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The day’s business news at a glance

Record highs for major

US stock indexes

A day of modest gains on Wall Street resulted in more milestones for U.S. stocks Wednesday as the Dow Jones industrial average closed above

23,000 points for the first time.

The Standard & Poor’s 500 index and Nasdaq composite also finished at record highs. Technology stocks and financial companies led the gainers as investors weighed the latest batch of company earnings. Strong quarterly results drove IBM shares to their biggest one-day gain since 2009.

IRS still enforcing Obama era insurance mandate

Contrary to widespread perceptions, the IRS still appears to be enforcing the unpopular Obama-era requirement that most people carry health insurance or risk a fine.

The agency says it will automatically reject electronic returns for tax year 2017 that don’t specify if the taxpayer had health insurance.

Taxpayers are supposed to say if they had coverage, or they were eligible for an exemption, or if they will pay the fine. But every year several million skip over that.

Bootleg Libyan oil,

shady havens

On tiny Malta, a star investigative reporter had been digging into plenty of international intrigue before she was blown up by a car bomb.

Malta’s reputation as a tax haven, its cozy links with nearby lawless Libya and its legal passports-for-sale program were just some of the fodder for reports by Daphne Caruana Galizia.

That means investigators have many possibilities to follow as they try to discover who killed her Monday as she drove near her home.

Twitter vows crackdown on abusive tweets

Twitter is vowing to crack down further on hate speech and sexual harassment on its platform, days after CEO Jack Dorsey said in a tweetstorm that the company was “still” not doing enough to protect its users.

The policy changes were specifically aimed at protecting women who unknowingly or unwillingly had nude pictures of themselves distributed online or were subject to unwanted sexual advances, as well as shield groups subject to hateful imagery, symbols and threats of violence.

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