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.

Hong Kong  - An Indonesian maid was in a Hong Kong jail Thursday awaiting trial for mixing her menstrual blood in a pot of vegetables she was cooking for her employer.

Indra Ningsih, 26, allegedly told police afterwards she mixed the blood into the meal in a superstitious effort to make her Chinese employer "more amiable and less picky" towards her.

Hong Kong  - Pilots and flight attendants with leading Hong Kong airline Cathay Pacific said Thursday they would fight anticipated "illegal" moves to make them take unpaid leave.

The airline, which with its subsidiaries has more than 2,000 employees, is reported to prepare a mandatory unpaid leave scheme after recording its first losses in 10 years.