HONG KONG - A BRITISH photographer said on Sunday that the wife of Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe punched him repeatedly in the face after he tried to take pictures of her near a luxury hotel in Hong Kong.

Mr Richard Jones told The Associated Press that Mrs Grace Mugabe, 43, ordered a bodyguard to hold him down and then attacked him herself on Thursday near the Shangri-La hotel on Hong Kong's Kowloon peninsula.

ONE of the country's sacred cows could be slaughtered during the Budget this Thursday, as the Government mulls over a move to dip into Singapore's rainy-day savings: the national reserves.

The leaders are now considering the unprecedented step of drawing from the reserves to fund the aggressive pain-relief measures needed in this downturn, Senior Minister Goh Chok Tong disclosed on Sunday.

GAZA CITY - PALESTINIAN militants announced a one-week ceasefire on Sunday after Israel called a unilateral halt to its massive offensive on Gaza, as medics pulled dozens of bodies from the rubble of bombed-out homes.

After exchanges of gunfire and an air strike punctured what Israel's Prime Minister Ehud Olmert acknowledged was a 'fragile' ceasefire, Gaza's Islamist rulers Hamas and other armed groups said they would silence their guns for the next seven days to give Israeli troops a chance to withdraw from the territory.

A FORMER employee of the Cortina watch outlet that was cleaned out of $7.9 million in timepieces and cash on Christmas Day is now a wanted man internationally.

Mr Jerry Ee - who has been missing since the theft was discovered and got the sack from the company - has been listed under Interpol's wanted list for theft.