WASHINGTON, (Reuters) by  David Lawder - Lebanon has withdrawn its nomination of Ziad Alexandre Hayek to run for World Bank president, but the government privatization official said he is trying to persuade board members of the multilateral development lender to renominate him. Hayek told Reuters on Monday that he received a formal notification from Lebanon's finance ministry that his nomination was rescinded, two weeks after he announced his candidacy on Twitter. He said the decision was due to pressure from other governments, which he declined to name. An official with Lebanon's finance ministry confirmed that the nomination had been withdrawn before it was registered by the World Bank's nominating committee, adding: "there was no American pressure or other (pressure)." The same official said some parts of the Lebanese government which includes nearly all of Lebanon's rival political factions - wanted to nominate Hayek, but others did not. In the end, the finance ministry decided not to proceed with a candidate viewed as having little chance of winning, the official said. The withdrawal leaves U.S. Treasury Undersecretary for International Affairs David Malpass as the sole announced candidate to lead the World Bank with about 10 days to go before the nomination period closes on March 14. A World Bank spokesman declined to comment on the decision. The United States, which wields the most voting power on the World Bank's board, has chosen every leader of the institution since it began operations in 1946. Challengers from Nigeria and Colombia emerged in 2012 under a new open nomination process when the U.S. nominee, Jim Yong Kim, was first elected as World Bank president. Kim resigned in January to join a private infrastructure fund

By Maria Vasilyeva MOSCOW (Reuters) – In pre-war Syria, Safaa Al-Kurdi sold wedding dresses. Fed up with the conflict, the mother-of-three fled …

by Chris Neiger (TMFNewsie) -- There's a battle raging between a handful of data storage companies to be the dominant player in the public cloud computing market. Apps, analytics, advertising, artificial intelligence and a host of other services all depend on cloud-based data to function, which is why Amazon (NASDAQ:AMZN), Alphabet (NASDAQ:GOOG) (NASDAQ:GOOGL) and Microsoft (NASDAQ:MSFT) have invested so heavily in this tech over the past few years. Each company is trying to carve out more market share in the $278 billion (by 2023) public cloud computing market. And the good news is that there's likely enough cloud computing demand for all three companies -- and their investors -- to benefit. If you're interested in investing in the top cloud computing stocks, Alphabet, Microsoft, and Amazon are the top-notch contenders you should be considering. Here's why.

Alphabet's growing focus

Alphabet sells cloud computing services through its Google Cloud Platform (GCP), and right now it holds a 9.5% market share, making it the third-largest player behind Amazon and Microsoft. The company doesn't disclose how much its cloud platform makes, but a recent report from Canalys estimates that sales from GCP were $2.2 billion in the fourth quarter of 2018. That's far less than Amazon's revenue of $7.3 billion, but Google is making moves to help it catch up to its rivals. Google has made several purchases of smaller cloud computing companies to help boost its services, the most recent one being the acquisition of a cloud migration company called Alooma. Google has also said that it will spend $13 billion to add additional data centers throughout the U.S. to improve its cloud services. On Alphabet's most recent earnings call, management said that GCP had more than doubled the amount of cloud computing deals worth more than $1 million last year. And with the company's recent commitment to spending billions on building more data centers and snatching up smaller cloud companies along the way, counting Alphabet out in the cloud space would be a huge mistake.

Microsoft's reinvention of itself

Microsoft has emerged as one of the strongest cloud computing contenders through its Azure cloud service. The company has about 16.5% of the market right now, and in the most recent quarter sales from Azure were up 76% year over year. The company made several significant cloud deals in the second quarter, including agreements with UBS, MasterCard, Walgreens Boots Alliance, Starbucks, and Kroger. The new Kroger deal will use Azure and Microsoft's artificial intelligence prowess to improve in-store customer experiences. Microsoft's Azure is not only generating significant sales for the company, it's also an essential driver of gross margin as well. In the second quarter the company's commercial cloud gross margin increased by five points to an impressive 62%. For a company that was once synonymous with PC software, it's nothing short of amazing for Microsoft to have successfully transitioned to the cloud -- and become the No. 2 player no less. Investors should expect a lot more from Microsoft's cloud business, as the company looks to pair Azure even more with artificial intelligence in the future to become a dominant AI cloud computing company.

by Bill Gates -- Textbooks are becoming obsolete as software is finally changing how students learn. I read more than my share of textbooks. But it’s a pretty limited way to learn something. Even the best text can’t figure out which concepts you understand and which ones you need more help with. It certainly can’t tell your teacher how well you grasped last night’s assigned reading. But now, thanks to software, the standalone textbook is becoming a thing of the past. Suppose you’re taking high school algebra. Instead of just reading a chapter on solving equations, you can look at the text online, watch a super-engaging video that shows you how it’s done, and play a game that reinforces the concepts. Then you solve a few problems online, and the software creates new quiz questions to zero in on the ideas you’re not quite getting.

All of this is a complement to what teachers do, not a replacement. Your teacher gets a rich report showing what you read and watched, which problems you got right and wrong, and the areas where you need more help. When you come to class the next day, she is equipped with a ton of specific information and suggestions to help her make the most of her time with you. When I told you about this type of software in previous letters, it was mostly speculative. But now I can report that these tools have been adopted in thousands of U.S. classrooms from kindergarten through high school. Zearn, i-Ready, and LearnZillion are examples of digital curricula used by students and teachers throughout the U.S. More than 3,000 schools are teaching a free digital course that I fund called Big History, which uses software to give students immediate feedback on their writing assignments.