Google Inc. has reached a licensing deal with representatives of European music publishers, artists and composers in which the U.S. online giant and its customers will gain access to 5.5 million musical works across 35 countries from artists including Lady Gaga and Rihanna.

The accord with Armonia, the alliance of French, Italian and Spanish licensing groups, is billed as the broadest of its kind.

Smartphones and tablets powered by Google's Android software are devouring the mobile gadget market, eating into Apple's turf by feeding appetites for innovation and low prices, analysts say.

The Android operating system powered nearly three out of four smartphones shipped worldwide in the recently ended quarter as the mobile platform dominated the market, according to industry trackers at IDC.

Pinball and slot machine wizard Joe Kaminkow is working his magic on the social games scene pioneered by Zynga and taking Facebook users along the yellow-brick road as his opening move.

Kaminkow and his small team at startup Spooky Cool Labs got a blessing from Warner Brothers Interactive Entertainment to make "Wizard of Oz" game for play at the leading social network complete with clips from the classic film.

China's home-grown passenger plane was only a model at the country's premier airshow, but a growing number of orders show Beijing's drive to challenge the dominance of Boeing and Airbus.

State-backed Commercial Aircraft Corporation of China (COMAC) said it won 50 orders for the planned 168-seat C919 plane at the Zhuhai airshow, which ended on Sunday, bringing the total to 380.

South Korea's Samsung has hit back at rival LG in a patents row over next-generation display panels, with both firms accusing the other of stealing technology and senior staff to grab a lead in the market.

Samsung Display, an affiliate of Samsung Electronics, asked a Seoul patents court last week to annul seven patents related to organic light-emitting diode (OLED) panel technologies held by LG, a company spokesman said Monday.

The Israeli government on Sunday admitted it had become the victim of a mass cyber-warfare campaign with millions of attempts to hack state websites since the start of its Gaza offensive four days ago.

Speaking ahead of the weekly cabinet meeting, Israeli Finance Minister Yuval Steinitz said the government was now waging war on "a second front -- of cyberattacks against Israel."

Online activist group Anonymous said on Saturday it had downed the websites of dozens of Israeli state agencies and a top bank in protest over the Jewish state's deadly air assault on Gaza.

The hackers said their operation "OpIsrael" had either damaged or completely erased the sites of more than 650 private and public institutions that included the Bank of Jerusalem -- one of the country's main finance houses.

Fifteen solar panel vehicles, some that look like small space ships, raced across Chile's Atacama desert Friday as part of a contest to build low-cost environmentally-friendly cars.

Teams from countries like Argentina, Chile, India and Venezuela have crafted aerodynamic racers to speed across 1,300 kilometers (800 miles) of the world's driest desert in the second edition of the Atacama Solar Challenge.

A movement by privacy activists to curb tracking of Internet users' browsing habits scored a major victory last month when Microsoft launched its new browser with "do not track" as the default, or automatic setting.

But some advertisers are in revolt against the move, certain websites are skirting the Microsoft effort and the debate over online privacy and tracking is heating up.

Afghanistan has launched a new literacy program that enables Afghan women deprived of a basic education during decades of war to learn to read and write using a mobile phone.

The phone is called Ustad Mobile (Mobile Teacher) and provides national curriculum courses in both national languages, Dari and Pashto, as well as mathematics.