Online video clip of gang rape prompts investigation

Three teenagers remained in police custody last night following their afternoon arrests for suspected involvement in a gang-rape investigation that was caught on a handheld camera and posted on the Internet earlier this week.

According to those who saw the online video clip, the victim and the three teenage males all wore uniforms of Yoshinoya, a Japanese fast-food restaurant chain, and their faces were clearly recognizable. Police launched a manhunt yesterday morning and managed to catch the three in Sha Tin and Tai Po in the New Territories.

Yoshinoya Fast Food (HK) Ltd said last night it had formed a special task force to cooperate with the police and will follow the case closely.

Hidden chickens at shop lead to first ban arrest

The Food & Environmental Hygiene Department (FEHD) has prosecuted a fresh provision shop licensee for breaching the ban on keeping live poultry at retail outlets overnight.

FEHD officials found four live chickens covered by two bamboo baskets inside a fresh provision shop in a market on Reclamation Street in Kowloon Sep 5.

To protect public health and reduce the risk of avian influenza, the government implemented the overnight live-chicken ban two months ago after some live poultry tested positive for the deadly H5N1 bird flu virus at a few local markets.

The ban bans fresh provision shop proprietors from keeping live poultry on their premises after 8pm daily.

The arrest yesterday was the first since ban started.

Changes may be made to exit polling in future

Chung Ting-yiu, director of the Public Opinion Programme at the University of Hong Kong (HKU), said yesterday that the city should discuss the future development of exit polls during elections, and his research body will consider whether it should conduct such polls in the next Legislative Council (LegCo) election.

Chung told reporters after a radio talk show that the voter response rate in exit polls has been declining over the years and, before the latest LegCo election on Sept 7, some parties asked voters not to answer questions by pollsters or suggested they even lie about how they voted.

Some polling agencies are not professionally qualified, he added, and there should be official guidelines for conducting exit polls to ensure data accuracy.

Stinky soup leads to Campbell's recall in HK

The Centre for Food Safety is advising people not to consume two types of canned soup that may have an odd smell. The affected products are Campbell's condensed cream of mushroom soup (405g/14.3oz) and the condensed creamy chicken mushroom soup (410g/14.5oz).

Campbell Soup Asia said last night it has recalled 14,000 cases of the canned soup in question, but had not yet found what is causing the bad smell, adding that it hadn't received any customer complaints about sickness after consuming either variety of the soup.

The two leading supermarket chains in Hong Kong, Park-n-Shop and Wellcome, said they had removed all the canned soup in question from their store shelves.

China Daily

(HK Edition 09/12/2008 page1)