Housebuilder Taylor Wimpey hit by sales fall amid budget uncertainty

The British housebuilder Taylor Wimpey has reported a drop in sales in the key autumn period, blaming uncertainty in the run-up to this month’s budget for potential buyers holding back purchases.The company, the latest home construction business to report softer sales growth, reported that its weekly average for the number of private sales per site fell 11% to 0.63 between 30 June and 9 November compared with 0.71 in the same period last year.“Market conditions remain challenging, impacted by uncertainty ahead of the upcoming UK budget and continued affordability pressures,” said Jennie Daly, its chief executive

Menulog closing in Australia, affecting thousands of delivery drivers and 120 employees

Menulog is closing its Australian operations, becoming the latest casualty in the competitive delivery service app sector that will affect thousands of delivery riders, as well as about 120 direct employees.The owner, Dutch multinational Just Eat Takeaway.com, announced on Wednesday that the Australian-founded service will no longer take orders from 26 November.“While Menulog has a proud 20 year history, it has been navigating challenging circumstances,” the company said.The Transport Workers’ Union national secretary, Michael Kaine, said the closure would come as a “shock to the thousands of food delivery riders who rely on Menulog for income”

John Tymukas obituary

My brother-in-law John Tymukas, who has died aged 73, was a structural engineer on many of London’s infrastructure projects from the 1990s onwards, including Canning Town station, Heathrow Terminal 5, Glaxo Smithkline HQ and Crossrail Bond Street.Born in Adelaide, South Australia, John was the son of Kostas, a Lithuanian refugee and engineer, and Kathleen (nee Donohoe), the daughter of Irish emigrants and a former clerk. He was the eldest of six siblings. John completed his education in Brisbane at Downlands school and the Queensland Institute of Technology, where he took a four-year engineering degree course and worked in Australia before heading in 1990 to London to work on contracts with engineering companies such as SKB and WSP.An avid traveller, he covered Europe extensively, making contact with Lithuanian and Irish family members and discovering family history unknown in Australia until he made the links

ChatGPT violated copyright law by ‘learning’ from song lyrics, German court rules

A court in Munich has ruled that OpenAI’s chatbot ChatGPT violated German copyright laws by using hits from top-selling musicians to train its language models in what creative industry advocates described as a landmark European ruling.The Munich regional court sided in favour of Germany’s music rights society GEMA, which said ChatGPT had harvested protected lyrics by popular artists to “learn” from them.The collecting society GEMA, which manages the rights of composers, lyricists and music publishers and has approximately 100,000 members, filed the case against OpenAI in November 2024.The lawsuit was seen as a key European test case in a campaign to stop AI scraping of creative output. OpenAI can appeal against the decision

Susie Wolff: ‘I can be very punchy and pragmatic. If I have to fight for something, I’ll fight’

Head of F1 Academy explains how close she came to a grand prix debut, her quest to produce female drivers and a frightening knock on her hotel room door by a powerful man in the sport“There was a deep loneliness to karting, and then definitely in single-seaters, because no one else was going through the same thing as me,” says Susie Wolff as she remembers her long struggle in motorsport, from racing as a teenager against Lewis Hamilton and Nico Rosberg to her determined, but unfulfilled, quest to become a Formula One driver.“After the whole #MeToo movement, we forget what it was like before. But the way I heard boys talking about girls in the paddock made me think I never want to be spoken about in that way. I realised I’d have to be whiter than white to get through it unscathed.”The 42-year-old says: “I couldn’t open up to anyone until I met [her husband] Toto

Ben Stokes hits back at England ‘has-beens’ over criticism of Ashes preparations

Ben Stokes has warned England’s players to be wary of an Australian media desperate to pounce on any indiscretion or hint of scandal, saying the Ashes tourists have already been the subject of some “unbelievable journalism” and that such treatment is “part of being in Australia … it’s not just stuff out on the field that can get you, it’s also the off-field stuff.”The England captain’s disgruntlement with his side’s treatment in the press extends to recent criticism of their preparations, with Stokes hitting out at the “has beens” who have been leading the chorus of complaint and insisting that “we leave no stone unturned” and “have prepared incredibly well”.Stokes’s arrival in Perth last week prompted the West Australian to launch an attack on “England’s cocky captain complainer” over a front-page photograph of the 34-year-old pushing his bags through the airport, while Joe Root was subjected to similar treatment on Monday.“I was a bit gutted when they turned their attention to Rooty because I was waiting to see what the next headline about me was,” Stokes said. “But it’s expected