Category: 3. Business

Trade union RMT says it has agreed a three-year pay deal for Tube workers as well as “fatigue-friendly” rosters, further discussions on staff travel and a “consistent” Boxing Day payment of £400.

The pay deal consists of a 3.4% increase, effective from 1 April 2025, with a guaranteed rise of 3% in year two and a 2.5% rise in year three.

Five days of Tube strikes badly disrupted London in September, and the deal lifts the union’s threat of more industrial action.

RMT general secretary Eddie Dempsey said: “This deal is a clear demonstration of the effectiveness of strike action and strong negotiation by our members.”

A TfL spokesperson said: “We welcome the decision from the RMT to accept our pay offer. This multi-year offer is fair, affordable and provides certainty for our colleagues over pay for several years.

“We are engaging with all of our unions on this offer and look forward to their responses.”

TfL said that no changes have been proposed to working hours as part of the pay offer.

Yum! Brands is exploring a possible sale of its Pizza Hut chain, as the business struggles to compete with rivals in the pizza business to win over cash-strapped consumers.

Pizza Hut has reported several quarters of declining same-store sales in the US – a market that makes up 42% of its global sales. The US woes have dragged down the business, even as sales rise in some other markets.

“Pizza Hut’s performance indicates the need to take additional action to help the brand realise its full value, which may be better executed outside of Yum! Brands,” chief executive Chris Turner said in a statement on Tuesday.

He added “strategic options” were being examined for its pizza division.

Pizza Hut, which saw sales at its existing outlets fall 1% overall in the most recent quarter, has lagged behind other big names in the Yum! portfolio. Notably, KFC and Taco Bell, which is known for its low-price meals, have both shown signs of strength.

Taco Bell’s same-store sales rose 7% in the most recent quarter, while same-store sales at KFC increased 3% despite recent challenges in the US.

Yum! generates about 11% of its operating profits from its Pizza Hut business. It operates roughly 20,000 Pizza Hut stores globally, about 6,500 of which are located in the US.

Competitors in the pizza market, like Papa Johns and Domino’s Pizza, also continue to grab market share, contributing to Pizza Hut’s struggles to stay competitive. Domino’s last month reported that its quarterly sales role 6%, which executives attributed in part to promotions.

Mr Turner, who took the helm of Yum! last month, said Pizza Hut employees have been “working hard to address business and category challenges”.

Yum! did not specify when the company will make a decision about what comes next for the Pizza Hut brand.

Beyond competition in the pizza business, Yum has faced a pullback in spending among consumers weighed down by persistent inflation and a slowdown in the labour market.

The trend of cautious spending has affected the fast-food restaurant industry as a whole in recent months. Last week, an executive at the burrito chain Chipotle said younger consumers in particular are showing sign of strain, stemming from unemployment and loan repayments.

On a call with analysts on Tuesday, Mr Turner of Yum! referred to US consumers as “cautious but incredibly resilient”. He said spending at Taco Bell has held up despite macroeconomic pressures.

In the UK, Pizza Hut is closing half of its restaurants as consumers in that market shy away from the chain, too. Over time, Pizza Hut’s market has been sliced up and distributed to its trendier, more nimble rivals.

QSA’s initiatives have led to over a dozen patents, numerous scientific publications, and the creation of startups that are bringing quantum technology to the market. Multiple quantum companies have benefited from QSA’s extensive research network and ongoing collaborations, utilizing the expertise, feedback, and techniques shared by QSA partners to enhance their processes. Additionally, five QSA principal investigators have co-founded quantum companies, applying research results to promising industry use cases. 

QSA has also trained a new generation of scientists and engineers, many of whom are now leading quantum research at top companies and universities, alongside high school students and teachers. In addition to the 150 graduate students and 100 postdoctoral students delivering cutting edge research in QSA annually, QSA’s QCaMP program has introduced quantum to over 160 high school teachers and 3,200 students across the country. Building on this success, QSA will help create a quantum-ready workforce with new pathways and partnerships that engage undergraduates in community colleges via hands-on training programs. 

To learn more about QSA’s many achievements, this article highlights five ways QSA has advanced quantum computing. And this Q&A with de Jong showcases QSA’s progress, exciting plans for the future, and the kinds of breakthroughs to expect as quantum systems grow and mature.

