Hong Kong shares slumped more than 2 percent to a new low for 2013 on Friday as investors fretted over bird flu in China, with Chinese airline stocks tumbling by as much as 12 percent.

Hong Kong's top court Monday rejected a bid to give hundreds of thousands of foreign maids the right to live in the city permanently, angering activists who said the ruling amounted to discrimination.

China Unicom Ltd., the country's second biggest mobile phone company by subscribers, said Thursday that 2012 profit jumped by more than two-thirds as revenue from third-generation mobile services surged despite stiff competition.

The severed heads of a Hong Kong couple were found in a refrigerator at a bloodstained apartment in a gruesome murder for which their 29-year-old son has been arrested, according to reports.

A Hong Kong public housing tenant was jailed for 10 years on Tuesday for laundering more than HK$6.8 billion (US$877 million) through nine banks, just two months after a Chinese man was imprisoned in the Asian financial center's biggest such case.

Hong Kong journalists have condemned an attack on two cameramen outside the Beijing home of the wife of jailed Nobel laureate Liu Xiaobo, slamming it as a violation of press freedom.

Hong Kong's billionaire Kwok brothers pleaded not guilty to graft charges on Friday, setting the stage for the city's biggest corruption trial in years.

China will retain its crown as the world's fastest growing wine consumption market although the rate is tipped to slow significantly after years of explosive expansion, a new study showed Friday.

A Hong Kong fortune teller who once advised Asia's richest woman but was later embroiled in a high-profile legal battle over her fortune has renounced feng shui for Christianity, a report said Thursday.

Outgoing Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao may have devoted less airtime to Hong Kong when he presented his work report on Tuesday, but the southern city's growing tensions with the mainland have made it a bigger talking point this year.