Some pigs, turkeys and household pets have become infected with the H1N1 flu, but the pandemic virus does not yet appear to be spreading quickly among animals, the World Health Organization said on Friday.

H1N1 swine flu is on the rise in China and Japan after triggering an unusually early start to the winter influenza season in Europe, Central Asia and North America, the World Health Organization said on Friday.

City Council members tentatively approved a multimillion-dollar proposal Tuesday to tap Google Inc. for government e-mail and other Internet services, a boon for the Web giant as it seeks to wrest market share for office software from rival Microsoft Corp.

Google says a board member who is also a director of computer maker Apple is stepping down, removing a potential conflict of interest as the two companies look to compete more directly.

Tamiflu can be given to babies less than six months of age during the current swine flu pandemic, Europe's medicines watchdog said on Friday.

Scientists offered new hope in the fight against a difficult-to-treat skin cancer on Wednesday as an early-stage clinical trial showed an experimental drug dramatically shrank tumors.

Doctors are reporting a severe form of swine flu that goes straight to the lungs, causing severe illness in otherwise healthy young people and requiring expensive hospital treatment, the World Health Organization said on Friday.

Teaching new mothers how to breast-feed could save 1.3 million children's lives every year, but many women get no help and give up trying, the World Health Organization said on Friday.

A bitter Congressional fight over the cost of superexpensive biotechnology drugs has come down to a single, hotly debated number: How many years should makers of those drugs be exempt from generic competition?