Alphabet, Microsoft, Amazon give Wall Street reason to cheer

Google parent Alphabet Inc , Microsoft Corp and Amazon.com Inc made headway in the latest quarter in the areas that will be their main engines of growth for years to come, driving up shares across the tech sector on Friday. For Alphabet, search traffic on mobiles surpassed desktop traffic worldwide for the first time, while Amazon was able to boost margins, an area of concern, as its cloud business boomed

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Myanmar’s reformist law used to stifle dissent

By Timothy Mclaughlin YANGON (Reuters) – Last week’s arrest of an NGO worker in Myanmar for a Facebook post is raising fears that legislation drawn up as part of the country’s economic and democratic liberalization are being used to stifle dissent in ways reminiscent of laws drafted by the former military junta. Myanmar only began to regain its freedoms of expression from 2011 after 49 years of military rule, and critics fear the arrest of Patrick Kum Jaa Lee for commenting on a picture showing a foot standing on a photo of commander-in-chief Min Aung Hlaing is a worrying backward step.

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