PHNOM PENH - JAPAN has donated US$4.17 million (S$6.25 million) to the UN-backed genocide tribunal trying former Khmer Rouge leaders on war crimes charges, just as the troubled court was running out of funding, a court official said on Friday.

The money will be used to offset a salary shortfall for 251 court staffers until at least the end of the year, tribunal spokesman Reach Sambath said. The court has been troubled by political wrangling and allegations that some Cambodian officials were demanding kickbacks from people trying to secure jobs with it.

KUALA LUMPUR - MALAYSIA needs to enact a law to ban forced conversions, a controversial issue in this mainly Muslim country, rather than just relying on rulings from ministers, according to lawyers for a women fighting custody.

An ethnic Indian Malaysian woman, Indira Gandhi, whose estranged husband embraced Islam and converted their children to the religion, is fighting to get them back.

PHNOM PENH - A FORMER Khmer Rouge prison chief on Thursday said regime leader Pol Pot was worse than China's 'Gang of Four' as he admitted further 'cowardly' deeds at Cambodia's UN-backed war crimes court.

Duch - real name Kaing Guek Eav - is on trial for overseeing the torture and extermination of 15,000 people who passed through the regime's Tuol Sleng prison, also known as S-21. He told the tribunal on Thursday that the regime's hardline communist theory was worse than China's cultural revolution, led by the so-called 'Gang of Four' who orchestrated extremist social reforms over ten years up to 1976.