but only one can be top cat today. this blue grey beauty got the edge but it seems just by a whisker. business news is up next with my very own finicky colleague rob watts stick around to be right. sure of. what unites. us what divides. cooking the books driving. what binds the continent together. good answers and stories aplenty. spawn why don't people. focus on your own on g.w. . is going to. tell my managers you know who today nothing

would change you know the banks. and so was the language of the bank. speaking the truth global news that matters g.w. made for mines. french train make up all stem speeds towards a deal with canadian competitive bone body ice as it tries to compete with bigger rivals from china. as the use threatens tough i hate speech rules facebook's mark zuckerberg warns brussels not to stifle freedom of expression. and elsewhere in big tech meet the activists trying to improve conditions for workers at thomas. places d w business on robots in berlin welcome along. french train maker is fast approaching

a deal to help it counter the growing threat from rivals in china it says it signed agreements to buy the rail arm of canada's bombard to 6200000000 euros from body a which makes trains for the likes of a barn and london underground is looking to make major changes to deal with it steps alston is also keen to complete the deal after regulators blocked its attempt to merge with german competitor siemens last year. let's get to the bottom of this with our reporter daniel wynter daniel welcome along so why is alston so keen to snuff out from body israel well rob i mean alson has been casting about to bulk up for a while now and mean as you just said that a block to deal with with siemens really angering the e.u. so much they had to intervene there it seems and it's an effort to create a challenger to china see os see which is a better model of

a train may come you can see this now combination of. a would get close becoming the 2nd biggest train maker in the world with 15300000000 euros of sales and 2018 not quite enough to beat c r r c n n a 21000000000 euros but much closer after all the threat from this chinese competition is not necessarily just on the global stage but also in europe as well so c.r.c. is to get a foothold in europe now deutsche bank has assessed the potential of of the merger and they say that for alstom their earnings per share could go up by about 17 percent and that's a figure which investors pay close attention to so you know that's the argument that alstom has it wants to bulk up its presence in order to fight off the competition so what is it about bombarding a specifically that makes it attractive to alston well it's attractive because yes it would bulk up alstom but also it's having difficulties at the moment as well mean if we take a look at share price tumbling over the past few years. is and from well over 2

canadian dollars per share to as little as $1.12 before rumors of this merger got really going as we can see right there now also some things that can tame the problems of the company as bomb body is piling on debt and it has a $36000000000.00 order backlog that it has to deal with just last week it announced that it was dropping a venture with air bus as it tries to save cash so it is struggling quite a bit at the moment so in short the company is relatively cheap right now and bomb body can't be too demanding in return because it's got problems of its own and yet the company would genuinely increase alston's presence. but also had a bad experience last year when his merger with siemens was blocked by the e.u. who's to say that it's not going to happen this time it could happen again i mean there's no. concrete reason why it couldn't i mean let's just look at the union members of a game it is a german union now they. represent workers at. bonn which is

a big customer of both on body a and of alstom as well and you know it's interesting to see that they think that this could be a threat as well this fused thing meaning that the bargaining aspects that the bargaining benefits have would be reduced and so it also seems that you know due to report from reuters they are quoting a source in the french government which has seen that this time around that the e.u. may be a bit lighter on this but in the end it comes down to this all important divestment so it depends whilst i'm is really willing to get rid of and that could be the decisive factor oh see how this progresses over the coming days in the coming months thanks for bringing us your insights you went. now mark zuckerberg has been attempting to face down e.u. leaders during a meeting in brussels the facebook founder told him that any plans to rein in tech companies could harm freedom of expression and innovation the e.u.

is warning that tough new hate speech laws could be on the way. smiles all around at this meeting on monday between mark zuckerberg and justice commissioner character rover but there's tension to the e.u. is threatening to hold social media companies that legally liable for hate speech on their platforms over the weekend at the munich security conference the c.e.o. of facebook argued against so-called authoritarian intervention i think that we need to make sure that the internet can continue to be a place where everyone can share their views openly and where the legal framework around this is one that encodes democratic values and open values and i do think that it is as part that we got to move forward on regulation hopefully we move forward quickly set before a more authoritarian model gets adopted in a lot of places 1st but the meeting with the man behind facebook didn't seem to convince you commissioners. the folks from does online platforms in particular the

