British operator Vodafone and French Orange will have their mobile telephony licenses prolonged for a year in Romania for 6.4 million euros each, the government said on Wednesday.

"The government has decided to prolong for a year (until the end of 2012) the license of the mobile operators. Each company will have to pay a tax of 6.4 million euros", the government said in a press release.

The New York Times Co. said Tuesday it has agreed to sell 16 regional U.S. newspapers to a Florida-based company for $143 million in cash.

The papers being sold to Halifax Media Holdings include five Florida-based papers, three California-based papers, three North Carolina-based papers, two Alabama-based papers, two Louisiana-based papers and one in South Carolina.

A former blogger for a U.S. mobile phone news site is being sued by his erstwhile employer over ownership of his Twitter feed in asocial media test case for the Internet age.

Noah Kravitz, of Oakland, California, worked as a product reviewer and video blogger for South Carolina-based PhoneDog from 2006 to 2010, according to the lawsuit filed in the US District Court for Northern California.

Italy's anti-trust authority said Tuesday it was imposing a 900,000-euro ($1.2-million) fine on U.S. tech giant Apple for misleading consumers on assistance services and guarantees for its products.

"Sanctions of a total of 900,000 euros have been imposed on the Apple group after it was found responsible for bad commercial practices that harmed consumers," the agency said in a statement.

Serbia's staunchly traditional Orthodox Church Tuesday announced the launch of a free mobile app allowing the faithful to access prayer books on their phones.

IPhone and Android phone users will be able to download them from the website www.spc.rs. The program was developed with Russian programmers and Russian religious website www.pravoslavie.ru, it added.

A growing number of shoppers in the U.S. apparently need only the briefest of breaks before diving back in, especially if they can log in to shop.

IBM found that online shopping jumped 16.4 percent on Christmas Day over last year, and the dollar amount of those purchases that were made using mobile devices leaped 172.9 percent.

Doctors in a domed laboratory in Canada are designing a virtual world where they hope to one day treat traumatized children with colorful avatars using toy-like medical gadgets.

Sensory stimulation could be used to make a burn victim feel she is encased in a block of ice. Three-dimensional images of a child's bedroom at home could make him forget he is in a hospital.

Shanghai will require microblog users to register under their real names from Monday, state media said, the latest local government in China to implement the rule after a spate of violent protests.

Beijing and the southern province of Guangdong have also ordered users of weibos -- microblogs similar to Twitter -- to register using their real names, as authorities tighten their grip on the Internet.

Japan's Sony and South Korean rival Samsung are dissolving their joint venture in liquid crystal display panels.

Sony Corp. said Monday that Samsung Electronics Co. will buy all of Sony's shares in the joint venture.

The loose-knit hacking movement "Anonymous" claimed to have stolen thousands of credit card numbers and other personal information belonging to clients of U.S.-based security think tank Stratfor. One hacker said the goal was to pilfer funds from individuals' accounts to give away as Christmas donations, and some victims confirmed unauthorized transactions linked to their credit cards.

Anonymous boasted of stealing Stratfor's confidential client list, which includes entities ranging from Apple Inc. to the U.S. Air Force to the Miami Police Department, and mining it for more than 4,000 credit card numbers, passwords and home addresses.