IBM will cut about 5,000 jobs in the US, adding to similarly large cuts in the past few months, sources with knowledge of the matter told Reuters on Wednesday.

The Centre for Democracy and Technology told the BBC: "China's actions fail to live up to international norms." The video sharing site has been off limits in China since Monday. Earlier in the week, the BBC reported from Beijing that China cut off access to the website because it carried a video showing soldiers beating monks and other Tibetans.

Global sales of Nintendo's Wii console have passed 50 million, the company's boss Satoru Iwata has said. The Wii is now the fastest-selling games console in history, surpassing the PlayStation 2.

When Toshiba's fuel cell-powered phone was announced last October of 2008, the purported release date was March of this year. Unfortunately, the month is coming to a close, but we are yet to see any telltale signs of the phone's release whatsoever. But even if the phone in question is nowhere in sight, Toshiba is commencing the mass production of its fuel cell products.

The European Commission and Japan are going to deepen their collaboration in energy research. The primal areas for cooperation are photovoltaics, power storage and carbon capture and storage.

A startup called Zeebo is betting that people in emerging markets want to play good video games just as much as people in the US, Western Europe and Japan do. Zeebo plans to launch its "video game console for the next billion" in Brazil next month for US$199 and other countries later in the year for US$179. It was developed using the cell phone technology of Qualcomm.

Dutch navigation device maker TomTom filed a countersuit against Microsoft Corp, accusing the US company of violating its patents related to car navigational technology and other computing functionality.

The world economy is set to shrink by between 0.5% and 1.0% in 2009, the first global contraction in 60 years. In its gloomiest forecast yet, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) says that developed countries will suffer a "deep recession".

Three years ago, as head of Toshiba's (TSBAa.BE) power business, Norio Sasaki orchestrated the tech conglomerate's $5.4 billion acquisition of Westinghouse's nuclear-power-plant business. Now, as Sasaki prepares to take over the president's post, he will have to show the same willingness to take chances as he tries to help overhaul the company after its biggest-ever expected annual loss.