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By Dustin Volz WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Facebook Inc prohibited global users from coordinating person-to-person private sales of firearms on its online social network and its Instagram photo-sharing service on Friday, countering concerns that it was increasingly being used to circumvent background checks on gun purchases. U.S. President Barack Obama has urged social media companies to clamp down on gun sales organized on their platforms. It updates Facebook's regulated goods policy, introduced in March 2014, that banned people from selling marijuana, pharmaceuticals and illegal drugs.

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Xerox Corp will split into two companies, one holding its legacy printer operations and the other its business process outsourcing unit, it said on Friday, in a bid to be more nimble after years of trying to integrate the businesses. Activist investor Carl Icahn, who first revealed a stake in Xerox in November, will get three board seats on the outsourcing company. Xerox Chief Executive Officer Ursula Burns said in an interview on Friday that the strategic review had been underway before Icahn publicly revealed he had bought Xerox shares.

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Apple Inc is expected to report a 1.3 percent increase in iPhone sales in the holiday quarter, its slowest ever and a far cry from the double-digit growth investors have come to expect. Apple sold 75.5 million iPhones in the October-December quarter, according to research firm FactSet StreetAccount, 1 million more than what was sold in the year-ago quarter. Shares of Apple, which will announce earnings after markets close on Tuesday, were trading up 0.3 percent at $99.76, after dipping to $98.07 in morning trading.

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The US Environmental Protection Agency ordered the state of Michigan today to take “immediate action to address serious and ongoing concerns” with the city of Flint’s drinking water system, which has been contaminated for more than 18 months with elevated levels of lead. “EPA has determined that the City of Flint’s and the State of Michigan’s responses to the drinking water crisis in Flint have been inadequate to protect the public health and that these failures continue,” the order reads. The EPA will begin sampling Flint's tap water and publishing analysis results on its website and lead an independent investigation into what could have been done to prevent the crisis.

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GoPro Inc estimated fourth-quarter revenue below market expectations due to disappointing sales of its action cameras, and said it would cut 7 percent of its workforce, sending its shares into freefall. GoPro shares plunged 28 percent to $10.50 in extended trading, or less than half its 2014 IPO price of $24. The San Mateo, California-based company said it expects revenue of about $435 million for the fourth quarter, well below analysts' average estimate of $511.9 million, according to Thomson Reuters I/B/E/S. The company, which had about 1,500 employees at the end of 2015, said quarterly revenue was also hit by a price cut meant to boost demand for its Hero4 Session cameras.

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Google will need to add to the number of partners to develop the next phase of its self-driving project, but the president of that project did not name any of those partners-to-be. John Krafcik, president of the Google self-driving project, in a speech on Tuesday at an auto industry conference in Detroit, did not mention the name of any automaker or say whether it would partner with any automakers to build a fully autonomous car. Krafick said Google wants to form some partnerships in 2016.

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By Alexandria Sage LAS VEGAS (Reuters) – Germans love the latest wave of touch-free car controls, which respond to the flick of a wrist or the swipe of a hand, as it means no messy fingerprints on their spotless dashboards. Germany's BMW demonstrated a 7 Series car that recognizes five simple gestures, from a finger twirl to the right to raise the music volume and a hand swipe to decline an incoming call. Japan's Pioneer had a minty scent shoot out of a dashboard to revive a driver after a car seat sensor detected a falling heart rate, a possible prelude to nodding off.

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The stock briefly traded as low as $99.87, its lowest level since Aug. 24, a day when the entire stock market suffered a brief 'flash crash.' Apple shares traded as low as $92 that day. Apple stock closed down nearly 2 percent at $100.70 on Nasdaq on Wednesday, amid a broadly lower stock market. The stock's decline comes as a growing number of analysts are trimming their estimates for iPhone sales – the bedrock of Apple's business – with some predicting sales this year will decline on an annual basis for the first time since the phone was introduced.

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By Julia Fioretti BRUSSELS (Reuters) – Facebook said on Monday it would appeal a court ruling ordering it to stop tracking the online activities of non-Facebook users in Belgium who visit Facebook pages, or face a 250,000 euro ($269,000) daily fine. Belgium's data protection regulator took the U.S. company to court in June, accusing it of trampling on EU privacy law by tracking people without a Facebook account without their consent. At stake is the so-called 'datr' cookie, which Facebook places on people's browsers when they visit a Facebook.com site or click a Facebook 'Like' button on other websites, allowing it to track the online activities of that browser.

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Vodafone UK said on Saturday hackers had accessed the accounts of 1,827 of its customers this week, the second cyber attack on a British telecoms company this month. The attackers had potentially gained access to the victims' bank sort codes and the last four numbers of their bank accounts, along with their names and mobile telephone numbers, a Vodafone spokesman said. “This incident was driven by criminals using email addresses and passwords acquired from an unknown source external to Vodafone,” he added in a statement.