China are resorting to some bizarre tricks to lure buyers, including giving away free cows to new homeowners, says Today Online (Singapore). One developer in the southern city of Nanjing.......

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