A LGBT advocacy group in China that has spearheaded many of the country's legal cases pushing for greater rights is halting its work for the foreseeable future.

LGBT Rights Advocacy China announced it was ceasing all activities and shutting down its social media accounts in an announcement on social media Thursday.

U.S. authorities on Wednesday put the Israeli maker of the Pegasus spyware on a list of restricted companies, taking aim at software central to a scandal over surveillance of journalists and officials.

Yahoo Inc. is leaving the China market, suspending its services there as of Monday amid what it says is an "increasingly challenging" business and legal environment.

Foreign technology firms have been pulling out or downsizing their operations in mainland China as a strict data privacy law specifying how companies collect and store data takes effect.

Facebook said it will shut down its face-recognition system and delete the face prints of more than 1 billion people amid growing concerns about the technology and its misuse by governments, police and others.

"This change will represent one of the largest shifts in facial recognition usage in the technology's history," Jerome Pesenti, vice president of artificial intelligence for Facebook's new parent company, Meta, wrote in a blog post on Tuesday.

Around 2,500 Amazon employees at seven sites across Germany were on strike Tuesday and unions warned stoppages could continue up to Christmas.

Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett and French President Emmanuel Macron have discussed the Israeli-made spyware said to have targeted Macron's phone, an Israeli diplomatic source said.

Like many companies in trouble before it, Facebook is changing its name and logo.

Facebook Inc. is now called Meta Platforms Inc., or Meta for short, to reflect what CEO Mark Zuckerberg said Thursday is its commitment to developing the new surround-yourself technology known as the " metaverse." But the social network itself will still be called Facebook.

The reports of hateful and violent posts on Facebook started pouring in on the night of May 28 last year, soon after then-President Donald Trump sent a warning on social media that looters in Minneapolis would be shot.

It had been three days since Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin kneeled on the neck of George Floyd for more than eight minutes until the 46-year-old Black man lost consciousness, showing no signs of life. A video taken by a bystander had been viewed millions of times online. Protests had taken over Minnesota's largest city and would soon spread throughout cities across America.

The Facebook Papers project represents a unique collaboration among 17 American news organizations, including The Associated Press. Journalists from a variety of newsrooms, large and small, worked together to gain access to thousands of pages of internal company documents obtained by Frances Haugen, the former Facebook product manager-turned-whistleblower.

A separate consortium of European news outlets had access to the same set of documents, and members of both groups began publishing content related to their analysis of the materials at 7 a.m. EDT on Monday, Oct. 25. That date and time was set by the partner news organizations to give everyone in the consortium an opportunity to fully analyze the documents, report out relevant details, and to give Facebook's public relations staff ample time to respond to questions and inquiries raised by that reporting.

As the Gaza war raged and tensions surged across the Middle East last May, Instagram briefly banned the hashtag #AlAqsa, a reference to the Al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem's Old City, a flash point in the conflict.

Facebook, which owns Instagram, later apologized, explaining its algorithms had mistaken the third-holiest site in Islam for the militant group Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade, an armed offshoot of the secular Fatah party.