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.

Residents of China's “richest village” bid farewell Friday to the man who made Huaxi (華西) a socialist paradise, with a 20-vehicle funeral procession transporting his coffin and a helicopter flying overhead.

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.

The number of dead pigs found in Shanghai's main river has doubled in two days to nearly 6,000, the government said, as residents worried over the water supply questioned the handling of the incident.

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.

A surge in the dumping of dead pigs upstream from Shanghai — with more than 2,800 carcasses floating into the financial hub through Monday — has followed a police campaign to curb the illicit trade in sick-pig parts.

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.