Hong Kong - Hong Kong shares surged by more than 5 per cent Wednesday as confidence in stimulus and bailout packages announced in China and the US pushed prices up.

Beijing - International negotiators on Wednesday tried to reach a compromise on verifying the dismantlement of North Korea's nuclear weapons programme, as the latest round of negotiations entered its third day.

The talks in Beijing, attended by negotiators from the United States, China, Japan, Russia, North and South Korea, centered on a draft verification protocol proposed by the Chinese hosts.

Delegates from China, the US and North Korea held bilateral meetings in the morning to clarify their positions and remove any potentially ambiguous passages from the text.

Beijing - Hit by the global financial crisis, China's government has asked its aviation industry to suspend buying new planes or delay the delivery of already ordered planes, aviation authorities said Wednesday.

The Chinese Aviation Administration of China (CAAC) "encouraged" airlines to cancel or defer taking delivery of new planes next year.

Leasing contracts with foreign companies will not be renewed either, owing to the crisis and falling passenger numbers, the CAAC said.

Hong Kong - The spectre of workers in protective suits slaughtering chickens by the tens of thousands returned to haunt Hong Kong Wednesday as a worrying new outbreak of bird flu was confronted.

More than 60,000 birds were culled at the farm where the city's first outbreak in six years was detected and thousands more were killed at a nearby farm and a wholesale market.

Beijing  - Liu Xiaobo, a prominent Chinese human rights activist, has been detained by police, Deutsche Presse-Agentur dpa was told Wednesday by a lawyer supporting Liu.

The writer and chairman of China's Pen Club signed an appeal for more democracy and freedom in China together with about 300 other intellectuals and activists on the occasion of the 60th anniversary of the declaration of universal human rights.

The circumstances of Liu's arrest, with his apartment searched and his computer seized, indicate that the former philosophy professor at Beijing University faces prosecution, sources close to Liu said.

Beijing, Dec. 10: There were red faces on the editorial board of one of Germany''s top scientific institutions, the Max Planck Institute, when it ended up with a racy flyer extolling the lusty details of stripping housewives in a brothel.

The respected research institute, according to a report in The Independent, wanted Chinese classical texts to adorn its journal, something beautiful and elegant, to illustrate a special report on China. Instead, it got the text of a handbill for a Macau strip club on the front page of its latest journal.