Hong Kong - Hong Kong shares plunged more than 7 per cent Thursday as delight over the US presidential election result turned to gloom over signs of a deepening global recession.

The blue-chip Hang Seng Index lost 1,050.12 points, or 7.08 per cent, to close at 13,790.04. Turnover was 48.25 billion Hong Kong dollars (6.22 billion US dollars).

The losses came 24 hours after the index surged by more than 3 per cent Wednesday afternoon on news of Barack Obama's win.

Apple’s retail operation increased two-fold during the existing year (2008).

According to Apple’s recent 10-k annual filing released Wednesday, the company presently has 32,000 people on a full-time basis. The figure was up from 21,600 as compared to the corresponding period of last year.

The report also said that around 16,000 of those people work in company’s retail group, which currently has 247 stores.

Apple, in last year's annual report, announced that it had around 8,000 people working in the retail unit, which comprised 197 stores.

Pfizer Inc., the world's largest

Manila - Philippine troops have arrested a suspected Islamic militant commander accused of being involved in the kidnapping of 21 Western tourists and Asian workers from a Malaysian resort island in 2001, a military official said Thursday.

The suspect, Sakirin Andalan Sali, 44, was arrested Wednesday on Jolo island, 1,000 kilometres south of Manila, a stronghold of the Muslim Abu Sayyaf rebel group, said Major General Juancho Sabban, commander of an anti-terrorism task force on Jolo.

Washington, Nov 6: A new research has indicated that the search for dark matter, a mysterious substance that makes up most of the Universe, could soon be at an end, thanks to a giant computer simulation.

Dark matter is believed to account for 85 per cent of the Universe’s mass, but has remained invisible to telescopes since scientists inferred its existence from its gravitational effects more than 75 years ago.

Now, the international Virgo Consortium, a team of scientists including cosmologists at Durham University, has used a massive computer simulation showing the evolution of a galaxy like the Milky Way to “see” gamma-rays given off by dark matter.

Pretoria - An auction of 51 tonnes of ivory in South Africa was brought to a halt before bidding even started Thursday by Asian buyers, who demanded the media be excluded from the sale.

Around two dozen Chinese and Japanese buyers threatened to boycott the one-off sale unless journalists were barred from the conference centre of the Reserve Bank in Pretoria, where the auction opened shortly after 10 a. m. (0800 GMT).

Lot number one had just appeared on a big screen when the buyers, informed the organizers that they wished to keep their identities confidential and that no bid would be submitted unless the journalists were removed. The media was also excluded from the Namibia sale.