Hong Kong  - Hong Kong's Hang Seng Index began the Chinese Year of the Ox in bullish fashion Thursday with a 4.6-per-cent jump.

The blue-chip index shot up by more than 7 per cent at the opening of the first day of trading after the holiday before it fell back. It closed back above 13,000 at 13,154.43.

Turnover was a relatively low 39.1 billion Hong Kong dollars (5.04 billion US dollars.)

Hong Kong  - Less than one in 10 Hong Kong workers expects a pay rise in 2009 as the global economic slump takes its toll on the former British colony, a survey found Thursday.

Only 7 per cent of workers surveyed said they expected to get a raise compared to 36 per cent in the same survey in 2008 when the city's economy was buoyant.

Twenty-eight per cent of respondents to the survey conducted by a pro-democracy organization said they expected to see their pay cut in 2009, compared to just 5 per cent in 2008.

Hong Kong - A baby seal lies helpless on the ice. Towering above it, a man wields a club, poised to land the blow that will smash the seal's skull.

Moments later, the seal is dead, its body dumped on a mound of freshly-skinned carcasses. Its skin is thrown on a pile of bloody furs to be shipped back 270 kilometres to the Canadian east coast to be sold for around 42 US dollars each.

Hong Kong  - Hong Kong people were gloomy Wednesday about the city's economic prospects for the Year of the Ox after Chinese New Year festivities were overshadowed by bad omens.

As celebrations to mark the New Year took place across the city of 6.9 million, which slipped into recession at the end of 2008, headlines were grabbed by two seemingly ominous events.

Hong Kong - Scores of pro-democracy legislators and activists in Hong Kong Tuesday marched to demand universal suffrage in the former British colony by 2012.

The demonstrators marched from the city's Legislative Council building to Government House, calling for democracy and criticizing the territory's chief executive Donald Tsang.

Beijing-appointed Tsang earlier this month put off a planned public consultation on political reform in the city of 6.9 million, saying the government needed to focus on the economic crisis.

Islamabad, Jan. 26 : The Hong Kong-based Asian Human Rights Commission (AHRC) has come out with a shocking tale of the brutal rape of a Baloch woman at the hands of military authorities.

According to the Daily Times, journalist and TV producer Munir Mengal, encountered the hapless woman at a detention centre in Karachi, where she was stripped naked and hurled into his cell.

He claims that he was tortured when he refused to rape the woman, a fate she had already suffered multiple times at the hands of her captors.

The case has not figured prominently in the local media. There has not been any official opinion either on what happened and why.