AP – The Australian Senate on Friday approved legislation that enables the government to roll out a 36 billion Australian dollar ($35 billion) high-speed national broadband network.
AFP – A group of “crush fetishists” has caused an online storm in China after uploading graphic videos showing attractive young Chinese women crushing small rabbits.
Reuters – Sony Corp will re-enter Japan’s electronic book market and open an online bookstore offering 20,000 titles, almost all in Japanese, in time for the year-end shopping rush, it said on Thursday.
AP – YouTube and top associations of French authors, filmmakers and other creative artists say they have struck an agreement to put more TV shows and movies online in France.
Reuters – Investment firm Oakley Capital has bought a 50 percent stake in magazine and travel guide publisher Time Out, attracted by the potential to exploit its strong brand online.
Mashable – Dr. Nathan Bonilla-Warford, OD, is a licensed VSP Vision Care provider based in Tampa, Florida specializing in children’s vision, computer vision, and orthokeratology. You can visit his blog here and follow him on Twitter here.
Mashable – The fact that people who make more money spend more time on computers and connected devices doesn’t come as a major surprise. Yet it’s still impressive that a full 95% of people with an income of $75,000 or more use cellphones and the Internet, according to a recent study from Pew’s Internet & American Life Project.
PC World – The U.K.’s National Health Service plans to make clearer the privacy policy of its Choices health information Web site, which shares browsing information with Facebook, following complaints from a security expert and a lawmaker, an NHS spokesman said Thursday.
Mashable – When University of the People founder Shai Reshef welcomed 16 Haitian students to their first day of class last Thursday, he told them that life might prevent some of them — as it does students in every part of the world — from completing their degrees at the free, online university.
PC World – European countries are outstripping the U.S. in terms of broadband take-up, but their broadband connections don’t match the speeds of those in Asian countries.