Hong Kong  - Two men were questioned Friday by police in Hong Kong in connection with a plot to rig big money races by shooting poison darts at horses.

The men were arrested Thursday evening after being seen acting suspiciously by security guards on a public jogging track that goes around the Happy Valley racecourse.

Hong Kong  - Around 66,000 people fell out of the Hong-Kong- dollar millionaire bracket in 2008 as shares prices plunged because of the global economic meltdown, according to a survey published Friday.

The number of people in the affluent former British colony with 1 million Hong Kong dollars (129,000 US dollars) in liquid assets fell from 414,000 in 2007 to 348,000 in 2008, the survey found.

Hong Kong - Hong Kong's leading English-language newspaper was protesting Thursday to officials in neighbouring Macau after one of its photographers was refused entry to the territory.

Felix Wong of the South China Morning Post was detained and then sent back on a ferry to Hong Kong when he attempted to travel to Macau to cover a corruption case involving a former transport secretary.

Wong had been given a Macau government permit to cover the trial but claims he was sent back to Hong Kong after being made to sign papers saying he had been denied entry under internal security laws.

Hong Kong  - A Hong Kong chef on Thursday began a 20-month jail sentence for attacking a woman diner with a meat cleaver after she complained about his food.

Cheng Chi-wai, 50, hit the 47-year-old woman on the head with the cleaver after she grumbled about the meal she was served in the seafood restaurant in the city's Wan Chai district.

He ran into the kitchen and emerged with two meat cleavers after she remarked on the poor quality of his cooking and hit the woman on the forehead with the blunt side of one of the cleavers.

Hong Kong  - Police seized a shipment of cocaine valued at 1.3 million US dollars smuggled from South America in cocoa boxes, officers said Wednesday.

Agents arrested six men and seized 12 kilograms of cocaine in the raid Tuesday which followed a two-month surveillance operation against an international drug trafficking syndicate.

Police and customs officers kept tabs on a consignment of cocaine flown to Hong Kong from Ecuador via Panama and Amsterdam and hidden inside 20 boxes of coca powder.

Hong Kong  - Hong Kong police on Wednesday were investigating a school brawl involving 50 students after a video of the melee was uploaded onto the YouTube website.

Tens of thousands of people have viewed the 2.5-minute clip, which shows two groups of teenage students attacking each other on the grounds of a housing estate in the city.

The video appears to have been filmed from the window of a high- rise apartment block overlooking the scene of the brawl, which took place Monday in the inner-city Ho Man Tin district.