Hong Kong  - Drunk drivers in Hong Kong are being offered the chance to phone the Automobile Association (AA) and get a tow home for the price of a taxi ride, the rescue service said Wednesday.

The AA has set up a team of vans and drivers to take late-night calls from members, pick them up and then either drive them in their own car or arrange a tow truck to take their car home.

Hong Kong - Hong Kong's unemployment rate has jumped to 4.6 per cent, its highest level in nearly two and a half years, officials said Tuesday.

The jobless rate in the city of 7 million rose from 4.1 per cent in the October-to-December quarter to 4.6 per cent in the quarter from November to January. Figures are announced on a monthly basis.

The rise added another 16,000 people to the jobless total, which now stands at 157,000, the most since September 2006, government figures showed.

Hong Kong  - Hong Kong's Hang Seng Index crashed back through the 13,000 barrier Tuesday as growing gloom over economic prospects forced prices down by almost 4 per cent.

The blue-chip index shed 510.48 points, or 3.79 per cent, to end the day at 12,945.4, the first time it has slipped below 13,000 since early February. Turnover was 41.7 billion Hong Kong dollars (5.3 billion US dollars).

Hong Kong  - Hong Kong's population reached 7 million for the first time after a surge in the city's notoriously low birth rate, officials said Tuesday.

The former British colony's population grew by 0.8 per cent in 2008 to reach 7,009,900 partly due to the highest number of births in 25 years, according to Hong Kong's Census and Statistics Department.

However, only 45,000 of the city's almost 80,000 births in 2008 were to native Hong Kong women, with many of the remainder born to mainland Chinese women who cross the border to give birth.

Hong Kong  - China Tuesday defended the right of Robert Mugabe to own a Hong Kong home after the Zimbabwean leader reportedly paid 5 million US dollars for a villa in the former British colony.

"Hong Kong is a free port, and even Falun Gong practitioners can buy a property there, am I right?" a Foreign Ministry spokesman in Beijing told Tuesday's South China Morning Post.

Hong Kong - A video of a middle-aged passenger throwing herself to the floor in a hysterical fit when she misses her flight has been watched by nearly 500,000 people Monday after being posted online.

The three-minute video - which appears to have been surreptitiously shot with a mobile phone by a member of the airline ground staff
- became an internet sensation after being posted on the video-sharing website You Tube last week.

It shows a Chinese woman going ballistic after arriving at her departure gate at Hong Kong International Airport for a Cathay Pacific flight to San Francisco only to find the plane is about to leave and her baggage has been offloaded.