Wednesday newspaper round-up: Ryanair, Uber, Walt Disney/21st Century Fox
The World Bank will end its financial support for oil and gas exploration within the next two years in response to the growing threat posed by climate change. In a statement that delighted campaigners opposed to fossil fuels, the Bank used a conference in Paris to announce that it “will no longer finance upstream oil and gas” after 2019. – Guardian
Pilots working for Ryanair in Ireland have called a one-day strike next week, potentially disrupting flights for Europe’s biggest airline on its home territory. Flights to and from Dublin, Shannon and Cork are likely to be affected by the walkout on Wednesday. The action has been taken in a bid to win collective representation in pay deals rather than through Ryanair’s own employee channels. - Guardian
York has become the third UK city to refuse Uber a licence to operate, citing concerns about the ride-hailing company's 2016 data breach, which affected 2.7m British users and drivers, and customer complaints. The City of York council’s gambling, licensing and regulatory committee had been considering an application by Uber Britannia Ltd to renew its private hire operator’s licence in York at a meeting late on Tuesday, but ultimately the councillors decided to refuse the application. – Telegraph
Canada’s government has launched a fresh attack in the row over the US imposing import tariffs on airliners built by Bombardier, a move which threatened UK jobs. Launching a tender to buy 88 new fighters, the Canadian government referenced tension with the US after Boeing-led a campaign for trade levies on imports of Bombardier’s C-Series airliners. – Telegraph
Walt Disney is on the verge of clinching a deal to acquire a sizeable part of Rupert Murdoch’s 21st Century Fox entertainment group in a deal worth about $60 billion that could be announced as early as tomorrow. Negotiations were moving quickly last night for a deal in which Disney would take control of 21st Century Fox’s stake in Sky, the European broadcaster, as well as 20th Century Fox, its Hollywood film studio business, plus a string of other companies including Star India. The rest of Fox’s assets, including Fox News Channel, would be spun off into a separate company worth about $10 a share, according to reports. - The Times
An explosion at the Baumgarten gas facility in Austria yesterday left one dead, 21 injured and melted plastic on cars up to half a kilometre away, but its shockwaves were felt even further afield. With Europe in the grip of a cold snap and about a fifth of the UK’s gas production already forced to shut down after the closure of the Forties pipeline, the loss of the key gas hub in Austria that processes supplies from Russia sent prices up across the Continent. – The Times