Cuba will open its first electricity plant using sugar cane as a biofuel hoping eventually to meet 30 percent of its energy needs from the fuel source, the official Granma daily said Thursday.

The plant, being built in Ciego de Avila province, some 400 kilometers (240 miles) east of Havana, will use "biomass from sugar cane (the residue from agricultural products) and forestry" particularly an invasive hardwood species known as "marabu" which provides good quality charcoal.

Microsoft Corp. is pulling out of the International Consumer Electronics Show, the largest trade show in the Americas. It's joining Apple in saying that it prefers to put on its own events when the time is right to show off its products.

Microsoft said the next show, to be held Jan. 9-12 in Las Vegas, will be the last show at which it has a booth or the CEO delivers the customary kick-off speech.

Technology stocks fell Wednesday, dragged down by a weak earnings report from the business software maker Oracle Corp.

Broad market indexes were flat. The Dow Jones industrial average eked out a gain of 4 points after having been down most of the day.

More Chinese cities are requiring users of Twitter-like microblog services to register with their real names, state media said Thursday, in a move likely to deter many online voices.

China has more than 485 million Internet users, the most of any country in the world. Sites that are deemed politically destabilizing or pornographic are routinely blocked, but microblogs have been widely used to share information not available in the state media.

When iPods hit the scene 10 years ago, the small, white ear buds that came with the devices became the symbol for listening to music on the go.

Today, that's changing.

The Grammys will pay special tribute to late Apple founder Steve Jobs, Brazil's Tom Jobim -- of "Girl from Ipanema" fame -- and U.S. singer Diana Ross at the upcoming awards show, the organization announced Wednesday.

The Apple co-founder and mind behind the wildly popular iPod, iPad and iPhone died in October after battling pancreatic cancer.

Yahoo! announced that it has ramped up the number of its websites around the world that let visitors automatically share what stories they read with Facebook friends.

A feature added in September to Yahoo! News in the United States has been extended to 26 more of the California Internet pioneers websites around the world.

Mozilla on Tuesday said that it has renewed a deal making Google the default search engine in the nonprofit organization's open-source Firefox Web browsing software.

"We're pleased to announce that we have negotiated a significant and mutually beneficial revenue agreement with Google," Mozilla chief executive Gary Kovacs said in a release.

Online singing sensation Rebecca Black topped a 2011 most-viewed YouTube videos list Tuesday that included spoofs starring pets, talking babies and pop music star Michael Bolton.

The collection of the year's most popular YouTube snippets was based on an analysis of the more than one trillion video views logged at the Google-owned website.

Google on Tuesday ramped up its investment in clean energy by backing the construction of solar panels that will feed electricity to California's power grid.

The Internet giant announced that it is pumping $94 million into Recurrent Energy projects near the state's capitol of Sacramento, raising its investments in Earth-friendly power generation to $915 million.