Singapore - The Singapore High Court confirmed on Thursday a life imprisonment for an Indonesian maid who killed her employer's 75-year-old mother in 2005, media reports said.

The maid, who was identified as Barokah, 29, pushed Wee Keng Wah from their ninth-floor flat after the elderly woman scolded her for sneaking out to meet a man. In 2007, the maid was sentenced to life imprisonment and appealed.

However, a re-hearing into the case did not change the judge's mind, the online edition of the Straits Times newspaper reported. The second hearing was ordered to evaluate if the life sentence was appropriate.

Singapore  - A Singapore court fined a restaurant manager 500 Singapore dollars (326 US dollars) Thursday for tying up a sex worker who subsequently fell to her death from a window of the man's ninth-floor flat, a news report said.

Edmund Peter Anthony had taken the 27-year-old Thai woman home and had sex with her on October 15, 2007, the online edition of the Straits Times newspaper reported. Before he went to the bathroom, he tied her hands and ankles with neckties.

Singapore  - The Singapore economy grew by 1.1 per cent in 2008, compared with 7.8 per cent a year earlier, the Ministry of Trade said Tuesday.

However, the city-state's gross domestic product (GDP) fell by 4.2 per cent on a year-on-year basis in the fourth quarter after posting flat growth in the third quarter.

On an annualized, seasonally adjusted basis, GDP slumped by 16.4 per cent from October to December last year, following a 2.1-per-cent contraction in the previous quarter, the ministry said.

Singapore  - A Singapore court sentenced a former trader of Japanese
company Mitsui Oil to five years in jail on Wednesday for hiding some
81 million US dollars of losses after some of his trading bets went
wrong, media reports said.

Noriyuki Yamazaki, 37, pleaded guilty of falsifying accounts between
April and October 2006. He put in false prices for the petroleum
product naphta, which prevented the head office from finding out the
true scale of his losses.

Yamazaki had believed that the prices would turn and that he would be

Singapore  - Singapore is likely to experience its worst ever recession and may lose 99,000 jobs by mid-2010, a DBS Bank report said Wednesday.

"Policy measures that have been put forth so far will help to cushion the blows but the worst of the labour market cycle is yet to come," the DBS researchers warned.

On account of the sharp collapse in global demand and export sales, Singapore's economy is likely to experience its worst ever growth rate this year with a GDP contraction of 4.8 per cent.