A court in Australia has ordered the fast-food restaurant Kentucky Fried Chicken (KFC) to pay $8.3m in compensation to the family of a seven-year-old girl. The youngster was left severely brain damaged after eating a KFC Chicken Twister that contained salmonella poisoning. Little Monika Samaan became seriously ill after eating the sandwich at a Sydney restaurant in 2005. She has since been confined to a wheelchair with brain damage and is unable to speak. Monika's father told the court that he and his family all fell ill with vomiting and diarrhoea after sharing the Twister. Monika’s parents and brother all recovered, but she stayed in a coma for six months and was in hospital for seven. KFC denied it was responsible for Monika’s condition and said it would not pay a single cent in damages. It said it was “deeply disappointed” by the decision and intends to appeal. The company’s lawyer argued during the trial that the family never bought a Twister. He told the court there was no sales data to prove the family purchased one. He told Mr Samaan: “You did not tell anyone at the hospital…that you had shared a KFC Twister.” Former employees told the court about the unsanitary practices at the eatery. One said: “If the store was particularly busy, then even if chicken dropped on the floor ... it was on some occasions simply put back into the burger station from where it had fallen.”

Google has entered the market for offering online storage space. Their new service, called Google Drive, will be in direct competition with rival cloud storage services like Dropbox, Apple's iCloud and Microsoft's SkyDrive. The search giant will offer 5GB (gigabytes) of storage for free for those wishing to keep their photos, documents and other files online. Keeping things in the cloud means users can access their files from any computer anywhere in the world, as long as it has Internet access. At the top end, Google will offer 16TB (terabytes) of space – at a price of $799.99 a month. Sixteen terabytes is sufficient to store 16,000 movies. For most people, the free 5GB option will be more than enough space.

Google senior vice-president of apps Sundar Pichai said the launch of Drive was an important step for the company. He wrote on a blog post: "Drive is a central place where you can create, share, collaborate and keep all of your stuff.…You can take all your data, regardless of which device you're on, and make it seamlessly available to you." Some industry insiders believe Google's entry into the cloud storage market could shake it up. Richard Edwards, an analyst at the research firm Ovum, said Google's move could stir Facebook into action. "Facebook doesn't have a cloud service but this may prompt it into an acquisition," he said. He added: "If Facebook was to buy Dropbox, that would be a game-changer."