Universal last month offered to divest Downtown’s royalty services platform Curve to address the European Commission’s competition concerns

International News via Reuters:

Universal Music Group is set to secure EU antitrust approval for its $775 million bid for Downtown Music after regulators signalled acceptance of its offer to sell the latter’s royalty services platform, people with direct knowledge of the matter said.

Universal last month offered to divest Downtown’s royalty services platform Curve to address the European Commission’s competition concerns.

The EU antitrust watchdog has not demanded further concessions, the people said.

The Commission, which is scheduled to decide on the deal by February 27, and Universal declined to comment.

The acquisition, via Universal unit Virgin Music Group and announced in December 2024, has drawn criticism and pushback from a wide swathe of independent labels, worried about the boost to Universal’s market power and want the deal to be blocked.

Downtown owns a major music publisher and a number of other businesses that help musicians collect royalties.

The Commission last year warned that Universal may have the ability and incentive to gain access to commercially sensitive data that is stored and processed by Downtown following the acquisition.

Reporting by Foo Yun Chee; Editing by Kirsten Donovan and Louise Heavens

Nearly three-quarters of the global population live in countries classified as “water insecure” or “critically water insecure”, and 4 billion people face severe water scarcity at least one month per year

International News via Reuters:

The world is facing irreversible water “bankruptcy”, with billions of people struggling to cope with the consequences of decades of overuse as well as shrinking supplies from lakes, rivers, glaciers and wetlands, U.N. researchers said on Tuesday.

Nearly three-quarters of the global population live in countries classified as “water insecure” or “critically water insecure”, and 4 billion people face severe water scarcity at least one month per year, the United Nations University Institute for Water, Environment and Health warned in a report.

“Many regions are living beyond their hydrological means, and many critical water systems are already bankrupt,” said Kaveh Madani, lead author and director of the institute.

“By acknowledging the reality of water bankruptcy, we can finally make the hard choices that will protect people, economies and ecosystems,” he said.  

The report said water supplies are “already in a post-crisis state of failure” after decades of unsustainable extraction rates that have drawn down water “savings” contained in aquifers, glaciers, soils, wetlands and river ecosystems, with supplies also degraded by pollution. 

More than 170 million hectares of irrigated cropland – an area larger than Iran – are under “high” or “very high” water stress, and economic damage from land degradation, groundwater depletion and climate change amounts to more than $300 billion a year worldwide, the report said. 

Three billion people and more than half of global food production are concentrated in areas already facing unstable or declining water storage levels, while salinisation has also degraded more than 100 million hectares of cropland, it said.

The researchers wrote that the current approach to solving water problems was no longer fit for purpose, and the priority was not “returning to normal” but a new “global water agenda” designed to minimise damage.

However, Jonathan Paul, geoscience professor at Royal Holloway, University of London, said the report did not address one major factor behind the crisis.

“The elephant in the room, which is mentioned explicitly only once, is the role of massive and uneven population growth in driving so many of the manifestations of water bankruptcy,” he said.

Reporting by David Stanway; Editing by Hugh Lawson

The country remains in shock after the first-ever fatal accident on the country’s extensive high-speed rail network, which occurred on Sunday evening near Adamuz in Cordoba province

International News via Reuters:

Spain’s rail operator Adif ordered trains on the Madrid-Barcelona high-speed line to limit their speed on Tuesday on concerns about the track’s condition, two days after one of Europe’s deadliest train crashes on another line left at least 42 dead.

The country remains in shock after the first-ever fatal accident on the country’s extensive high-speed rail network, which occurred on Sunday evening near Adamuz in Cordoba province, about 360 km (223 miles) south of Madrid. Experts say a faulty rail joint may be key to determining the cause of the derailment that led to the collision between two trains.

Train drivers last year called on Adif to limit speeds due to their unease about deterioration on several of Spain’s high-speed lines, after it opened the network to private competition in 2020 to offer low-cost alternatives to state-run Renfe’s trains.

“We have detected and reported to all operators much more vibration and wear and tear on the infrastructure since the liberalisation and a 60% increase in traffic,” Diego Martin, general secretary of the Semaf drivers’ union, told Reuters.

Adif said it hoped to lift the speed limit on the line once its maintenance team had inspected two stretches totalling nearly 150 km (93 miles) where drivers have reported bumps on the tracks.

At the site of the crash near Adamuz, rescuers used heavy machinery overnight and in the early hours of Tuesday to level the ground and gain access to the worst-hit carriages as they sought to recover the remains of people still missing.  

They aimed to use two cranes to lift the front carriages of the train belonging to the state-run Alvia service, which had plunged down a 4-metre (13 ft) embankment after the crash, and the rear carriages of the train operated by private consortium Iryo.

The collision occurred in rolling, olive-growing countryside in the foothills of a mountain range at a site only reachable by a single-track road, making it difficult for rescuers to gain access with heavy machinery.

One more body was found overnight within the wreck of the Iryo train, which had derailed, and another death was confirmed later on Tuesday raising the death toll to 42, authorities said.

BODIES STILL TRAPPED IN WRECKAGE

Interior Minister Fernando Grande-Marlaska said police had received 43 missing-person reports, which broadly matched the provisional death toll, but cautioned that the final number would not be confirmed until rescue teams had lifted the worst-affected carriages to see what was underneath.

Some relatives continued to wait for news of their loved ones as authorities worked on identifying the dead.

Osiris Sevilla described her anxiety as she waited for news about her husband outside an emergency centre in Cordoba but said she hadn’t given up hope that he’d survived.

“He didn’t like trains… Since we got together, this is the first time he took a train,” she said.

Spain’s King Felipe visited the site of the tragedy on Tuesday and spoke to residents, including 16-year-old Julio Rodriguez, who with his mother and a friend was one of the first to reach the scene of the accident.

He described the scene to El Mundo newspaper as “like a massacre… with dismembered bodies, limbs here and there”.

Survivors also spoke of their ordeal.

Lola Beltran told TVE she had changed carriage minutes before the crash, moving from her assigned seat in one of the hardest-hit cars to another carriage to sit with a colleague. 

“We had to break the windows with emergency hammers and pry open the doors to get out,” Beltran said, describing scenes of chaos, screams, and torn-out seats.  

BROKEN RAIL: CAUSE OR CONSEQUENCE?

A photo circulated by Spanish police showing a broken rail with the marker “1” beside it strongly suggested the fracture occurred at, or very near, the initial point of the derailment, Scottish railway engineer and author Gareth Dennis told Reuters.

He said the track just before the break looked intact, making it the likely trigger for the train leaving the tracks. 

Dennis also said the fracture appeared close to a rail weld, where steel beside the weld can be a weak spot. Cold weather can raise tensile stress as rails contract, he said.    

“The interesting question is why did the rail break,” Dennis said, rather than why the train derailed.

Transport Minister Oscar Puente urged patience as the investigation proceeds. He said all hypotheses were open but it was “very strange” for the rear of a train that was not exceeding the speed limit to derail on a straight stretch.

The discovery of a broken rail was “one more piece of data” and did not itself prove any single scenario, Puente said, adding that the key question was whether it was the cause or the consequence of the derailment.

($1 = 0.8516 euros)

Reporting by Nina Lopez, Michale Gore, Susana Vera, Leonardo Benassatto, Corina Pons and Emma Pinedo; Writing by David Latona and Charlie Devereux; Editing by Charlie Devereux, Tomasz Janowski and Gareth Jones