Asian shares fell about 1% and U.S. Treasuries dipped on Wednesday on fears about Lehman Brothers' ability to raise capital, demonstrating Washington's bailout of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac this week had not fixed the credit crisis. Oil prices rose above $103 a barrel from a five-month low, after OPEC agreed to a small but

News Corp's MySpace advertising business is operating ahead of expectations and its digital ad business is performing better than the marketplace, the company's chief operating officer said on Tuesday. Rupert Murdoch's international media conglomerate, which owns The Wall Street Journal and the Fox network, also is interested in expanding its digital portfolio of businesses, COO

Google and Europe's biggest bank HSBC have thrown their weight behind a plan to provide cheap, high-speed Web access via satellite to millions in Africa and other emerging markets. Google has joined forces with the bank and cable operator Liberty Global to back a group called O3b Networks, which stands for the "other 3 billion"

Research In Motion Ltd is launching a flip version of its popular BlackBerry Pearl smartphone, a move that reasserts its push into the retail consumer market. Like RIM's original Pearl model, the first-ever flip BlackBerry comes loaded with multimedia features such as a video and music player and a 2-megapixel camera with flash, as well

Scientists at a vast underground Swiss laboratory will launch an experiment on Wednesday to re-enact the "Big Bang" on a small scale to explain the origins of the universe and how it came to harbor life. The Large Hadron Collider, or LHC, will use giant magnets housed in cathedral-size caverns to fire beams of energy

Come next week, owners of Microsoft Corp's portable music player Zune will be able to download music wirelessly and tag and buy songs they hear on the device's built-in FM radio, Microsoft said on Monday. The software company is introducing a host of new features on September 16 for the Zune, its answer to Apple

Google Inc has halved the amount of time it stores personal data gathered from its users' Web surfing habits, a move aimed at improving its privacy policies, a company official said. Google used to store such data for 18 months, but has now trimmed that duration to nine months. Nicole Wong, Google's deputy general counsel,

Stocks headed for a higher open on Tuesday as a drop in oil prices and mortgage rates buoyed sentiment as did positive broker actions on bellwethers including Hewlett-Packard. Shares of HP, a Dow component, rose 1.4% before the bell after a brokerage raised its rating and price target on the computer maker. McDonald's, another Dow

Oil fell to a new five-month low on Tuesday as expectations OPEC would leave formal output targets steady outweighed concerns over the threat of Hurricane Ike to U.S. Gulf of Mexico energy infrastructure. OPEC ministers meeting in Vienna were expected to keep output targets steady with calls from some to trim excess supply above agreed