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China's Alibaba Group Holding Ltd said on Wednesday it would invest $1 billion into its Aliyun cloud computing arm to challenge Amazon.com Inc's lucrative Web Services division, opening a global front in the battle between the two e-commerce giants. With the global cloud computing market estimated by analysts to be worth about $20 billion, Alibaba said in a statement the investment would go toward setting up new Aliyun data centers in the Middle East, Singapore, Japan and Europe. Although Alibaba and Amazon have so far avoided competing directly in their core business of e-commerce outside China, Aliyun's international expansion takes aim squarely at Amazon Web Services (AWS), an increasingly central and profitable division of the Seattle-based company.

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Qualcomm shares fell 1.8 percent to $63.05 in after-market trading on Wednesday. The move comes after hedge fund Jana Partners called for Qualcomm to spin off its chip business from its highly profitable patent-licensing income, among other changes the activist asked for. “We decided we were going to take a fresh look at the corporate structure of the company,” Qualcomm president Derek Aberle said in an interview, adding that the chipmaker has reviewed its options twice already in the past decade.

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Japan's financial watchdog plans to seek a financial penalty on Toshiba Corp , currently being investigated by an independent committee over accounting irregularities, the Nikkei reported on Saturday. The Securities and Exchange Surveillance Commission (SESC) believes the company falsified financial statements and will recommend as early as September that the Financial Services Agency impose a fine, the business daily said, citing sources. An SESC spokesman declined to comment, while Toshiba officials were not immediately available for comment.

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They are among the world's most popular websites and are vital diplomatic channels for Iranian officials involved in the nuclear talks. While Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif leads the way on social media — his Twitter account has “Verified” blue tick status — he is far from alone in seeing its benefits. Aides to President Hassan Rouhani tweet regularly on his behalf, as do officials from supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei's office — most recently to restate Iran's “red lines” for a nuclear deal.

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Software security company Symantec Corp is in talks to sell its Veritas data storage business to private equity firm Carlyle Group LP , a person familiar with the matter said on Tuesday. Bloomberg News reported earlier that Symantec was nearing a deal to sell Veritas to Carlyle for between $7 billion and $8 billion, citing people with knowledge of the matter.

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Uber Technologies will suspend its UberPOP ride-hailing service in France, the U.S. company said on Friday, after it faced often-violent protests and local authorities denounced it as an illegal taxi service. After fierce protests last week by licensed French taxi drivers who argue it threatens their livelihood with unfair competition, France took two executives from California-based Uber into custody and said they will face trial in September. France's legal clampdown was the latest setback for Uber in Europe.

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A robust cyber security insurance policy can be tricky to procure, even for the most meticulous wealth management firms. Interest in cyber insurance has surged over the past year following a number of high-profile hackings, including one announced earlier this month involving the U.S. Office of Personnel Management. In response, many industries and the financial services industry in particular, have stepped up their vigilance against cyber crimes.

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U.S. intelligence chief James Clapper said on Thursday that China was the top suspect in the massive hacking of a U.S. government agency that compromised the personnel records of millions of Americans. The comments from Clapper, the director of National Intelligence (DNI), were first reported in The Wall Street Journal and marked the first time the Obama administration has publicly accused Beijing of the hacking attacks on the Office of Personnel Management. “You have to kind of salute the Chinese for what they did,” given the difficulty of the intrusion, the Journal quoted Clapper as saying at a Washington intelligence conference.

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(Reuters) – Apple Inc has removed several civil war games featuring Confederate flags from its App Store, some game developers said. South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley on Monday called on lawmakers to take down the Confederate battle flag at the state capitol grounds. Retailers such as Wal Mart Stores Inc and Sears Holdings Corp have stopped selling the flag.

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Chipmaker Advanced Micro Devices Inc is at the initial stage of reviewing whether to split itself in two or spin off a business, seeking to reverse its fortunes and take on rival Intel Corp, according to three people familiar with the matter. The review highlights Chief Executive Lisa Su's determination to consider every possible option to turn the company around. Su, however, who took over as CEO last October, judged that there is merit for the company to at least consider such a possibility again, the people added.