General

Without announcing a deal, Apple CEO Steve Jobs today dropped broad hints that an agreement could be imminent to distribute the songs of the Beatles on his company's iTunes music download service.

Disproving the adage that 'no publicity is bad publicity', a company today disowned a flood of emails that was apparently crafted to boost its stock price. Pay88 Inc claimed that it was an innocent pawn in an apparent 'pump and dump' scheme' run by unknown spammers.

The unwanted emails began appearing in inboxes on July 14, the company complained in a statement to the media.

One month after tens of thousands of PCs in China were disabled by a bug in its Norton antivirus software, Symantec has offered to compensate the owners. However, the compensation – more copies of the software that caused the problem – has sparked outrage on some online forums.

Microsoft is paying an unprecedented $50 million for exclusive rights to publish two episodes of the forthcoming game, Grand Theft Auto IV, on its Xbox 360 games console, according to statements from a senior executive at GTA IV publisher, Take-Two Interactive.

Take-Two has already recorded the payments in financial filings as deferred revenue, explained Lainie Goldstein, Take-Two's newly appointed CFO, in a conference call with analysts.

'Mission creep' in the Iraq conflict dropped US chances of success from 70 percent to 26 percent, says a University of Georgia researcher. The predictions were produced with a statistics-based approach that has proved accurate in 80 percent of former conflicts, claims assistant professor Patricia L. Sullivan of the UGA School of Public and International affairs.