(02-19) 07:14 PST BRUSSELS, Belgium (AP) —

Canada’s Thomson Corp. won European regulatory approval Tuesday to buy news and information provider Reuters Group PLC but must sell off financial research units to eliminate antitrust concerns, the European Commission said.

EU antitrust regulators said the two companies had also agreed with the U.S. Department of Justice to divest divisions that supply financial-market research reports, earnings estimates, basic financial data on businesses and economic data archives.

The EU said this was necessary to make sure financial institutions and customers of these products were not faced with “a reduced choice, the likelihood of price increases and a severe risk of discontinuation of overlapping products.”

EU Competition Commissioner Neelie Kroes said the two companies had offered a package “that provides strong safeguards that users of financial data will not be harmed by this major consolidation.”

Thomson’s 8.1 billion pound ($15.9 billion) bid for Reuters would cut the number of major companies selling information and trading systems to the financial services industry from three Д Reuters, Thomson and privately owned Bloomberg LP Д to just two.

The combination of Reuters, founded when Paul Julius Reuter began transmitting stock market quotations between London and Paris via the new Calais-Dover cable in 1851, and relative newcomer Thomson would generate sales in excess of $11 billion and just edge out Bloomberg in market share.

EU regulators said they were unhappy about the original lineup of the deal and were worried that it would have reduced competition for aftermarket broker research reports that analyze securities, industries or markets and supply estimates of future company earnings and information on how a company is performing.

The deal would also have damaged technology companies that supply the terminals which gather and combine this data for customers, the EU said. Thomson-Reuters “would have had the ability and the incentive” to cut them off if it wanted to hike prices.

Selling off the databases Д including assets, personnel and customer base Д satisfies EU worries and would give financial information providers a new alternative supplier, the Commission said.

EU regulators said their investigation and the negotiation of the settlement package was done in parallel with U.S. officials.

“The U.S. Department of Justice announced today that it will propose a settlement agreement with divestitures by the parties which are consistent with the remedies accepted by the Commission,” the EU executive said.

Reuters’ market share of 23 percent and Thomson’s 11 percent would combine for a total Thomson-Reuters Corp. share of 34 percent, according to April figures from Inside Market Data Reference. Bloomberg, founded by New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, has a 33 percent share.

Reuters and Thomson share the midlevel market for trading customers and could argue that the deal would leave them better placed to compete with Bloomberg for higher-end customers where it currently dominates.

London-based Reuters is also more focused on Europe, while Canada’s Thomson is stronger in North America.

TOKYO: It is official: The biggest consumer electronic format war in a generation is finally over.

Toshiba, the Japanese electronics giant, threw in the towel on its HD DVD technology Tuesday, announcing it would no longer develop, produce or market disk players for the format. In doing so, it handed victory to Sonys competing Blu-ray format, which now looks set to become the global standard for high-definition DVDs.

The decision followed a pitched two-year battle with Sony, in which both companies tried to woo Hollywood studios to release movies in their formats, and computer and game console makers to use their disk drives. The battle was the first full-scale format war between two Japanese electronics companies since the 1980s, when Matsushitas VHS and Sonys Betamax fought to become the standard for videotape.

Toshibas chief executive, Atsutoshi Nishida, said the death blow for HD DVD came last month, when the movie studio Warner Brothers, a unit of Time Warner, decided to drop the format in favor of Blu-ray. He also cited decision last week by Wal-Mart Stores not to stock disks and players using the Toshiba format.

“The sudden change by Warner Brothers was like a bolt from the blue,” Nishida told a news conference at Toshibas headquarters in Tokyo. “We had no more prospect of winning this competition.”

He said Toshiba had already informed two of its biggest HD DVD partners, Universal and Paramount studios, of the decision. Other partners included Intel and Microsoft, which sold HD DVD drives for its Xbox 360 game consoles.

Nishida said Toshiba would halt all production by the end of March, though it would continue offering customer support for several more years. He also said Toshiba had no plans to begin producing Blu-ray players.

He refused to say how much money Toshiba stood to lose from dropping HD DVD, though analysts had said it could run in the hundreds of millions of dollars. That would be far from a fatal blow for Toshiba, which had $60.3 billion in sales last year.

