Hong Kong  - Hong Kong's Financial Secretary Wednesday announced plans to accelerate public works and create 62,000 new jobs over the next three years to tackle the severe economic slump.

In his annual budget speech, John Tsang warned that the former British colony's economy would shrink by between 2 and 3 per cent in 2009, its first contraction since the Asian economic crisis of 1998.

Hong Kong - Hong Kong shares fell almost 3 p

Hong Kong  - A rapist was Tuesday beginning a 10-year jail term in Hong Kong after being traced by his DNA nearly a decade after attacking a 13-year-old schoolgirl.

Truck driver Chung Chi-wing, 30, posed as a policeman to lure his young victim to a parked van and violently rape her as she walked home from school on an afternoon in November 1999.

He was only identified as the attacker when a police officer found a match between DNA in the semen found in the victim and a DNA sample taken from Chung when he was arrested for car theft in 2001.

Hong Kong - Top Hong Kong singer and actress Karen Mok was making plans Monday to fly to Canada to visit colonies of young seals, days before an annual hunt in which 300,000 will be slaughtered.

The trip is being organized by the Hong Kong Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (SPCA) as part of a campaign lobbying for a ban on the trade of seal products in Hong Kong and China.

Mok, 38, will be accompanied on her March visit by a film crew to shoot a mini-documentary of her trip, which the SPCA plans to use in the campaign.

Hong Kong - A lorry driver involved in a crash that killed six men in Hong Kong was nearly seven times over the legal drink-drive limit, a court was told Monday.

Law Siu-kuen, 41, was driving a container truck that collided with a taxi carrying five construction workers the day before the start of the Chinese New Year holiday last month in an accident that shocked Hong Kong.

He was allegedly driving on the wrong side of the road when his lorry slammed into the taxi, dragging it for 50 metres and killing the 54-year-old driver and the five passengers, ages 30 to 47.