Microsoft

The Defense Department is scrapping its $10 billion cloud-computing contract with Microsoft, ending the award process that's been mired in a legal battle with Amazon.

Microsoft's board of directors hired a private law firm to investigate a decades-old "intimate relationship" Bill Gates had with a company employee. The investigation, according to a company spokesman, took place in the months before the billionaire resigned from the board last year.

The state of Washington, hamstrung as many states have been by a slow distribution of COVID-19 vaccines, will deploy the National Guard, set up mass vaccination sites and create a new public-private partnership to lead a renewed effort to get the vaccine into the arms of people.

The group behind the suspected Russian attack into U.S. government agencies and private companies was able to hack into Microsoft's internal systems and access some of the company's source code, the tech giant said in a blog post on Thursday.

Walmart cited a potential boost from TikTok to its online presence, including the giant retailer's efforts to grow online advertising and a marketplace for third-party sellers.

By 2050, the tech giant pledges it will "remove from the environment all the carbon the company has emitted either directly or by electrical consumption since it was founded in 1975."

The Southern border may be far from Washington state, but software used by immigration officials is built in Seattle. Now tech workers are grappling with their responsibility as the creators of that technology. Some have become unlikely activists.

Amazon is alleging "unmistakable bias" on the government's part in awarding a massive military tech contract to rival Microsoft.This begins a new chapter in the protracted and contentious battle over the biggest cloud-computing contract in U.S. history — called JEDI, for Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure — worth up to $10 billion over 10 years.

After bemoaning that the state's highways, bridges, ferries and rail cars "are on a glide path to failure," Washington State Department of Transportation Secretary Roger Millar laid out the case for building an ultra-high speed railway on dedicated track.

In a new book, "Holding the Line: Inside Trump's Pentagon with Secretary Mattis," Guy Snodgrass, a retired Navy commander who worked closely with then-Defense Secretary Jim Mattis, writes that Trump called and directed Mattis to "screw Amazon" by locking it out of a chance to bid for the JEDI contract.