The WSJ reported this week that Ling Ka-shing, the chairman of Cheung Kong and Hutchison Whampoa and the richest man in Asia, has committed another $60M to Facebook’s current $500M round.

The round, which is still open, has now secured $300M in new capital for Facebook (the previous $240M came from Microsoft as part of a larger strategic deal). Apparently, hedge funds are still backing off from the deal because of unfavorable terms.

As Facebook grows internationally, China will become an increasingly important focus for the company. (Facebook is launching internationalized versions of the service soon.) Just a few weeks ago, there were rumors that Facebook would acquire Zhanzuo, the most popular social networking service for college students in China.

I’m sure Facebook’s PR team didn’t get much rest this weekend, as media coverage of the privacy implications of Facebook’s Beacon program surged late in the week. Here’s a quick summary of what’s happened and what people are saying:

CA Security Advisor Research Blog

Facebook is recording what you do when you’re on Beacon-enabled sites, even when you’re logged out of Facebook, and that’s not cool. Not only that, but their Customer Service team is “materially misrepresenting” what’s really going on.

NY Times Bits Blog

Coke is backing out of using Beacon even though it was a “Landmark Partner” at the Nov 6th launch event. Coke is saying it thought Beacon was going to be different than it is (?).

Dare Obasanjo’s Blog

It’s going to be hard to fix Beacon without completely re-doing it.

Several months ago, Facebook started telling the developer community it would probably deprecate its notification email feature, though it never gave a specific date as to when or how that was going happen. Then, a couple weeks ago, Facebook created a new mechanism for  apps to send email to users, notifications.sendEmail – though the new method included a 1 email/user/day limit. This week, Facebook announced that that limit has now been upped to 5 emails/user/day.

It will be interesting to see how the developer community uses email in relation to messaging, feeds, and traditional notifications, and how strict/transparent Facebook will be regarding appropriate levels of application email. So far, apps have made sparing use of email in comparison to on Facebook channels, which usually convert very well.