Afternoon Briefing Friday 9th October

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0:37You just pay per session. Grow connects you with thousands of high-quality licensed therapists across the U.S. offering both virtual and in-person sessions nights and weekends. You can search by what matters, like insurance, specialty, identity, or availability. And you can book a therapy session in minutes and begin in as little as two days, not the national 48-day average. See if you could pay as little as$0 for therapy in seconds at growtherapy.com slash ACAST. That's growtherapy.com slash ACAST. growtherapy.com slash ACAST. Availability and coverage vary by state and insurance plan. Hello, this is your Times Radio afternoon briefing for Friday 9th October with me, James Kitchen.

1:26Labour has won the Hoburn and St Pancras by-election in North London following Sakir Starmer's resignation. Sagal Abdiwali received more than 12 ,000 votes, followed by the Green Party leader Zach Polanski, who won almost 9 ,000 votes. Labour's new MP says she wants to tackle rough sleeping, bring Thames water into public ownership and create more opportunities for young people. I've watched people across Camden work to build communities where difference is not something to fear, but something to value. We cannot allow that work, built over generations, to be casually undone by those who seek to divide us.

2:04Meanwhile, Zach Polanski has insisted he will absolutely continue to lead the Greens despite his defeat. The Sunday Times' Whitehall editor Katie Tarrant was at the count. She says she's not surprised by his defiance. I don't really think the Green Party, being the sort of democratic structure that it has, is really in the business of deposing its leaders. So it will be really interesting to see how the party's MPs and other senior figures react in the coming day. It comes as the Green Party is facing an investigation by the equality's watchdog after it adopted a controversial motion declaring Zionism as a form of racism.

2:44Speaking to Times Radio, the Green Pier, Baroness Jones, said the motion lacked clarity but insisted Zach Polanski would adopt a pragmatic approach. We do have a leader who's prepared to clarify it for us. Zach will step up. You know, it will be part of what a leader does. But Andy Burnham saying that Zach should scrap the motion, he clearly doesn't understand what democracy is about. A leader does not have that sort of power. Elsewhere, the U.S. Secretary of War Pete Hegseth says the execution of a former U.S. Army major will be live-streamed. It was a radical Islamist attack in uniform inside the ranks, and so he's going to get a firing squad of soldiers, as it should be.

3:22And we'll make sure that people are able to watch it, that it's public, because people need to understand that there's serious consequences for these types of things. Nidal Hassan shot dead 13 unarmed U.S. soldiers and injured more than 30 others at the Fort Hood base in Texas in 2009. His death will be the first public execution in the U.S. since the 1930s. The South African jurist Navarne Thampille has been awarded the 2026 Nobel Peace Prize. The 85-year-old former UN High Commissioner was recognized for her efforts to promote international law. The Nobel Peace Prize is worth 12 million Swedish krona, almost a million pounds.

4:02It will be presented in Oslo in December. There's a warning, England's reached a tipping point at which people are at risk of being misdiagnosed with ADHD and autism. An independent reviews found recognition of the conditions has risen dramatically, leading to hundreds of thousands of people awaiting assessment. Professor Sir Simon Wesley is a psychiatrist and vice chair of the review. Speaking to Times Radio, he said private clinics should be held to the same standards as the NHS. Misdiagnosis, which is what we're talking about here, has been with us for as long as we've had doctors. There's nothing new about that.

4:39But the circumstances we have at the moment of a really over-pressured system, not picking up the fact that many diagnoses overlap, not having the time to get GP records, not doing a full assessment, that is not helping the person, the family or the professionals. Remember, you can follow The Times Radio News Briefing on Spotify and you can listen live to Times Radio Online.