society

Escaping Hong Kong’s noisy, crowded streets doesn’t require a long trek off the beaten path. Sometimes the most laid-back neighborhoods are just a short hop from the MTR. Here are five seriously relaxed parts of town less than 10 minutes walk from the MTR.

Anticipating the elimination of the military ban on homosexuality, the Office of the Chief of Navy Chaplains has decided that same-sex couples in the Navy will be able to get married in Navy chapels, and that Navy chaplains will be allowed to perform the ceremonies -- if homosexual marriage is legal in the state where the unions are to be performed.

The Hong Kong government has been told to hammer out a timetable for new air quality rules amid increasingly vocal criticism of pollution in the global financial hub, a green group said Sunday.

A 7-year-old Wichita, Kan., boy on a zoo outing was mauled on the head and neck by a leopard after the first-grader climbed a railing separating the cage from the public, according to local news reports. The boy was hospitalized in fair condition.

A toothless garbageman who once wandered Hong Kong’s streets with dingy bags of ink and brushes tied to his crutches is now the subject of a major retrospective. About 300 calligraphic works by the late Tsang Tsou-choi — who is best known by his self-dubbed title, the King of Kowloon — are showing at the ArtisTree art space in a high glass tower.