In fact, Toshibas share price jumped 5.7 percent Monday, after the Wal-Mart decision fed speculation the company would drop out of the costly format war. Toshibas announcement Tuesday came after Tokyo markets closed.

Toshiba said it had already sold about one million HD DVD players, of which about 600,000 were sold in the United States. Analysts have said Sony and its partners, including Samsung and Panasonic, have sold an equal or slightly smaller number of Blu-ray players, and another three million Blu-ray drives as part of Sonys PlayStation 3 game console.

Those sales are tiny compared with the 100 million players sold globally last year that used the current DVD format. The companies have been betting that sales of the next generation of DVD players would rise with the popularity of high-definition televisions, whose sharper images require the greater storage capacity of the new disks.

However, the format battle often drew yawns from analysts and consumers, many of whom believe the new disk format will be quickly by leap-frogged Internet-based movie downloads, just as music disks have been largely replaced by digital files.

In fact, executives and analysts in the electronics industry have worried that the DVD war was only hurting the industry by making consumers reluctant to buy either format.

On Tuesday, Nishida said he hoped Toshibas decision would help the high-definition DVD market develop by leaving a single format.

During the press conference, Nishida seemed to show flashes of anger at Warner Brothers, in a rare display of emotion for one Japans usually reserved corporate chiefs. He said the two formats were about even in sales until Warner Brothers decided in early January to join the Blu-ray camp, which also includes Walt Disney and 20th Century Fox studios.

In fact, Toshiba said it was the largest single seller of high-definition DVD players in the United States last year, with about half of the one-million-unit market.

Nishida said that with recent global economic uncertainty, and particularly a slowdown in the American market, Toshiba decided it could no longer risk money on the HD DVD format. He said the company was going to refocus its resources on more profitable products, like flash memory computer chips and laptops.

On Tuesday, he announced that Toshiba and an American partner, SanDisk, would spend at least $16 billion to build two new flash memory plants in Japan.

It was in December, 2005, when Aman Kapoor reached a boiling point. The computer programmer at Florida State had been waiting four years for his green card—the key to permanent residency in the U.S.—and he had been obliged to stay in the same job at the same pay the entire time that he waited. Then a U.S. House-Senate conference failed to move forward with legislation to relieve the growing green-card delays, dashing the India native’s hopes once again.

Kapoor decided to start a Web site for frustrated immigrants, called Immigration Voice. While there were community message boards and the like online, he wanted a place where skilled workers waiting for their green cards could share their ideas and frustrations. He also hoped that there would be some sort of collective power from the skilled immigrant community if they got organized. “Misery loves company, and I was looking for a way to channel all the frustration we were sharing with each other,” says Kapoor. “Instead of feeling hopeless, we decided to use our right to association and push reform of the broken system together.” Making Themselves Heard

Legal, highly skilled immigrants say they have felt overlooked in the immigration debate, which has focused largely on the fate of 12 million illegal unskilled workers. But this week a formerly diffuse and quiet group made its first concrete mark in Washington in helping push the U.S. government to reverse an early July decision refusing applications to speed up green-card processing (see BusinessWeek.com, 7/18/07, and 7/17/07, ).

In just 19 months, Kapoor’s once-fledgling Web forum has become a powerful political force. In the days leading up to the U.S. government’s decision to allow green-card applicants to apply for the next phase of processing, Immigration Voice and other advocacy groups met with senior White House officials to share their concerns. U.S. Representative Zoe Lofgren (D-Calif.), whose district includes Silicon Valley, has been outspoken in her support of those stuck in the green-card backlog, and she has pledged to ensure that the U.S. government keeps its promise to speed up green-card processing. An Active Membership

Immigration Voice (immigrationvoice.org) now has a membership of 21,000 people in the green-card queue. The queue is swelling into the hundreds of thousands because only 9,800 green cards are allotted to each country each year. Tens of thousands of visa holders from countries including India and China are left waiting for years. Through the Web site, Immigration Voice members share ideas and strategies, provide words of support for each other, and organize local meetings.

In 2006, the nonprofit group raised $200,000, mainly through member donations. Its 2007 goal is $500,000; so far, it has raised about half that amount. Members are not required to pay dues, but they are encouraged to make donations or opt for a $50 monthly contribution. Kapoor says the group is open to gifts from other sources, but declined to name other contributors.