Hong Kong - Hong Kong's unemployment rate has risen to a three-year high of 5.2 per cent as the economic slump takes its toll, according to government figures Monday.

The figure for the quarter running from January to March is 0.2 percentage points higher than the figure for the previous quarter from December 2008 to February.

Around 5,500 jobs were lost between the two quarters, according to government figures, with the biggest rises in joblessness recorded in the construction, transport, hospitality and financial sectors.

Hong Kong - Sixty companies in energy-hungry Hong Kong have signed up for a programme to promote low-carbon lifestyles, a environmental conference heard Monday.

The government-backed campaign run by environment activists the Climate Group aims to find ways to lower high-rise Hong Kong's carbon footprint, which is reckoned to be one of the world's biggest.

Speaking at the launch of the one-year campaign Monday, environment secretary Edward Yau appealed to businesses and individuals to help make it a success.

Hong Kong - The waiter serves up a generous helping of hyperbole with his sales patter as he points to a giant garoupa gawping out of the glass of a neon-lit fish tank on the pavement outside a seafront restaurant in Hong Kong.

"This is a very special fish - it is more than 100 years old," he says, gesturing to the fish struggling to turn its metre-long body in the confines of the tank.

"If you want to eat it, it will cost you around HK$500,000 (64,500 US dollars). You will need a very big party."

Hong Kong - Hong Kong's leading airlines Cathay Pacific and Dragonair Friday invited nearly 20,000 employees to take between one and four weeks of unpaid leave as part of a raft of cost-cutting measures.

The sister airlines also announced that they would cut flight schedules, axing some Dragonair flights to mainland China and cutting Cathay Pacific's London flight schedule by 17 a month upwards.

The cost-cutting moves came as the airlines announced that first quarter revenue on Cathay Pacific and Dragonair for passenger and cargo services fell 22.4 per cent from 2008.

Hong Kong - The new leader of the Catholic Church in Hong Kong said Thursday that he believed China should reverse its verdict on the students killed in the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre.

Bishop John Tong, who took up his duties in the former British colony Thursday, said China was wrong to brand the 1989 Beijing student movement a counterrevolutionary rebellion.