San Francisco  - On March 24, 1989, a massive tanker captained by a man who had allegedly been drinking, sailed outside regular Alaskan shipping lanes and hit a reef, causing one of the worst environmental disasters in US history.

The Exxon Valdez, at the time one of the most advanced tankers in the world, split, spilling approximately 40 million litres of crude oil into the delicate and pristine Arctic environment of the remote Prince William Sound.

San Francisco  - Technology giant IBM is in talks to buy rival Sun Microsystems for 6.5 billion dollars, the Wall Street Journal reported Wednesday. The deal would represent the largest purchase ever by IBM and signal the company's determination to maintain a strong presence in the market for servers in the face of challenges from HP, Dell and Cisco.

San Francisco  - Apple unveiled its proposed new software for its genre-defining iPhone Tuesday and gave acolytes of the world's most popular smartphone the feature they most wanted: the ability to cut and paste text and pictures on the device.

Lack of the cut and paste facility had been one of the main drawbacks of the device, compared to competitors like the Blackberry.

San Francisco  - Actress Natasha Richardson was in serious condition at a Montreal hospital Tuesday after suffering head injuries Monday afternoon in a skiing accident, according to Canadian news reports.

The British actress, 45, is a member of the Redgrave acting dynasty and the wife of Liam Neeson. She suffered the injury at the Mont Tremblant ski resort in Quebec, according to People magazine online.

San Francisco  - Intel warned rival chip maker AMD Monday that its license to make personal-computer chips could be revoked because it spun out its manufacturing unit into a separate company.

Intel dominates the market for PC-compatible chips, which are based on the ubiquitous x86 architecture, first introduced by Intel in 1978 and later licensed to other companies.

San Francisco - The Seattle Post-Intelligencer newspaper will print its last edition on Tuesday, ending a 146-year run and continuing operations as a web-only publication, the paper said Monday.

The newspaper is currently distributed to more than 117,600 subscribers every morning, making it the nation's largest daily newspaper to shift to an entirely digital news product.

The paper lost 14 million dollars last year and owner Hearst Corporation put the paper up for sale in January, saying that it would stop printing if a buyer couldn't be found.