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

Cloudflare outage hits major web services including X, LinkedIn and Zoom – business live

Technical problems at internet infrastructure provider Cloudflare today have taken a host of websites offline this morning.Cloudflare said shortly after 9am UK time that it “is investigating issues with Cloudflare Dashboard and related APIs [application programming interfaces – used when apps exchange data with each other].Cloudflare has also reported it has implemented a potential fix to the issue and is monitoring the results.But the outage has affected a number of websites and platforms, with reports of problems accessing LinkedIn, X, Canva – and even the DownDetector site used to monitor online service issues.Last month, an outage at Cloudflare made many websites inaccessible for about three hours

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

Elon Musk’s X fined €120m by EU in first clash under new digital laws

Elon Musk’s social media platform, X, has been fined €120m (£105m) after it was found in breach of new EU digital laws, in a ruling likely to put the European Commission on a collision course with the US billionaire and potentially Donald Trump.The breaches, under consideration for two years, included what the EU said was a “deceptive” blue tick verification badge given to users and the lack of transparency of the platform’s advertising.The commission rules require tech companies to provide a public list of advertisers to ensure the company’s structures guard against illegal scams, fake advertisements and coordinated campaigns in the context of political elections.In a third breach, the EU also concluded that X had failed to provide the required access to public data available to researchers, who typically keep tabs on contentious issues such as political content.The ruling by the European Commission brings to a close part of an investigation that started two years ago

McLaren will use team orders in quest for F1 world drivers’ title in Abu Dhabi

Zak Brown has said McLaren will use team orders for Lando Norris and Oscar Piastri if required to ensure the team secure the Formula One drivers’ championship in the season finale at Abu Dhabi on Sunday.With Red Bull’s Max Verstappen trailing Norris by 10 points, the Dutchman still has a good shot at taking the title from McLaren’s grasp. Piastri is a further six points back. Having spent all season allowing their drivers to race and attempting to be scrupulously fair to both, Brown announced at the Yas Marina circuit that if circumstances rendered it necessary, they would use orders.“Yes, of course

‘We’re all human’: Joe Root defends England over costly dropped catches on day two

Joe Root has insisted that human error rather than poor preparation lay behind a string of dropped catches during a day of toil in the field for ­England. Travis Head, Alex Carey – twice – Josh Inglis and Michael Neser all got lifelines as Australia ended day two of the second Test on 378 for six, a lead of 44.“We worked as hard as we could in the lead-up to this, we had five days of prep and we did a huge amount of catching,” Root said. “We made sure we utilised those two [training] sessions under lights well. You can’t replicate that surface, the bounce, the way the nicks come