Leveraging QSA’s expertise and capabilities

QSA develops next-generation quantum capabilities by integrating multidisciplinary teams across its partner institutions and leveraging specialized quantum-ready facilities at Berkeley Lab, Sandia National Laboratories, and other leading institutions. 

Berkeley Lab, for example, partners with industry and academia and works across the quantum research ecosystem — from theory to application — to fabricate and test quantum-based devices, develop software and algorithms, and build prototype computers and networks. Berkeley Lab’s national user facilities provide state-of-the-art resources for scientists in QSA and beyond to advance the frontiers of quantum science. This includes the Advanced Light Source, the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC), and the Molecular Foundry, which has a QIS cluster tool that enables researchers to experiment with dozens of materials and methods for making qubit components in a single automated system. The Molecular Foundry will also soon add a dilution refrigerator that will enable high-throughput analysis of qubits. Berkeley Lab also leads the Advanced Quantum Testbed (AQT), a collaborative research laboratory and open-access testbed to advance quantum computing based on superconducting circuits. In this video, de Jong, shares how quantum research at Berkeley Lab is forging the future of quantum breakthroughs by collaborating with researchers across institutions.

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Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) is committed to groundbreaking research focused on discovery science and solutions for abundant and reliable energy supplies. The lab’s expertise spans materials, chemistry, physics, biology, earth and environmental science, mathematics, and computing. Researchers from around the world rely on the lab’s world-class scientific facilities for their own pioneering research. Founded in 1931 on the belief that the biggest problems are best addressed by teams, Berkeley Lab and its scientists have been recognized with 17 Nobel Prizes. Berkeley Lab is a multiprogram national laboratory managed by the University of California for the U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Science.

DOE’s Office of Science is the single largest supporter of basic research in the physical sciences in the U.S., and is working to address some of the most pressing challenges of our time. For more information, please visit energy.gov/science.

The Quantum Systems Accelerator (QSA) is one of the five National Quantum Information Science Research Centers funded by the U.S. Department of Energy Office of Science. Led by Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) and with Sandia National Laboratories as lead partner, QSA catalyzes national leadership in quantum information science to co-design the algorithms, quantum devices, and engineering solutions needed to deliver certified quantum advantage in scientific applications. QSA brings together dozens of scientists who are pioneers of many of today’s unique quantum engineering and fabrication capabilities. In addition to industry and academic partners across the world, 15 institutions are part of QSA: Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Sandia National Laboratories, University of Colorado at Boulder, MIT Lincoln Laboratory, Caltech, Duke University, Harvard University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology,, UC Berkeley, University of Maryland, University of New Mexico, Cornell University, University of Washington, and Canada’s Université de Sherbrooke and University of Waterloo. QSA’s industrial partners are Applied Materials, Atom Computing, IonQ, Maybell, QoLab, Quantum Machines, Quantinuum, QuEra, and Riverlane. For more information, please visit https://quantumsystemsaccelerator.org/

MILWAUKEE, Nov. 4, 2025 – Johnson Controls (NYSE: JCI), the global leader for smart, safe, healthy and sustainable buildings, today announced its inclusion in Newsweek’s America’s Most Reliable Companies 2026, presented in collaboration with Statista.

America’s Most Reliable Companies 2026 were identified through a comprehensive independent survey of more than 1,700 U.S. participants, evaluating businesses on five key metrics: likelihood of recommendation, ease of doing business, value for money, consistency of deliverables and reputation for dependability.

“At Johnson Controls, we take pride in being a trusted partner to our customers, helping them grow their businesses in complex, mission-critical environments,” said Todd Grabowski, President, Americas at Johnson Controls. “Being named one of America’s Most Reliable Companies is a testament to how our teams put the customer at the center of everything we do, from the technicians delivering service in the field to the engineers driving innovation behind the scenes.”

Reliability is the foundation of long-term success, and this recognition underscores Johnson Controls’ unwavering commitment to earning and maintaining the trust of its customers, partners and stakeholders. Inclusion in this list highlights the dedication of the entire Johnson Controls team to deliver consistent quality, transparent communication and dependable results year after year. Johnson Controls has an unmatched field position in the industry and proudly employs over 15,000 skilled technicians across the Americas, and 40,000 globally, who – alongside our sales teams – are the face of the company. 

