Don't despair if you can't fit in the recommended 30 minutes of daily exercise. Growing evidence suggests that even half that much can help.

It's still no excuse to slack off. Regular exercise strengthens muscles, reduces the risk of some diseases and promotes mental well-being. The more exercise, the better.

Asian stocks put on solid gains on Monday, with Tokyo getting a boost from better-than-expected GDP figures that showed the country is on the road to recovery after its devastating tsunami.

Asia followed a positive end to Wall Street's week with green screens all over the region giving dealers hope after a turbulent few days during which they were battered by Eurozone debt fears and a U.S. credit downgrade.

Taiwan's leading smartphone maker HTC said Thursday it plans to pay about $309 million for a 51 percent stake in a firm run by U.S. star producer Dr Dre that produces high-end headphones.

HTC and Beats Electronics LLC are working together to create a line of HTC headsets offering "high performance sound" to be available this fall, a company statement said.

Twenty inmates pound barrel-sized drums in a Taiwanese prison courtyard until they are so drenched with sweat that colorful tattoos show through their thin cotton T-shirts.

The convicts range in age from 18 to 25 and most of their records include violence or serious drug abuse. They beat out their energetic rhythms under a blazing summer sun during their midday session at the Changhua Prison.

Taiwan animal rights activists and community leaders on Wednesday called for a ban on a popular "holy pig" rite in which pork are force-fed before being sacrificed in public.

In the "holy pig" contest, carried out among the ethnic Hakka community, farmers compete to raise the heaviest pig in the neighborhood, with the "winning" animal killed to please the gods.

Taiwan's main opposition party said Tuesday its headquarters has been the target of a sustained hacking attack from China and one instance of hacking from the government in Taipei.

Deputy Director Alex Huang of the Democratic Progressive Party's Policy Research Committee linked the computer attacks to Taiwan's quadrennial presidential and legislative elections, scheduled for January.

Over 70 organizations including the United Nations and major U.S. defense groups have been targets of a global cyber spying effort, according to security firm McAfee, with analysts pointing to China as the culprit, the Washington Post said Wednesday.

Targets for the intrusions -- identified from logs tracked to a single server -- included computer networks of the United Nations secretariat, a U.S. Energy Department lab, and some dozen U.S. defense firms, said the McAfee report to be released Wednesday, according to the Post.

For Charles Pillitteri, the fight against fraudsters began when he discovered fake bottles of his Canadian ice wine in Taiwan in 1998.

He tried everything to safeguard his product from counterfeiting, from 22-carat gold to invisible ink, only to realise that none would protect the consumer at point of purchase.

Taiwan, which sees itself as a guardian of traditional Chinese culture, has started cleansing government websites of the type of simplified script used in mainland China, officials said Thursday.

The Tourism Bureau, the main agency in charge of thousands of Chinese visitors arriving every day, was the first to remove simple characters, leaving only the more complex traditional version that is standard on the island.

The latest model of Apple's ultra-light MacBook Air is scheduled to hit the market by the end of this month, media in the computer manufacturing hub of Taiwan reported on Tuesday.

The first shipment of the next-generation MacBook Air -- the thinnest line of Apple's notebook computers, holding a hard drive and disc player -- will be 380,000 units, the Taipei-based Economic Daily News said.