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Cloud, cloud, cloud, followed by Office, gaming, Surface and then Windows: By now, Microsoft has laid out its priorities, and the financial results Microsoft reported Wednesday afternoon reflected this. For consumers, the high point of Microsoft’s fourth-quarter calendar 2019 results was the fact that Microsoft reported $1.98 billion in Surface sales alone—almost, but not quite, [...]

Virgin Group founder Richard Branson suspended discussions with Saudia Arabia about a proposed $1 billion investment in Virgin’s space companies following allegations that journalist Jamal Khashoggi was murdered in the country’s consulate in Istanbul. “What has reportedly happened in Turkey around the disappearance of journalist Jamal Khashoggi, if proved true, would clearly change the ability [...]

In 2009, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation launched an ambitious project to improve teacher effectiveness among certain primary and secondary schools in California, Florida, Tennessee, and Pennsylvania. The goal was to reform teacher evaluations. More effective teachers, the foundation predicted, would improve student achievement, raise graduation rates, and help low-income and minority students get into college. [...]

Communications chipmaker Broadcom Ltd on Monday said it offered to buy smartphone chip supplier Qualcomm Inc for $70 per share or $103 billion (roughly Rs. 6,66,116 crores) in cash and stock, in what would be the biggest technology acquisition ever. A tie-up would combine two of the largest makers of wireless communications chips for mobile phones and raise the stakes for Intel [...]

  A decade-long wait by India’s cash-hungry real estate and infrastructure developers may finally be nearing an end. Birla Sun Life Asset Management Co. estimates that real estate and infrastructure trusts will raise as much as 600 billion rupees ($9 billion) this year as India rolls out the much-anticipated investment products mooted in 2007. Sterlite [...]

Business fliers in India drew a travel bill of US$29.6 billion (Rs2,01,909 crore) in 2015, making it among the world’s top 10 countries in spending on business travel, said a white paper released in Mumbai on Wednesday. While China topped the list followed by the US, Germany, Japan and the UK, India stood tenth, the [...]

GOOD NEWS, BAD news. A security firm says that the US Election Assistance Commission, which exists in part to help keep voting machines secure, was hacked, with 100 login credentials for sale on the black market. The good, or at least better, news is that the hack doesn’t appear to have had any impact on [...]

General Electric Co (GE.N) said on Wednesday it would sell its $3 billion industrial solutions business, which makes electrical equipment, as part of a push to focus on its core businesses. The industrial conglomerate expects to raise about $4 billion from the sale of the unit as well as the previously announced sale of its [...]

It’s been a bad week for a lot of Americans. How about an interesting distraction? The video above, from the American Museum of Natural History, shows essentially all of human history in just six minutes. It shows humanity spreading across the world over a few hundred thousand years — even as our population remained under [...]

BEIJING: Alibaba Group Holding Ltd’s Singles’ Day sales surged past last year’s 91.2 billion yuan ($13.36 billion) total with nearly nine hours left on the clock, but growth was markedly slower than in 2015 as shoppers sought even bigger price cuts. Amid fanfare and celebrity razzmatazz, sales on Alibaba’s platforms had raced to a billion [...]

Grab some popcorn—AT&T wants to take you to the movies. AT&T is buying Time Warner, the owner of the Warner Bros. movie studio as well as HBO and CNN, for $85.4 billion in a deal that could shake up the media landscape. The acquisition would combine a telecom giant that owns a leading cellphone business, [...]

Duke Energy announced it has reached an agreement to sell its international businesses in Peru, Chile, Ecuador, Guatemala, El Salvador and Argentina to I Squared Capital for approximately $1.2 billion enterprise value (cash and the assumption of debt). This represents the full remainder of the Latin American businesses Duke Energy is exiting. The after-tax proceeds [...]