society do not have a responsibility to an obvious responsibility towards our fellow citizens just as we do towards all of those tools those who uses a well known society and also tools democracy is a bit of the macaws you see if you don't know that we do indeed have a legislative vehicle in the form of the digital service which will be presented at the end of the year and it will contain measures that could be binding to music or to procure political killed mark zuckerberg trip to europe was meant to steal his case against regulatory tightening so far you commissioners are not willing to budge. now having a global business juggernaut in your neighborhood can have benefits for example amazon's massive staten island facility employs thousands of people but the conditions for its workers have been called into question by one group of campaigners who are determined to change things. armed with just a phone in the laptop daniel wants to force change at one of the world's biggest

companies led by one of the world's richest men jeff bezos he likes to present himself as a progressive but his approach to business says angered communities and many of amazon 750000 workers. we are oriented around having as many people in as many states iran's this country participate in our activities to make it known what the cost of hosting amazon in a community is and to demand better of our public officials iran's mitigating back costs. rejoinder a coordinates more than 60 groups of activists she calls her organization athena after the greek goddess of war one of the group's goals is to improve working conditions and force amazon to pay higher wages at the company's gigantic warehouses just outside the city their algorithms determine work speeds and cameras monitor staff around the clock a former employee complains that missing targets 3 times could cost you your job

and that causes stress of a different sort. because of their read system. a new warning able to basically news about them throughout the day otherwise you could be in jeopardy of. not meeting your goal the only time you really could thought about that was during the break amazon allowed us to shoot at the warehouses a manager there disputes ilyas claims he says toilets are no more than 90 seconds away from workplaces and workers can use them as needed. if you have. one straight 30 minutes and actually $45.00 on the days with state laws for that and we also get 215 minute paid rates the starting wage for an unskilled worker here is $17.00 an hour that might sound decent but it's not enough to live from in new york or california critics have done the math. they have a very. profitable employer providing wages that are so low that people can't

afford housing and food that's not right what we saw was that for every dollar in the wages they pay. the public pays $0.24 in subsidies for health care and food stamps and also for welfare. there are hundreds of thousands of people involved in the athena network dunya regenerates says they don't want amazon to go broke they just want to break the power it has over the people who work there. now time is biggest car show is one of the latest events to be scuppered by the coronavirus the beijing auto show's been postponed until further notice meanwhile was due to restart production at its chinese plant some monday that didn't happen either the impact of the virus is being felt across the motoring trait. it's not a good time to be selling cars in china in january car sales in the country fell by 18 percent from the previous year as the effects of coronavirus restrictions hit showrooms analysts of swiss bank u.b.s.

expect a 50 percent plunge in february as if that weren't bad enough extended factory shutdowns and supply chain destructions are said to lead to a massive drop in production who by province the center of the outbreak is a key manufacturing hub for the car industry. german car makers are being hit especially hard china is a key market for the folks wagon group and its various brands the company sold 4200000 cars there in 2018 that's around 40 percent of its global total but january was a bad month all of the v.w. brands combined sold $343000.00 cars a drop of 11.3 percent compared with last year. the outbreak has come at a time when the car industry worldwide is already facing many challenges the diesel gate scandal and the difficult switch to electro mobility are among the biggest for german car makers if the current crisis in china goes on much longer it might come

to rival those other problems. the 2nd would cause us tesla tries to build its next gigafactory near berlin it's just come face to face with germany's famous bureaucracy a court order has halted the american companies efforts to clear woodlands around the site in the state of brandenburg environmentalists fear deforestation will endanger the region's water supply and the factory will overwhelm infrastructure. and that's all from d.w. business thanks for joining us being with you a little bit later on you can find us in the meantime on our web site sash business by.

their child and their future. tens of zone thousands of children by news finders group or from the mirror. to become darius. to the fall of the. they've been refused papers. and the chance of going to school. what will become of them close up. in 60 minutes on d w. carefully

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climate news to green energy solutions and reforestation. to interactive content teaching the next generation about environmental protection and more determined to build something here for the next generation the ideas the multimedia environment series on t.w. . the and. this is state of the news africa coming up in the next 15 minutes the sudanese hope possibly get into the country's transitional government's hardships persist but prime minister abdullah how doc tells you. will be a success all. particular bottle gold is looking for success story that's what up support along with his.