Business Highlights

Microsoft is shutting down its main LinkedIn service in China later this year after internet rules were tightened by Beijing, the latest American tech giant to lessen its ties to the country.

The company said in a blog post Thursday it has faced a "significantly more challenging operating environment and greater compliance requirements in China."

LinkedIn will replace its localized platform in China with a new app called InJobs that has some of LinkedIn's career-networking features but "will not include a social feed or the ability to share posts or articles."

LinkedIn in March said it would pause new member sign-ups on LinkedIn China because of unspecified regulatory issues. China's internet watchdog in May said it had found LinkedIn as well as Microsoft's Bing search engine and about 100 other apps were engaged in improper collection and use of data and ordered them to fix the problem.

Several scholars this year also reported getting warning letters from LinkedIn that they were sharing "prohibited content" that would not be made viewable in China but could still be seen by LinkedIn users elsewhere.

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ROME -- Italy's bankrupt national airline, Alitalia, made its final flights Thursday before formally folding, marking the end of business for the 74-year-old carrier and an end of an era for Italy.

Alitalia, which had operated in the red for more than a decade, will be replaced by a new national carrier, ITA, or Italy Air Transport, which launches Friday.

The European Union's executive commission has given the go-ahead to a 1.35 billion-euro ($1.58 billion) injection of government funding into the new airline, but ITA only plans to hire around a quarter of the estimated 10,000 Alitalia employees.

Among its routes, ITA plans to operate flights to New York from Milan and Rome, and to Tokyo, Boston and Miami from Rome. European destinations from Rome and Milan's Linate airport will also include Paris, London, Amsterdam, Brussels, Frankfurt and Geneva.

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BATON ROUGE, La. -- Industrial gas supplier Air Products announced Thursday it will build a $4.5 billion clean energy facility in Louisiana's capital region, a project that Gov. John Bel Edwards said will help the state's work to reduce carbon emissions in the heart of the petrochemical corridor.

The planned complex in Ascension Parish will produce "blue hydrogen," which uses natural gas to produce an alternative fuel with the carbon dioxide emissions captured and stored underground. Air Products said the facility will create 170 permanent jobs with a total annual payroll of $15.9 million, plus thousands of construction jobs to build the site over three years.

Air Products President and CEO Seifi Ghasemi said the Ascension Parish site will be the largest permanent carbon dioxide sequestration facility in the world, helping to capture human-caused emissions and keeping them out of the atmosphere.

Air Products will capture and store about 95% of the carbon dioxide generated at the facility in deep underground geologic formations leased from the state. The complex is expected to be up and running in 2026.

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