Ash spewing from an Icelandic volcano prompted flight cancellations in parts of Europe again on Sunday.
Eurocontrol, the agency that manages European air travel, expects 24,500 flights on Sunday — about 500 below average for a Sunday at this time of year.

Apple Inc said on Friday it will launch the iPad tablet computer in nine international markets on May 28, following a strong debut in the United States last month.

The iPad will go on sale in Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Spain, Switzerland and Britain. Pre-ordering for those markets will start on May 10.

The international launch was originally schedule for late April, but Apple delayed it by a month due to what it called higher-than-expected demand.

Apple also said the iPad will expand to Austria, Belgium, Hong Kong, Ireland, Luxembourg, Mexico, Netherlands, New Zealand and Singapore in July.

The iPad, a 9.7-inch touchscreen tablet intended primarily for games, Web browsing, and digital media of all sorts, went on sale in the U.S. on April 3.

The company has already sold more than 1 million iPads. Analysts expect the company to sell roughly 5 million of the devices this year.

Shares of Cupertino, California-based Apple fell 3.3 percent to $238 in midday trading on the Nasdaq. The broader Nasdaq market was down 1.6 percent.

BERLIN – Airlines lost at least $1.7 billion in revenue during the volcanic ash crisis, an industry group said Wednesday as the debate heated up over whether European governments were justified in shutting down their airspace for so long.

Planes were flying into all of Europe’s top airports – London’s Heathrow, Paris’ Charles de Gaulle and Germany’s hub at Frankfurt. Still experts predicted it could take days – even more than a week – to clear a backlog of stranded passengers after about 102,000 flights were canceled around the world.

While the commercial air transport world has been all but stopped in the European airspace, the U.S. military has managed to continue resupply operations and medical evacuation flights by redeploying aircraft ahead of the spreading volcanic ash.

Millions of air travellers are stranded as thousands of flights are being cancelled for a third day. Many countries and airlines have grounded fleets as the ash – a mixture of glass, sand and rock particles, drifting from 5,000ft (1,500m) – can seriously damage aircraft engines.
The disruption from the spread of ash would continue into Sunday, European aviation agency Eurocontrol said.
The volcanic ash cloud is starting to cause serious economic problems for some airlines and food importers and even postal deliveries.

SAN FRANCISCO – Authorities have smashed one of the world’s biggest networks of virus-infected computers, a data vacuum that stole credit cards and online banking credentials from as many as 12.7 million poisoned PCs.

The “botnet” of infected computers included PCs inside more than half of the Fortune 1,000 companies and more than 40 major banks, according to investigators.

Spanish investigators, working with private computer-security firms, have arrested the three alleged ringleaders of the so-called Mariposa botnet, which appeared in December 2008 and grew into one of the biggest weapons of cybercrime. More arrests are expected soon in other countries.

Spanish authorities have planned a news conference for Wednesday in Madrid.

The arrests are significant because the masterminds behind the biggest botnets aren’t often taken down. And the story of investigators’ hunt for them offers a rare glimpse at the tactics used to trace the origin of computer crimes.

MADRID (AP) – Many Spanish Internet users are furious over a government proposal that could lead to the shutting down of Web sites offering peer-to-peer file sharing of music and films without a court order. A meeting Thursday between their representatives and the culture minister failed to calm them down.

Minister Angeles Gonzalez-Sinde insists the legislation – to be brought into effect in 2010 if approved by Parliament – will not target individual Internet users who download material and in no case would anyone’s Internet connection be cut off.

Prime Minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero said the proposed legislation would not threaten freedom of expression.

Speaking after talks with 14 bloggers and Web site directors, Sinde said the bill is directed against Web sites that illegally offer the possibility of downloading copyright-protected material.

Zapatero said Spain, like many other nations around the world, had to find a means of safeguarding the intellectual property of the country’s creative sectors.

“If we don’t, we run the risk losing it, of being left without intellectual power and creativity,” Zapatero said at a news conference.

Under the bill, an intellectual property commission would investigate complaints about Web sites offering the possibility of P2P downloading, and if they are deemed to be making money from other people’s work they could be closed.

“It’s like a shop that sells goods stolen from the manufacturer’s warehouse,” said Sinde.

She stressed that if the commission found that in any way the Web site owners’ basic rights were likely to be affected by such a closure, a judge would have to handle the case.

But while industry groups see the anti-piracy proposal unveiled this week as insufficient, opponents of the bill accused the minister of playing Big Brother and trying to establish a “culture police” that would curtail civil liberties.

“The page with most links to copyright-protected content is Google. Are we going to close Google without a judicial order?” asked Victor Domingo, president of the Spanish Association of Internet Users.

Zapatero later said it was not his government’s intention to shut down any Web site.

Spanish National Television and Radio, whose Web site director Rosalia Lloret was at the meeting, said “the meeting concluded without any progress and showed the vast differences of opinion between both sides.”

Hundreds of entertainment industry employees, including several musicians, staged a noisy protest outside the ministry Tuesday to demand tougher legislation. Simultaneously, opponents posted a manifesto slamming the bill on the Internet, and it was picked up by tens of thousand of Web sites.

“The Internet must function freely and without political interference spurred by interested sectors trying to perpetuate an obsolete business model and to prevent human knowledge from continuing to be free,” the manifesto said.

Downloading copyrighted material is illegal in Spain but not a criminal offense, and courts consistently throw out cases on grounds that it is an infringement only if used for commercial profit.

This stance has infuriated music companies and also the U.S. government and that country’s powerful entertainment lobby.

Spain’s plans are more moderate those of some other European countries. Britain recently announced it planned to follow France’s lead to cut off Internet access to people who download illegally.

Spanish record label association Promusicae says the industry in Spain lost $1.6 billion in revenue in 2007 and 2008 because of piracy. Promusicae says the industry’s work force has declined by 70 percent over the last few years.

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