BERLIN (Reuters) - Facebook said on Friday it would roll out a new feature designed to make political advertising more transparent in time for a key German regional election, as it seeks to restore trust after a massive data breach.

BEIJING (Reuters) - China has long pushed the development of top-end semiconductors as a key strategic objective.

MOSCOW (Reuters) - Russia's standards agency said on Friday it had been informed about the voluntary recall by German carmaker Daimler of 24,763 Mercedes-Benz cars sold from 2014 to 2017.

TOKYO (Reuters) - Japan's cryptocurrency exchanges should be regulated more like banks as they hold investors' assets while offering trading platforms, the chief executive of online brokerage Monex Group Inc said.

BERLIN (Reuters) - Hamburg's data protection ombudsman has opened non-compliance procedures against Facebook, which has been accused of abusing its users' data, a spokesman for the representative said.

SHANGHAI (Reuters) - E-commerce titan Alibaba Group Holding Ltd has bought a Chinese microchip maker to further its cloud-based "internet of things" (IoT) business, underscoring its commitment to the chip industry, an Alibaba spokeswoman said on Friday.

SHANGHAI (Reuters) - Chinese e-commerce firm Alibaba Group Holding Ltd has acquired Chinese chip maker Hangzhou C-SKY Microsystems to underpin its cloud-based "internet of things" (IoT) business, an Alibaba spokeswoman said on Friday.

JAKARTA (Reuters) - Indonesia has given Facebook a week to provide more information on how personal data of about one million of its citizens was misused and on the steps the company is taking to prevent such breaches, the country's communications ministry said.

(Reuters) - Facebook Inc's privacy practices were cleared by auditing firm PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP in an assessment completed last year of the period in which data analytics consultancy Cambridge Analytica gained access to the personal data of millions of Facebook users.

TOKYO (Reuters) - A two-armed robot in a Japanese factory carefully stacks rice balls in a box, which a worker carries off for shipment to convenience stores. At another food-packaging plant, a robot shakes pepper and powdered cheese over pasta that a person has just arranged in a container.

NEW YORK (Reuters) - JPMorgan Chase & Co has tested a new blockchain platform for issuing financial instruments with the National Bank of Canada and other large firms, they said on Friday, seeking to streamline origination, settlement, interest rate payments and other processes.

HONG KONG (Reuters) - China's ZTE Corp said on Friday that a ban on the sale of parts and software to the company was unfair and threatens its survival, and vowed to safeguard its interests through all legal means.

HONG KONG (Reuters) - Chinese telecom equipment maker ZTE Corp said on Friday a U.S. decision to impose sanctions on the company was unfair and threatens the survival of the technology giant as it pledged to safeguard its rights through all legal means.

TAIPEI (Reuters) - Shares of Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co Ltd tumbled and other Apple supplier and chip stocks fell after it cut its full-year revenue target on softer demand for smartphones.

TAIPEI (Reuters) - Shares of Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co Ltd opened down 6.8 percent on Friday, after it revised its full-year revenue target to the low end of its earlier forecast due to softer demand for smartphones and uncertainty in the cryptocurrency mining market.

(Reuters) - Consumer activists and technology experts are advising consumers to hold off on buying Android handsets from China's ZTE until the company clarifies whether U.S. sanctions against the company prevent it from providing operating system updates for its devices.

(Reuters) - Chipmaker Qualcomm Inc is cutting 1,500 jobs across multiple divisions at its offices in California, as part of its promise to investors to cut annual costs by $1 billion.

(Reuters) - Japanese e-commerce company Rakuten Inc will issue as much as 200 billion yen ($1.86 billion) to prepare for its entry into the country's mobile phone service market, the Nikkei business daily reported on Thursday.

BERLIN (Reuters) - German lawmakers will question a senior Facebook Inc manager about data privacy in the wake of revelations that the personal information of millions of users wrongly ended up in the hands of political consultancy Cambridge Analytica.

(Reuters) - Shares in Apple Inc and its suppliers fell on Thursday after a raft of analysts read a prediction of softer smartphone sales from Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co Ltd as driven chiefly by concern about demand for iPhones.