Los Angeles  - A law firm has released details of what was supposed to be a confidential 65-million-dollar payoff by Facebook to plaintiffs who claimed the social networking site was based on their ideas.

The payment was made by Facebook last year to smaller rival ConnectU, which had accused Facebook Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg, a fellow Harvard University graduate, of stealing their ideas to create his site. The ConnectU founders claimed to have hired Zuckerberg while all were students at Harvard University to create a college dating site.

Dhaka - African countries, comprising the second largest region in global cotton trade, aim to grab larger share of Bangladesh's 1-billion-dollar cotton market, a media report said Friday.

Accounting for roughly 20 per cent of the global cotton trade worth 12 billion dollars, the African cotton growers with a 10 per cent market share in Bangladesh, now want to export directly to the South Asian country instead relying on mostly Swiss and French cotton merchants.

Lusaka  - Zambia has selected a Singapore-based company, Nava Bharat (Singapore), from ten firms vying for a stake in the country's biggest coal mine, it was announced Wednesday.

The semi-state owned Zambia Consolidated Copper Mines-Investment Holdings (ZCCM-IH) - which owns the Maamba mine - said Nava Bharat, a wholly-owned subsidiary of India-based Nava Bharat Ventures, had been chosen from a total of ten local and foreign firms as its strategic equity and technical partner.

India's Vedanta Resources PLC and London-based energy company Aldwych International were among the unsuccessful bidders.

ZCCM-IH did not stipulate how big Nava Bharat's stake in the mine would be, nor put a value on it.

Tokyo - Fuji Heavy Industries Ltd incurred a net loss of 19.2 billion yen (214.7 million dollars) in the October-December quarter because of a strong yen and slow sales amid the global economic downturn, the company said Wednesday.

The conglomerate - which manufactures Subaru cars as well as trains, industrial products and aerospace technology - reported 10 billion yen in profit during the same quarter a year before.

Hong Kong - Hong Kong's struggling Disneyland theme park confirmed Wednesday that it is pushing up its weekday admission prices by almost 20 per cent despite the economic slowdown.

Weekday admission to the park is to rise beginning Monday from 295 to 350 Hong Kong dollars (38 to 45 US dollars) for adults and from 210 to 250 Hong Kong dollars for children.

The higher prices previously only applied to visitors who went to the 3-and-a-half-year-old, 3.5-billion-US-dollar theme park on weekends and public holidays.

Tokyo - Hitachi Ltd on Tuesday said its net loss expanded in the third quarter and it also reiterated it would incur its worst annual loss for fiscal 2008 that ends in March.

The weak performance was attributed to sales declines in semiconductors, automotive devices, industrial machinery among other products as well as the yen's surge against other currencies.