Online shopping giant Amazon said Wednesday that it will launch a Japanese-language version of its hugely popular Kindle next month as it looks to break into the largely untapped Japanese e-book market.

The retailer's long-awaited announcement comes a day after Apple unveiled its new iPad Mini, the latest volley in the battle for the multi-billion-dollar tablet sector.

In Facebook's second quarter as a publicly traded company, the world's largest social media site is juggling the challenge of growing its advertising revenue while maintaining the loyalty of more than 1 billion users.

Facebook is expected to report earnings of 11 cents per share on revenue of $1.23 billion after the market closes Tuesday, according to FactSet. The Menlo Park, Calif., company has not provided investors with any financial guidance.

Scores of smartphone applications are promoting a pro-smoking message, from brands to games, according to a study published on Monday in the health journal Tobacco Control.

Public-health researchers led by Nasser BinDihm at the University of Sydney in Australia say they found 107 tobacco-friendly apps in a trawl of the Apple App Store and Android Market.

Yahoo! chief Marissa Mayer on Monday revealed a revival strategy that includes making a priority of delivering the Internet firm's popular online services to smartphones and tablets.

Freshly returned from maternity leave after giving birth to a boy just a few weeks ago, Mayer used an upbeat quarterly earnings release conference call to lay out her vision for returning the faded Internet pioneer to glory.

Apple on Tuesday is expected to pull back the curtain on a "mini" version of its iPad to battle Amazon and Google in the hot, crowded arena of tablet computers with smaller screens.

As is its style, Apple has remained mute regarding what it plans to unveil at the media event, which will be held in the California city of San Jose in the heart of Silicon Valley.

The United Nations published Monday a report offering guidance and support to countries on tackling "terrorists" who use the Internet to plan attacks, recruit and disseminate propaganda.

"Just as Internet use among citizens has increased in the past few years, terrorist organizations also make extensive use of this indispensable global network," said Yury Fedotov, head of the U.N. Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC).

Smiling shyly, Wassan Saleh admitted to being the face of a vast problem across Iraq's bureaucracy that officials are now trying to remedy: she had never used a computer.

Her participation in information technology (IT) classes at a Baghdad college is part of efforts by university professors to help modernize Iraq's civil service.

When Canada's ambassador to China posted photos of his car on the embassy's Twitter-like weibo page, the instant, mass response boosted his country's image in a way that surely stunned many diplomats.

Hundreds of Chinese netizens posted comments marveling that the Canadian envoy at the time -- David Mulroney -- was driving a relatively inexpensive car compared to the luxury vehicles favored by their own officials.

Japan's biggest mobile operator said Monday it will launch a translation service that lets people chat over the telephone in several different languages.

The application for NTT DoCoMo subscribers will give two-way voice and text readouts of conversations between Japanese speakers and those talking in English, Chinese or Korean with a several-second delay, the firm said.

Twitter, a day after saying it blocked a neo-Nazi account in Germany in a global first, made another major concession Friday by agreeing to remove anti-Semitic posts in France, a lawyer said.

The company did not immediately confirm the move, but the lawyer for a French Jewish student union said that after it threatened legal action, Twitter agreed to take down many of the offending tweets that have recently flooded the site.