Hong Kong  - Police seized a shipment of cocaine valued at 1.3 million US dollars smuggled from South America in cocoa boxes, officers said Wednesday.

Agents arrested six men and seized 12 kilograms of cocaine in the raid Tuesday which followed a two-month surveillance operation against an international drug trafficking syndicate.

Police and customs officers kept tabs on a consignment of cocaine flown to Hong Kong from Ecuador via Panama and Amsterdam and hidden inside 20 boxes of coca powder.

Hong Kong  - Hong Kong police on Wednesday were investigating a school brawl involving 50 students after a video of the melee was uploaded onto the YouTube website.

Tens of thousands of people have viewed the 2.5-minute clip, which shows two groups of teenage students attacking each other on the grounds of a housing estate in the city.

The video appears to have been filmed from the window of a high- rise apartment block overlooking the scene of the brawl, which took place Monday in the inner-city Ho Man Tin district.

Hong Kong  - Drunk drivers in Hong Kong are being offered the chance to phone the Automobile Association (AA) and get a tow home for the price of a taxi ride, the rescue service said Wednesday.

The AA has set up a team of vans and drivers to take late-night calls from members, pick them up and then either drive them in their own car or arrange a tow truck to take their car home.

Hong Kong - Hong Kong's unemployment rate has jumped to 4.6 per cent, its highest level in nearly two and a half years, officials said Tuesday.

The jobless rate in the city of 7 million rose from 4.1 per cent in the October-to-December quarter to 4.6 per cent in the quarter from November to January. Figures are announced on a monthly basis.

The rise added another 16,000 people to the jobless total, which now stands at 157,000, the most since September 2006, government figures showed.

Hong Kong  - Hong Kong's Hang Seng Index crashed back through the 13,000 barrier Tuesday as growing gloom over economic prospects forced prices down by almost 4 per cent.

The blue-chip index shed 510.48 points, or 3.79 per cent, to end the day at 12,945.4, the first time it has slipped below 13,000 since early February. Turnover was 41.7 billion Hong Kong dollars (5.3 billion US dollars).

Hong Kong  - Hong Kong's population reached 7 million for the first time after a surge in the city's notoriously low birth rate, officials said Tuesday.

The former British colony's population grew by 0.8 per cent in 2008 to reach 7,009,900 partly due to the highest number of births in 25 years, according to Hong Kong's Census and Statistics Department.

However, only 45,000 of the city's almost 80,000 births in 2008 were to native Hong Kong women, with many of the remainder born to mainland Chinese women who cross the border to give birth.