BP to scrap paid rest breaks and most bank holiday bonuses for forecourt staff

BP is ditching paid rest breaks and most bank holiday bonuses for 5,400 workers in its petrol forecourts as it attempts to offset a planned rise in the independent living wage.The company has told workers in its 310 company-run forecourts that it will be changing their benefits in February. Workers at a further 850 BP-branded forecourts run by partners are on different pay deals.BP is an accredited member of the Living Wage Foundation’s fair pay scheme, under which employers commit to pay staff an annually set wage to meet living costs.Hourly pay for BP’s affected workers will rise to a minimum of £13

Financial markets now certain the RBA will hike interest rates in 2026

Financial markets are now pricing in a 100% chance the Reserve Bank will hike rates in 2026, in what would be a blow to mortgage holders but may take some steam out of an overheating property market.The latest forecasts represent a turnaround from just two weeks ago, when traders were factoring in an even chance that the next RBA move would be a cut by its May meeting.It comes as data showed inflation is now moving in the wrong direction, alongside this week’s national accounts and household spending figures which showed the economy is accelerating into the new year.Adam Donaldson, the head of interest rates strategy at the Commonwealth Bank, said “the market has come to the conclusion that the Reserve bank won’t be cutting rates any further”.“Basically, from February onwards, the market is starting to price some risk that rates will go up

New York Times sues AI startup for ‘illegal’ copying of millions of articles

The New York Times sued an embattled artificial intelligence startup on Friday, accusing the firm of illegally copying millions of articles. The newspaper alleged Perplexity AI had distributed and displayed journalists’ work without permission en masse.The Times said that Perplexity AI was also violating its trademarks under the Lanham Act, claiming the startup’s generative AI products create fabricated content, or “hallucinations”, and falsely attribute them to the newspaper by displaying them alongside its registered trademarks.The newspaper said that Perplexity’s business model relies on scraping and copying content, including paywalled material, to power its generative AI products. Other publishers have made similar allegations

I spent hours listening to Sabrina Carpenter this year. So why do I have a Spotify ‘listening age’ of 86?

Many users of the app were shocked, this week, by this addition to the Spotify Wrapped roundup – especially twentysomethings who were judged to be 100“Age is just a number. So don’t take this personally.” Those words were the first inkling I had that I was about to receive some very bad news.I woke up on Wednesday with a mild hangover after celebrating my 44th birthday. Unfortunately for me, this was the day Spotify released “Spotify Wrapped”, its analysis of (in my case) the 4,863 minutes I had spent listening to music on its platform over the past year

BBC showing tennis’s new Battle of the Sexes will just offer up opportunity to belittle women’s sport | Barney Ronay

It’s always best to take a sceptical view of the constant flow of BBC-bashing newspaper stories, which are often simply bogus outrage expressed for commercial gain. Even the war-on-woke, cod-ideological stuff – Clive Myrie INSISTS hamsters can breastfeed human robots – the bits that make you want to smear your face with greengage jam and weep for England, our England, with its meadows, its shadows, its curates made entirely from beef. Even these come from a hard, transactional place.Basically, it’s the licence fee. The BBC is free at the point of delivery, but paid for by a national levy

Five years on: rugby’s brain damaged players wait and wait for the help they need

In 2020 Steve Thompson revealed he could not remember winning the Rugby World Cup and since then his case and others have been caught up in a warren of legal argumentThe Royal Courts of Justice are a warren. They were built piecemeal over 125 years of intermittent construction, wings were added, blocks were expanded and then joined by a web of twisting staircases and long corridors. You navigate your way to whichever corner of it you have business in by checking the tiny print on the long daily case lists that are posted in the lobby early each morning, when the building always seems to be full of people hurrying in the other direction. For the last three years, three separate sets of legal action about brain damage in sport have been slowly making their way through here, lost in the hallways.One is in football, one is in rugby union, one is in rugby league