The Associated Press

Industrial conglomerate Siemens AG is poised to sell its 50-percent stake in the joint venture Fujitsu Siemens Computers to Japan's Fujitsu Group, two people familiar with the deal told The Associated Press on Monday.

Siemens has been contemplating a sale of its half in the joint venture at least since August. Chief Executive Peter Loescher said then that the company was in talks with Fujitsu about the fate of the unit, which makes personal computers and laptops and posted sales of 6.6 billion euros but a pretax profit of just 105 million euros last year.

Following its rivals, Sprint Nextel Corp. will soon begin trimming the fees customers face for canceling their cell phone service early.

Chief Executive Dan Hesse said Tuesday in an interview with The Associated Press that Sprint could start lowering the early termination fees as soon as December, once the company updates its billing software. The fee of $200 or more is charged to wireless subscribers who end their service before their two-year contract ends.

Electronic Arts Inc. is turning to online games to boost its limited presence in Asia, the Asia president of the U.S. video game maker said Tuesday.

EA's main business in the West comes from packaged games software for consoles and personal computers, but online games are more popular in Asia, EA President for Asia Jon Niermann told The Associated Press in an interview.

"It's night and day," Niermann.

Niermann was attending the launch of "Need for Speed Undercover," which features a character played by actress Maggie Q.

A low-price laptop product line is helping Taiwan's Asustek Computer Inc. generate record revenue despite signs of slowing global growth, a senior company executive said Tuesday.

Chief Executive Jerry Shen said the company is expecting revenue will grow 26 percent to $834.3 million in September with the prospects for October and November even brighter.

Shen attributed much of the success to Asustek's budget Eee PCs, whose prices range from $300 to $1,000.

Yahoo Inc. launched a much-anticipated upgrade to its online advertising system Wednesday as it tries to bring to graphical display ads some of the innovations that powered Google Inc.'s rapid rise in search marketing.

Playing to Yahoo's strengths in display ads and technology targeting pitches to users' interests, the new "Apt from Yahoo" platform will initially involve just the newspaper companies in a 2-year-old consortium led by Yahoo. Many of the papers joined that effort hoping for relief from the decline in their industry.

Chaos in the money markets gave Microsoft Corp. an opening Monday to announce it would take on debt for the first time, launch a new $40 billion stock buyback plan and raise its dividend.

The moves indicate that for all the credit problems plaguing the financial sector, cash-laden technology companies with good credit ratings are still borrowing money on favorable terms and otherwise enjoying flexibility.

Who is the "iPhone Girl"?

Pictures of an Asian factory worker found on a new iPhone sold to a British customer have generated keen discussion on the Internet about her identity -- and her fate.

The three pictures, posted on the Apple discussion Web site MacRumors.com, show a young Asian woman working on what appears to be an assembly line for iPhones.

Dressed in a pink striped outfit and hat and wearing white gloves with yellow fingertips, the young woman now known on the Web as the "iPhone Girl" is shown smiling and making victory signs as she poses next to an iPhone.

The White House is missing as many as 225 days of e-mail dating back to 2003, and there is little if any likelihood a recovery effort will be completed by the time the Bush administration leaves office, according to an internal White House draft document obtained by The Associated Press.

The nine-page outline of the White House's e-mail problems invites companies to bid on a project to recover the missing electronic messages.

The work would be carried out through April 19, 2009, according to the Office of Administration request for contractors' proposals, which was dated June 20.

It wasn't what anyone expected to see while perusing a news article.

But there, in the final paragraph of an online story about the call girl involved in the Eliot Spitzer scandal, Yahoo's automated system was inviting readers to browse through photos of underage girls.

Police launched a massive manhunt in India's financial capital Tuesday, believing that the serial blasts that rocked the western Indian city of Ahmadabad over the weekend, killing 45 people, were hatched in a Mumbai suburb.

Four cars used in the weekend bombings were stolen from in the suburb of Navi Mumbai -- "New Mumbai," police said.

Meanwhile, police on Tuesday found 10 unexploded bombs in Surat, a city 280 kilometers (175 miles) south of Ahmadabad, said H.P. Singh, a senior Ahmadabad police officer.