Universal Music, home to Taylor Swift and Drake, receives €55bn takeover offer

Billionaire Bill Ackman’s hedge fund has offered to buy Universal Music Group (UMG) in a deal that values the world’s biggest music company at about €55bn (£48bn).Pershing Square, the New-York based hedge fund, has made a bid for the business, which is home to artists including Taylor Swift and Elton John, with a cash and stock deal that would move its stock market listing from Amsterdam to New York.Ackman said in a statement that while the company, which is led by the British-born Sir Lucian Grainge, had done “an excellent job nurturing and continuing to build a world-class artist roster and generating strong business performance”, its share price had lagged owing to issues “unrelated to the performance of its music business”.Shares in UMG, which have been listed in Amsterdam since 2021, had lost more than a quarter of their value in the past year alone. Pershing’s offer triggered a sharp rise, with the price up by 13% on the previous trading day when the Amsterdam Euronext exchange closed on Tuesday

Oil back above $110 in volatile markets as Trump deadline looms for Iran to reopen strait – as it happened

Brent crude has risen above $110 a barrel again, after Donald Trump warned Iran “a whole civilization will die tonight” if Iran does not make an agreement.Brent, the global oil benchmark, has see-sawed in volatile markets today, and is now up 0.8% at $110.67 a barrel.Writing on Truth Social, the US president said:double quotation markA whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again

An AI company with an arsenal of spacecraft: what exactly is SpaceX?

Hello, and welcome to TechScape. I’m your host, Blake Montgomery, US tech editor at the Guardian, writing to you as I listen to George Handel’s Messiah for Easter.SpaceX filed confidentially for an initial public offering on the US stock market last week at a reportedly astronomical valuation. My colleague Nick Robins-Early reports:Elon Musk’s company, which has become a dominant power in both space travel and satellite communications, could seek a valuation upwards of $1.75tn

Porn, dog poo and social media snaps: the ‘taskers’ scraping the internet for Meta-owned AI firm

Tens of thousands of people have been paid by a company part-owned by Meta to train AI by combing Instagram accounts, harvesting copyrighted work and transcribing pornographic soundtracks, the Guardian can reveal.Scale AI, 49%-controlled by Mark Zuckerberg’s social media empire, has recruited experts across fields such as medicine, physics and economics – putatively to refine top-level artificial intelligence systems through a platform called Outlier. “Become the expert that AI learns from,” it says on its site, advertising flexible work for people with strong credentials.However, workers for the platform said they have become involved in scraping an array of other people’s personal data – in what they described as a morally uncomfortable exercise that diverged significantly from refining high-level systems.Outlier is managed by Scale AI, which has contracts with the Pentagon and US defense companies

Sale believe Courtney Lawes can regain England place after veteran signs one-year deal

Courtney Lawes has been backed to regain his England place following confirmation he will be joining Sale Sharks this summer on a one-year deal. The former national captain has spent the last two seasons with Brive in France’s Pro D2 but has indicated he would love to play international rugby again should the chance arise.While Lawes will be 38 next February and retired from the Test arena after the 2023 World Cup in France, he still feels he can make an impact at the top level of the game. That view is shared by Sale’s director of rugby, Alex Sanderson, who is looking forward to welcoming the former Northampton stalwart to Manchester.“I don’t think we’d have signed him if he was just a player who wanted a paycheck,” said Sanderson

Drone racing to drone strikes: have war and sport become indistinguishable?

The Trump administration’s pushing of the war in Iran reflects a sporting culture driven by clipped-up content, shameless tribalism and a lust for escalation Among the more surprising continuities of 2026 has been the visual kinship between the Winter Olympics and the US’s illegal and unprovoked war in Iran. High-speed camera drones were a highlight of TV coverage of the recent Games in Milano Cortina, bringing viewers within kissing distance of the action as Olympic athletes hurtled down the slopes and around the tracks in the skiing and sliding events. The incessant screech of the drones aside, the introduction of quadcopter-borne cameras felt like a real step forward in coverage of the winter sports, bringing a (literal) new perspective to events that had become, over recent decades, fairly static as a viewing experience.No sooner had the Olympics finished than aerial video was back on our screens – only the footage, in this case, was of a far darker variety. In place of the ludicrous hip flexibility of the slaloming skiers and the high-speed cornering of the monobobbers, for the past month our feeds have been flooded with satellite and drone imagery of the US military blowing Iranian aircraft, ships, vehicles, munitions buildings, and citizens to smithereens