Washington  - US Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton will travel to China, Japan and other Asian countries this month in her first trip abroad since becoming the nation's top diplomat.

Clinton will stop in Japan, Indonesia, South Korea and China during the February 16-22 trip for talks on bilateral relations, regional issues and the nuclear disarmament negotiations with North Korea.

Clinton will also discuss the global economic turmoil, humanitarian issues, security and climate change, State Department deputy spokesman Robert Wood said.

Melbourne, Feb 4 : A Kiwi businesswoman is trying to spice up the romance of Valentine''s Day by offering chocolates fortified with Tongkat Ali - a potent herb from South-East Asia which is claimed to stimulate testosterone production in men.

Last year, Hanna Frederick, a former food scientist, made headlines by feeding beer-flavoured chocolate to brewers and deer antler chocolate to meat industry heads at business conventions.

Now, the Auckland lady is hoping to capitalise on the commercial day of romance with the "aphrodisiac" chocolates, reports the CourierMail.

New Delhi, Feb 2: A team of astronomers from East Asia is building the world's largest radio telescope network, which will look deep into the galaxies and black holes more accurately and determine the orbits of lunar probes.

The array, called the East Asia Very Long Baseline Interferometry (VLBI) consortium, consists of 19 radio telescopes from China, Japan and the Republic of Korea (ROK) that cover an area with a diameter of 6,000 kilometers from northern Japan's Hokkaido to western China's Kunming and Urumqi.

Hong Kong - The Year of the Rat was not a good one for the world of finance and banking. Stock markets plummeted, property prices dived and businesses all over the world crumbled in the fall-out from the credit crunch.

This was to be expected, according to Chinese astrologer Raymond Lo, who points to the fact that the influencing element of the rat is water. And as every good Chinese astrologer knows water brings worries and provokes fears.

Manila - The International Rice Research Institute (IRRI) said Wednesday it has received an 11-million-dollar grant to fund an ambitious project to develop a higher-yielding rice variety that could boost production by up to 50 per cent.

The Philippines-based IRRI said the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation will provide the grant over a three-year period to fund the C4 Rice Consortium.

Singapore  - Asian's economy might recover from the recession as early as the second quarter of this year, supported by the governments' policy responses to the downturn and the sharp drop in commodity prices, a news report said on Wednesday.

"The cavalry is on its way in the form of one of the most significant policy responses ever," the Straits Times quoted HSBC senior Asian economist Robert Prior-Wandesforde as saying.