A top Apple executive downplayed the theory of an e-book price-fixing conspiracy at an antitrust trial Monday, saying publishers were already moving away from Amazon's model when Apple launched its iPad.

Eddy Cue, an Apple senior vice president, said in his second day of testimony that Apple introduced e-books for the iPad that were not available on Amazon, which was selling many popular e-book titles for $9.99.

The late Steve Jobs took center stage Monday in the latest twist in the Apple antitrust trial on ebooks.

A federal court attempted to plumb the meaning of a series of unsent emails Jobs addressed to Eddy Cue, an Apple senior vice president assigned with negotiating ebook contracts with major publishers in late 2009 and early 2010 before the launch of the iPad.

Chinese telecoms giant Huawei will launch a new smartphone on Tuesday to better compete with high-end rivals like Apple and Samsung overseas, a company official said.

Huawei will unveil the Ascend P6 in London in one of its major smartphone launches of the year, Huawei spokesman Roland Sladek told Agence France Presse.

A mysterious Facebook event set for Thursday has sparked buzz that the leading social network could be adding video to Instagram smartphone picture-sharing service.

The leading social network invited the media to its headquarters in the Silicon Valley city of Menlo Park where "a small team has been working on a big idea," but remained hush about what will be unveiled.

A Chinese supercomputer is the fastest in the world, according to survey results announced Monday, comfortably overtaking a U.S. machine which now ranks second.

Tianhe-2, a supercomputer developed by China's National University of Defense Technology, achieved processing speeds of 33.86 petaflops (1000 trillion calculations) per second on a benchmarking test, earning it the number one spot in the Top 500 survey of supercomputers.

U.S. tech giant Apple revealed on Monday it received between 4,000 and 5,000 data requests in six months from U.S. authorities, days after Facebook and Microsoft released similar information.

Apple, Facebook, Microsoft and several other top Internet and technology companies have come under heightened scrutiny since word leaked of a vast, covert Internet surveillance program U.S. authorities insist targets only foreign terror suspects and has helped thwart attacks.

Wrinkled and skinny at first, the translucent, jellyfish-shaped balloons that Google released this week from a frozen field in the heart of New Zealand's South Island hardened into shiny pumpkins as they rose into the blue winter skies above Lake Tekapo, passing the first big test of a lofty goal to get the entire planet online.

It was the culmination of 18 months' work on what Google calls Project Loon, in recognition of how wacky the idea may sound. Developed in the secretive X lab that came up with a driverless car and web-surfing eyeglasses, the flimsy helium-filled inflatables beam the Internet down to earth as they sail past on the wind.

Amid the explosion of social media and new networking tools, governments and businesses are grappling with balancing their security needs against their wish to join the online conversations.

"Communications technology has dramatically democratized the process of gaining a public audience," said journalist and former military analyst Joshua Foust at a Washington forum on digital diplomacy.

Facebook revealed Friday it received between 9,000 and 10,000 requests for user data from U.S. authorities in the second half of last year, as it seeks to shield itself from a growing scandal.

The requests covered issues from child disappearances to petty crimes and terror threats and targeted between 18,000 and 19,000 accounts, the social networking site said, without revealing how often it complied with the requests.

U.S. law enforcement officials are demanding the creation of a "kill switch" that would render smartphones inoperable after they are stolen, New York's top prosecutor said in a clear warning to the world's smartphone manufacturers.

Citing statistics showing that 1 in 3 robberies nationwide involve the theft of a mobile phone, New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman on Thursday announced the formation of a coalition of law enforcement agencies devoted to stamping out what he called an "epidemic" of robberies.