Hong Kong  - China Tuesday defended the right of Robert Mugabe to own a Hong Kong home after the Zimbabwean leader reportedly paid 5 million US dollars for a villa in the former British colony.

"Hong Kong is a free port, and even Falun Gong practitioners can buy a property there, am I right?" a Foreign Ministry spokesman in Beijing told Tuesday's South China Morning Post.

Hong Kong - A video of a middle-aged passenger throwing herself to the floor in a hysterical fit when she misses her flight has been watched by nearly 500,000 people Monday after being posted online.

The three-minute video - which appears to have been surreptitiously shot with a mobile phone by a member of the airline ground staff
- became an internet sensation after being posted on the video-sharing website You Tube last week.

It shows a Chinese woman going ballistic after arriving at her departure gate at Hong Kong International Airport for a Cathay Pacific flight to San Francisco only to find the plane is about to leave and her baggage has been offloaded.

Taipei - Hong Kong and Macau, which have served as the transit points for China-bound Taiwan passengers for six decades, will lose that role when Taiwan launches regular air links with China in June, a Taiwan newspaper reported Monday.

Taiwan and China are expected to discuss regular flights in March and implement them in June, according to the Economic Daily News.

Hong Kong - More than 10,000 Indonesian women working as live-in maids in Hong Kong are being illegally underpaid, with some receiving just half the legal salary, according to a survey Monday.

The survey of foreign domestic helpers found that 12 per cent of Indonesian maids in the city of 6.9 million are paid less than the government-set minimum wage of 460 US dollars a month.

London/HongKong  - Zimbabwean president Robert Mugabe has spent more than 5 million US dollars on a luxury Hong Kong hideaway, a news report said Sunday.

The three-storey home at the JC Castle development in Hong Kong's Tai Po district was bought in June last year by a middle-man acting on behalf of Mugabe and his wife, the Sunday Times in London reported.

The newspaper speculated that the property may have been bought as a Far East "bolt-hole" for the dictator whose 30-year stranglehold power appears to be finally ending as his country sinks into economic and political chaos.

Hong Kong  - A Zimbabwean students' union was Sunday calling for Hong Kong to deport the daughter of President Robert Mugabe, who is studying at the city's top university.

The Zimbabwe National Students Union petitioned Chinese diplomats in Africa after learning that 20-year-old Bona Mugabe is an undergraduate student at the University of Hong Kong.

Students in the impoverished African nation, which is in the grip of a spiralling economic crisis and political turmoil, say Mugabe's daughter should be made to study back home.