Afternoon Briefing Friday 13th March

0:00This episode of the Times Radio News Briefing is sponsored by PwCWC. Staying competitive means getting ahead, not just keeping up. So how do business leaders cut through the noise and focus on what really matters? PwC takes you further with tech, from optimising the systems that put your data to work, to scaling AI from proof of concept to competitive edge. PwC helps you meet tomorrow's tech demands so you can compete at a speed that rewrites the rules. Discover more at pwc.co.uk. Welcome to the Times Radio afternoon briefing on Friday the 13th of March. An oil trader has told Times Radio that Donald Trump has lost control of the situation in the Middle East.

0:43The United States has temporarily lifted sanctions on Russian oil to help tackle a surge in prices. It applies to Russian crude and petroleum already loaded onto ships and will last almost a month. Greg Newman, head of the Onyx Capital Group, was asked what he made of this move. What I make of it that Trump and Trump's administration have completely lost control. I mean, he's saying one minute that everything's fine and he's saying, oh, you know, the straits have closed. And one of his advisers would have said the reason why it's bad is not because ships can't physically get through. It's because no one wants to insure it.

1:13So he says, OK, we'll insure everything. But we were looking at it like how are you going to insure like a 300 billion dollar business? It's just not going to happen overnight. He also says up to 200 dollars is being paid for a barrel of crude oil. Iran is blocking the Strait of Hormuz, which carries 20 percent of the world's oil. Philip Crowther from the Associated Press is in the UAE and says a small number of vessels are getting through. The only movement that we've seen over the last few days, and this is based on website traffic and tracking software, is that some ships that are aligned at least with China have been able to get through.

1:49Very minimal movement, China being Iran's last oil client, essentially. Otherwise, it is just a bottleneck. Rachel Reeves has admitted there's still more to do after the economy recorded zero growth in January. The Tories claim the government's economic plan has failed. Reform UK's deputy leader Richard Tye says Labour is not helping businesses. These numbers were worse than the economists were forecasting. They're consistently worse because the impact of raising taxes, wasting government public sector spending all over the place that everybody sees, raising regulations, whether it's unemployment regulations.

2:27It just adds to the cost for businesses and they have to pass it on to the consumers. And parents with unreasonable expectations and short tempers are draining schools' time and energy, according to an education union. 95 % of headteachers say they've experienced unreasonable demands. Jo Rowley is the president of the Association of School and College Leaders. She says artificial intelligence is causing problems as well. We get an awful lot of emails which are quite often AI generated, so you can get very long, lengthy emails of complaint where it can actually be very hard to work out from 13 pages exactly what the complaint is.

3:08And you can follow the Times Radio News Briefing on Spotify and listen live to Times Radio online. This episode of the Times Radio News Briefing is sponsored by PwC. AI is everywhere. In the news, in our hands, but return on investment, not so much. So how do you get beyond the hype and deliver AI that powers reinvention and growth across your business? Strong foundations unlock AI's potential. That's why PwC takes you further with tech, strengthening the data quality, processes and workflows that shape how well AI performs. PwC turns innovation into implementation so you can accelerate from experiment to scale.

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