India's telecom operators on Saturday won a reprieve from a government order that they end "illegal" mutual roaming agreements to provide seamless nationwide 3G services, a report said.

The country's telecom tribunal called for a stay on the order until a hearing on January 3, amid an ongoing battle pitting Delhi against the nation's biggest mobile operators.

Pope Benedict XVI's popemobile may be getting an ecological upgrade.

Young car designers participating in an annual auto style competition are being asked to design a low-emission popemobile that meets the Vatican's high security standards.

Nevada gambling regulators on Thursday unanimously approved rules that allow companies in the state apply for licenses to operate poker websites, a move that puts Nevada in a position to capitalize if Congress reverses its ban on Internet gambling.

The Las Vegas Review-Journal reports that the regulations would let casino companies operate Internet poker sites in the state, and some sites could begin operating by the end of 2012.

The start of this year was marked by a tech industry obsession with where to put growing mountains of information gathered online and by sensors increasingly woven into modern lifestyles.

External drives boasted seemingly unfillable capacities and companies touted services for storing bits and bytes at massive data centers in the Internet "cloud."

Southeast Asia is closer to the equator than the North Pole, but an electronics store in Vietnam is ringing in the holidays with a 15-foot Christmas tree made from more than 2500 unusable cellular phones.

Nguyen Trai, a store manager at Westcom Electronics in the southern city of My Tho, says 10 workers spent two weeks building the cellular Christmas tree that he hopes will raise awareness about hazardous waste and promote environmental responsibility.

Eastman Kodak Co. said Thursday it has agreed to sell its gelatin business as the struggling photography pioneer looks to boost its dwindling cash reserves.

Kodak is selling the Eastman Gelatine business to Rousselot, a division of the Vion Food Group. Terms were not disclosed. Eastman Gelatine produces gelatin used in photographic and printing processes as well as in food, pharmaceuticals.

India's telecom ministry told mobile phone operators on Thursday that they must scrap "illegal" mutual roaming agreements allowing them to provide seamless nationwide 3G services.

The pacts that let the operators offer 3G services outside their licensed zones are "in violation of terms and conditions of their licenses," the top bureaucrat in the telecom ministry said.

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.