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This is NEWS Plus Special English. I'm Mark Griffiths in Beijing. Here is the news.

On an island where most people have no Internet access, the arrival of mobile phone email service was embraced with joy.

Tens of thousands of Cubans began emailing like crazy in March, for days, until the service started to fail, taking much of Cuba's already shaky voice and text-messaging mobile service down with it.

The island's aging cellphone towers became swamped by the new flood of email traffic; creating havoc for anyone trying to use the system. Users had to make eight or nine attempts to successfully send an email. Even voice calls by non-subscribers' began to drop mid-conversation. Callers sounded like they were phoning from the bottom of the sea. Ordinary text messages arrived days late, or not at all.

Since then, the state telecom monopoly Etecsa has issued a rare apology and the troubles have eased. But problems with the service, dubbed Nauta, offer a rare window into the Internet in Cuba. The country's digital age has been achingly slow to spread since arriving in 1996, leaving the country virtually isolated from the world of streaming video, photo-sharing and 4G cellphones.

Cuba's government blames the technological problems on a U.S. embargo that prevents most American businesses from selling products to the Caribbean country. Critics of the government say it deliberately strangles the Internet to halt the spread of dissent. Other observers offer a less political explanation: a government desperate for foreign exchange is investing little in infrastructure improvements while extracting as much revenue as possible from communications services largely paid for by Cubans' wealthier overseas relatives.

Experts say that the last explanation appears to be the primary culprit in the case of Nauta, in which the government tried to open connections with the world but floundered due to apparent poor planning and underinvestment.

About 100,000 people, or around 5 percent of Cuban cellphone users, had subscribed to the service even though it cost 50 times that of many U.S. data plans.

This is NEWS Plus Special English.

Two of the world's largest technology giants have reached an agreement to settle all of their lawsuits against each other regarding smartphone patents.

Apple and Google have announced that they are dropping nearly two dozen lawsuits in U.S. and European courts against each other. The disputes revolved around the operating systems Apple uses for its iPhone and Google's Android software as well as patent infringement accusations from Motorola Mobility, which Google acquired two years ago.

Apple and Google said they would work together on patent reform and that the agreement does not include the cross licensing of technology.

You're listening to NEWS Plus Special English. I'm Mark Griffiths in Beijing.

Health officials have reported what appears to be the first time that a mysterious Middle East virus has spread from one person to another in the United States.

An Illinois man probably picked up an infection from an Indiana man who earlier this month became the first U.S. case of Middle East respiratory syndrome, or MERS. The Illinois man, however, never needed medical treatment and is reported to be feeling well.

The U.S. health department says the two men met twice before the Indiana man fell ill and was hospitalized, shortly after traveling from Saudi Arabia where he lived and was employed as a health care worker. Officials think the virus spread during a 40-minute business meeting that involved no more contact than a handshake.

The new report also is not considered evidence that the virus is spreading more easily among people than previously thought. The virus is not considered to be highly contagious, and only spreads from person to person with close contact. Many of those who have become sick in the Middle East have been family members or health care workers caring for MERS patients.

MERS belongs to the coronavirus family that includes the common cold and SARS, or severe acute respiratory syndrome. SARS caused some 800 deaths globally in 2003.