Google has announced that China has renewed its ICP licence to operate in the country, after announcing a week ago that it plans to end the automatic redirect to Google.com.hk, its Hong Kong-localised version of Google, with a landing page.

The move to stop the redirect was due to the objection by the Chinese government in March.

Without an ICP licence, Google is not allowed to operate in the country as it is deemed as a commercial website. Other content providers, like CBS Interactive – which has a large presence in China – and Yahoo also operate with an ICP licence.

“We are very pleased that the government has renewed our ICP licence and we look forward to continuing to provide web search and local products to our users in China,” Google said in a brief statement in an update to a blog post about an update with its Chinese conundrum.

The rift between Google and the Chinese Government started in January after Google revealed that it was attacked and traced the source back to China, and in retaliation decided to end its company’s long practice of self-censoring content in China and moved all of its servers from China to Hong Kong, which is a part of China but has different regulations in regards to the media and is not affected by the culture of censorship.

While this rift may have ended, Google is still not backing down from uncensored web searches and that will remain in Hong Kong. Instead, it will offer only searches for music files and products, while also offering Google Translate in China.

“We asked the government to renew our license on the basis that we would make some products – which don’t require any filtering by Google – available locally on Google.cn,” a spokesperson told paidContent.UK.

Overheating problems were initially reported to be the cause of the outage, similar to an incident that happened in March – which took the site down for more than a couple of hours.

“We’re aware that the site isnt (sic) working as usual and we’re figuring out the problem now,” according to a tweet by the Wikipedia team when the outage was reported.

“We’ve figured out the problem: power outage in our Florida data center,” the team posted about an hour and 30 minutes later.

The Wikimedia Foundation is slowly trying to rectify the problem, but it appears that the English version of Wikipedia is known to be up. All other sites are expressing an error message stating that they cannot connect to the database server.

Please note that this story is most likely will be updated as news comes to hand.

Original Post (11:14AM)

Wikipedia, along with the entire Wikimedia Foundation, has experienced an outage which has lasted, at the time of writing, about 40 minutes of the day. The last outage that Wikipedia experienced was in March, and that lasted for a few hours. Unlike the previous outage, which was attributed to an overheating DNS server, we have no idea on what is happening.

The blogs, including its technical blog, run by Wikimedia Foundation are still up.

Now we have a date. Apple has confirmed that Australians will be getting the iPad on May 28 – along with Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Span, Switzerland and the UK; and will be able to pre-order the device starting Monday, May 10. The iPad will be sold for $629 for the 16GB model, $759 for the 32GB and $879 for the 64GB. For the models with Wi-Fi + 3G: the 16GB model will cost $799, $928 for the 32GB and $1049 for the 64GB.

Also released on that day will be iBooks for those countries.

Those living in New Zealand, Ireland, Luxembourg and Austria will have to wait until July to see the iPad being released, with no word on pricing and availability. Full PR after the jump.

SYDNEY, Australia—8 May 2010—Apple® today announced that iPad™ will be available in Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Spain, Switzerland and the UK on Friday 28 May. Customers can pre-order all iPad models from Apple’s online store in all nine countries beginning on Monday 10 May. In the US, Apple has already sold over one million iPads and customers have downloaded over 12 million apps from the App Store, as well as over 1.5 million ebooks from the new iBookstore.

iPad allows users to connect with their apps and content in a more intimate, intuitive and fun way than ever before. Users can browse the web, read and send email, enjoy and share photos, watch HD videos, listen to music, play games, read ebooks and much more, all using iPad’s revolutionary Multi-Touch™ user interface. iPad is 13.4 mm thin and weighs just 680 gms—thinner and lighter than any laptop or netbook—and delivers up to 10 hours of battery life.*

The App Store on iPad lets you wirelessly browse, buy and download new apps from the world’s largest app store. iPad includes 12 new innovative apps designed especially for iPad and will run almost all of the more than 200,000 apps on the App Store, including apps already purchased for your iPhone® or iPod touch®. Developers have created more than 5,000 exciting new apps designed for iPad that take advantage of its Multi-Touch interface, large screen and high-quality graphics.

Pricing & Availability
iPad is available in Australia for a recommended retail price of AUS$629 inc GST for 16GB, AUS$759 inc GST for 32GB, AUS$879 inc GST for 64GB for Wi-Fi models and AUS$799 inc GST for 16GB, AUS$928 inc GST for 32GB and AUS$1049 inc GST for 64GB for Wi-Fi + 3G models. iPad will be sold through the Apple Store, Apple’s retail stores and select Apple Authorised Resellers. The iBooks™ app for iPad including Apple’s iBookstore will be available as a free download from the App Store on 28 May.

Apple plans to release iPad in Austria, Belgium, Hong Kong, Ireland, Luxembourg, Mexico, Netherlands, New Zealand and Singapore in July. Apple will announce availability, local pricing and pre-order plans for these nine additional countries at a later date.

*Battery life depends on device settings, usage and other factors. Actual results vary.

Apple ignited the personal computer revolution with the Apple II, then re-invented the personal computer with the Macintosh. Apple continues to lead the industry with its award-winning computers, OS X operating system, and iLife, iWork and professional applications. Apple leads the digital music revolution with its iPods and iTunes online store, has reinvented the mobile phone with its revolutionary iPhone and App Store, and has recently introduced its magical iPad which is defining the future of mobile media and computing devices.