Software giant Microsoft Corp. said Friday it has signed a deal to scan and put online 100,000 books from the British Library.
Readers will be able to search through around 25 million pages of material next year without having to visit the library in London or pay any fee.
Microsoft is initially investing $2.5 million in th

State regulators said yesterday they've closed down Guangdong Securities Co for "severe irregularities."
The company is the 15th such firm to be shuttered by the China Securities Regulatory Commission since August 2004 — the start of a nationwide campaign to crack down on irregularities in the country's problem-plagued stocks sector.
Faci

A Colorado man who had a panic attack when he found he was glued to a toilet seat in a Home Depot restroom has sued the home improvement giant for negligence, saying staff ignored his plight.
Retired electrical engineer Bob Dougherty, 57, said on Thursday he was stuck in the stall with his pants down for about 20 minutes and that two ye

MACAU : China won the East Asian Games football final to cap a dominant performance in Macau, where they took a record number of gold medals and leapt forward in their preparations for the Beijing Olympics.

China's huge population and rising standard of living have U.S. farmers hoping the Chinese will cross culinary lines and sample fare that's a little more foreign to them.
Many of China's 1.3 billion people, with ever more disposable income, are becoming more receptive to different food choices, said New York State Agricultural Commissio

Hoping to trademark a gymnastics maneuver, China's Cheng Fei tried a complex new move for the first time in the women's vault at the East Asian Games on Wednesday, and it cost her a gold medal.
Cheng fell during landing and ended up placing second.
She hopes to name the new move, a backward 180-degree flip and forward 540-degree flip,

the world's top mobile phone maker, launched three new multimedia handsets Wednesday that let users watch TV, play music and swap content between electronic devices at home.
The new phones, including Nokia's first consumer-oriented handset with Wi-Fi wireless Internet connectivity, are the latest products in Nokia's push to make advance

The international space station Wednesday marked five continuous years of people living and working aboard it. But there wasn't much time for celebration.
The station's two residents spent the day cleaning air filters, upgrading exercise equipment and doing other maintenance. Astronaut William McArthur Jr. and cosmonaut Valery Toka

It all started with Durex. This condom manufacture released a survey in 2003 that found that Chinese are the world's most likely to agree to unprotected sex with a new partner, and later it was discovered by UNAIDS that 30 percent of Chinese who get HIV do so through unsafe sex.

Russia and China may cooperate in a lunar exploration program that would culminate with a manned moon mission within less than two decades, the Interfax news agency quoted a Russian space official as saying Monday.
China has asked Russia to help with an unmanned lunar probe program, Interfax quoted Federal Space Agency deputy chief Yuri Nosenk

China is likely to post 9.5 percent economic growth for the second half of 2005, slowing to 8.5 to 9.0 percent in the full year of 2006, a senior government economist said on Tuesday.
"In the second half of this year 9.5 percent GDP growth is likely," said Liu Shijin, vice director of the Development Research Centre of the State Council, th

Almost all economists attending a recent seminar on the Chinese economy agreed the Chinese currency Renminbi (RMB) would be tending toward further appreciation in the long run.
But opinions varied on how much the RMB is undervalued among economists attending the seminar held by the China Center for Economic Research (CCER) of Beijing Un

Having won unprecedented popularity nationwide, he is known as a "charming guy to all" in the country.

Police believe an unmarried 18-year-old woman from Hubei Province secretly gave birth to a baby girl in the bathroom in a sixth-floor apartment she shares with her parents, and then tossed the infant out the window so no one would find out she had been pregnant.

China yesterday described the spread of avian influenza in birds around the country as highly alarming, and said it was in the midst of carrying out a campaign to eradicate and vaccinate birds.
In the past two weeks authorities have destroyed more than 47,300 domesticated birds in three provinces after local outbreaks. Nearly 7m birds