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Singapore - A Singapore court on Monday sentenced an Australian project manager who threw his Thai wife out of their fourth-floor bedroom window to 25 months in jail, media reports said.

The court found Jason John Porteous, 36, who pleaded guilty to attempted manslaughter, to have been suffering from depression and alcoholism at the time of the May 17 incident.

Porteous was originally accused of attempted murder, but after a psychiatric assessment the charge was lessened.

Singapore - Singapore's poorest were hit hardest by rising prices for food, housing and electricity in 2008, as the city-state's inflation climbed to its highest level in 28 years, data published by the Department of Statistics on Monday said.

Singapore's consumer price index (CPI) for general households rose by 6.5 per cent in 2008, the highest level since
1981 when it came up to 8.2 per cent.

It was more than triple the 2.1-per-cent increase of 2007.

Jakarta  - Indonesia's defence minister accused Singapore of obstructing an extradition treaty because it fears it would have to hand over businessmen who sought refuge in the city-state with huge amounts of illegally gotten money, a news report said Friday.

Juwono Sudarsono also said a defence cooperation agreement with Singapore, negotiated simultaneously with the extradition pact, appeared to have collapsed as well, according to The Jakarta Post.

"They [the agreements] are frozen," Juwono told the Post.

Singapore  - A Singapore justice on Thursday fined an editor of The Wall Street Journal 10,000 Singapore dollars (6,600 US dollars) for three articles that the city-state's government said showed contempt of its judiciary, a news report said.

Melanie Kirkpatrick, a deputy editor of the New York-based business newspaper's editorial page, had acknowledged responsibility for the publication of the articles in The Wall Street Journal Asia that the justice found to be in contempt of court.

Singapore  - A Singapore court sentenced a tattoo artist who helped a friend tattoo his wife's breasts, abdomen and forearms for suspected infidelity to two years and 10 months in jail, news reports said Thursday.

The sentence for the tattooist, 41, was two months shorter than the husband's jail term. Like the husband, who was sentenced in 2007, he will also be given six strokes of the cane, the Straits Times newspaper reported.