Tokyo - It has not been so long since the world worried about Japan's financial sector.

After the speculation excesses of the late 1980s and early 1990s Japan's banks moaned under a tremendous burden of non-performing loans.

Even as late as 2003 they sought financial bailout packages from foreign banks, especially from the United States.

Now the situation has changed dramatically as the US financial market has been turned upside down.

Now it is the Japanese banks that are starting to buy out their American counterparts.

Japan's banks have returned with a vengeance internationally, launching a series of major investments in the US financial sector.

Hong Kong - The number of US dollar millionaires grew by 22.7 per cent in India and 20.3 per cent in China last year as the ranks of wealthy in the Asia-Pacific region swelled to 2.8 million, according to a report Friday.

Vietnam saw the fastest growth in millionaire numbers with a 24.2 per cent increase although its overall number of high net worth individuals with assets worth over one million US dollars was just 1,200.

In 2007, China had 415,000 millionaires and India 123,000, the report said. The country with the most millionaires in the region, however, was Japan with 1.51 million, a 2.2 per cent increase on 2006.

New York - Despite a massive financial crisis afflicting rich countries, a one-day United Nations development conference witnessed a strong outpouring of aid from leaders both public and private to help the world's poorest nations.

Major charitable foundations, government leaders and businesses of all stripes joined forces Thursday to push for progress in ending poverty, hunger and fighting diseases, and warned that the ongoing financial turmoil was no reason to bring those efforts to a halt.

The pledges totalled 16 billion dollars according to an initial UN estimate, including more than 3 billion dollars to eradicate malaria, 2 billion dollars to tackle an ongoing food crisis and 4.5 billion dollars for educational programmes.

New York - World leaders from both business and politics promised 16 billion dollars in new programmes to help slash poverty, combat disease and boost education in the world's poorest nations, during a United Nations conference Thursday on development.

The pledges included more than 3 billion dollars to eradicate malaria, 2 billion dollars to tackle an ongoing food crisis and 4.5 billion dollars for educational programmes, according to the UN's initial estimate.

"That expression of global commitment will be all the more remarkable because it comes against the backdrop of a global financial crisis," said UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon.

Dublin  - Ireland's economy - which enjoyed an unprecedented boom in the last decade - is in recession after the gross domestic product fell for the second successive quarter, figures released from the Central Statistics Office (CSO) in Dublin showed Thursday.

GDP fell by 0.8 per cent in the second quarter of this year compared to the same quarter of 2007 after falling by 1.3 per cent in the first quarter compared to the first three months of 2007.

GDP fell by 1 per cent overall in the first six months of the year compared to last year.

Gross national product, which excludes earnings from multinational companies, fell by as much as 2.1 per cent in the second quarter after growing by 0.9 per cent in the first quarter.

Washington, Sept 25 : Billionaire investor Warren Buffett has described the current Wall Street meltdown as an “economic Pearl Harbour”, requiring immediate action of lawmakers.

Amid growing rancour over the terms of a 700 billion dollar bailout for the American financial system, Buffett said the panic of last week would "look like Nirvana" if the legislation is not passed.

According to the Independent, his comments came a day after he paid five billion dollars (2.7 billion pounds) for a stake in Goldman Sachs, the banking giant, in what he described as a bet that politicians would indeed act to repair.