New York - Ailing US automotive giant General Motors denied reports Thursday that it was holding merger talks with its likewise stricken competitor, Chrysler.

A GM spokesman at company headquarters in Detroit, Michigan said there were clearly no talks about a merger going on.

The comment came to reports in the business daily Wall Street Journal - citing industry insiders - that the two automotive groups had resumed merger talks which had been broken off a few weeks earlier.

Berlin - Germany's lower house of parliament Thursday approved a revised version of a bill on police powers that was rejected by the upper house last month.

The bill authorizes police to use computer viruses to hunt terrorists.

Deputies from Chancellor Angela Merkel's grand coalition of conservatives and Social Democrats backed the new version a day after it was agreed on by a committee of both chambers of parliament.

The bill reforms the federal police and includes powers to break into personal computers during preventive inquiries into terrorism and other serious crime.

Hong Kong - Hong Kong's unemployment rate has risen to 3.8 per cent - the highest level in more than a year - as the global economic slump takes its toll, the government announced Thursday.

There are now 136,000 people out of work in the wealthy city of 6.9 million which has a workforce of more than three million, according to figures released for the period from September to November.

The jobless figure was 0.3 per cent higher than in the time from August to October.

Budapest - Hungarian police said Thursday that French authorities have sent two officers and equipment to help search for a 22-year-old French student who disappeared two weeks ago after leaving a city centre bar to walk home alone in the early hours.

Hungarian police assigned a seven-strong team of detectives to interview over 100 possible witnesses and review footage from surveillance cameras to reconstruct Ophelie Bretnacher's last known movements.

However, they have found no trace of the young French woman, who came to Hungary in September as an exchange student.

Barcelona - Hundreds of Spanish students Thursday disrupted traffic, causing traffic jams in the Barcelona region in protests at the temporary expulsion of six students.

The six had been accused of staging violent incidents against the so-called Bologna university reform.

A protest movement against the reform based on a 1999 declaration and signed by 46 European countries has spread through some half a dozen Spanish universities.

Warsaw - A Polish bus company is telling the city of Gdansk to pay up after citing 10,000 zloty (3,520 dollars) in losses resulting from traffic jams delaying the company's operations, the daily Wyborcza reported on Thursday.

Buses were stuck in traffic for up to an hour and a half during road renovations, Planetobus owner Jakub Sachse told the daily, and work was delayed for two months.

"I want to make officials realize that there are also social costs," Sachse said. "I hope that with upcoming large-scale renovations, one of the criteria for picking a bid won't be the lowest price but also quick completion time."