View the full list on Newsweek’s website.

MEDIA CONTACT: 

Ben Hoekstra  
Direct: +1 414 630 0482
Email: media@jci.com

About Johnson Controls:

At Johnson Controls (NYSE:JCI), we transform the environments where people live, work, learn and play. As the global leader in smart, healthy and sustainable buildings, our mission is to reimagine the performance of buildings to serve people, places and the planet. 

Building on a proud history of 140 years of innovation, we deliver the blueprint of the future for industries such as healthcare, schools, data centers, airports, stadiums, manufacturing and beyond through OpenBlue, our comprehensive digital offering. 

Today, Johnson Controls offers the world`s largest portfolio of building technology and software as well as service solutions from some of the most trusted names in the industry. 

Visit johnsoncontrols.com for more information and follow @Johnsoncontrols on social platforms.

About Statista

Statista produces hundreds of global industry rankings and company listings in partnership with leading media outlets. Its research and analysis service is powered by the data-driven expertise of statista.com, a premier business intelligence portal offering comprehensive market insights, statistics, and consumer studies.

The Claimants (collectively Getty), whose business centers on licensing photographic images, videos, and illustrations, alleged that Stability AI (Stability) had scraped millions of its images without consent to train various versions of its open-source AI image generator, Stable Diffusion. Getty claimed that this conduct infringed its copyright and database rights, constituted secondary copyright infringement through the importation of the pretrained software into the UK, and amounted to trademark infringement and passing off through the use of Getty’s marks in AI-generated outputs.

In late 2023, Stability sought reverse summary judgment/strikeout of Getty’s claims. The High Court dismissed the application, holding that there were reasonable grounds to believe further disclosure might clarify where training occurred and that novel questions of statutory interpretation raised by the secondary infringement claim should proceed to trial. However, during trial, Getty had to abandon its primary copyright infringement claim, accepting that there was no evidence that Stability had trained and developed Stable Diffusion in the UK.

The Court’s Decision

The key issue for the Court to decide became Getty’s secondary copyright infringement claim that Stable Diffusion was an “infringing copy” imported into the UK in breach of the Copyright, Designs, and Patents Act 1988 (CDPA). This in turn required the Court to decide whether Stable Diffusion was an “article” for those purposes. The CDPA does not define “article,” but the Court held that an article can be an infringing copy only if it actually contains or embodies the copyright work — at least transiently. The Court found that Stable Diffusion’s model weights did not store, reproduce, or contain any of Getty’s images; they were sets of numerical parameters derived from statistical training.

Accordingly, the Court held that merely using infringing copies in the course of creating another artifact does not make that artifact an infringing copy and that the Stable Diffusion model “has never consisted of or contained a copy” of Getty’s works.

Comment

With no equivalent to a U.S. fair-use defense, creators and AI companies had been waiting to see how the English High Court would apply English copyright law to the AI industry. But Getty’s inability to prove that any relevant acts of Stability took place in the UK left the Court with no need to apply copyright law to the alleged training and development acts of Stability. IP rights are territorial: no UK act, no UK infringement.

On secondary infringement, English High Court Judge, Mrs. Justice Joanna Smith, carefully considered the argument and rejected Getty’s claim: Merely exposing model weights to infringing copies during training does not render the resulting model an infringing copy.

AI companies and copyright owners alike may attempt to draw deeper conclusions from Mrs. Justice Smith’s strong judgment; some might even use the decision to justify calls to the UK Government for accelerations or pauses to AI copyright defenses. Ultimately, though, the case teaches nothing new about the application of English copyright law to AI training and development; it reminds copyright holders that they must prove that the alleged acts occurred in the UK, not just that they happened.

As to deployment and use of the final AI model, the judgment is emphatic: Given that the model never contained or stored an infringing copy, supplying that model is not secondary infringement.

Getty may decide to appeal. Until then, the law remains that AI companies training AI models outside the UK face little legal threat inside it.

Innovation leverages physical AI – a major technological breakthrough with potential benefits for the sector’s performance.