Afternoon Briefing Monday 14th September

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 Monday the 14th of September. The deputy leader of Reform UK has told Times Radio the UK has an authoritarian government.

0:43Richard Tice claims there is a dictatorship running the country and Reform is the victim of a coup. He was speaking as controversy over two£36 million donations to Reform from two cryptocurrency billionaires continues into a third day. He was asked if he knew when they moved back to the UK to make the donations admissible. I know they've complied. That's what our compliance team and lawyers have checked. It sounds to me that you don't know when he moved. It's not my job to know individual movements, where someone spends individual nights of an individual week of an individual month. Politicians are warning that AI poses serious threats to human rights with current laws around it described as patchy and confused.

1:25A cross-party report says governments could be left behind by the rate of development. Richard Suskind has written a best-selling book on AI. He says the tech poses different kinds of risks. So there are, for example, the existential threats, but there are also the impact on white-collar work or the impact on our democratic process, the threats of deep fake. And when we're talking about regulating, we need to separate out the different kinds of problems and risks that we face. A drone which struck a train travelling behind another one containing Boris Johnson may have been targeted at the former Prime Minister.

2:01Johnson was travelling with other delegates on the border between Ukraine and Poland, returning from a security conference in Kyiv. Ukraine's railway operator says it's entirely possible they were the intended target. The Times' former defence editor Michael Evans agrees. I think very clearly it could have been. Everyone knows that the only way to get in and out of Ukraine is by train. And they run this, what they call a diplomatic train. and hundreds of officials and prime ministers and presidents, whatever, have used this same train. So I think Russia knows full well that this service is going.

2:36I have no doubt that they have their own ways of finding out who may or may not be on board. Main meals will have to be served with salad or vegetables as part of a shake-up of school dinners in England. From next September, sugary drinks, ice cream, waffles, pizzas and sausages will be limited while deep-fried food will be banned. and Emmett Wiltshire is head chef at a primary school. The changes have implemented the fact that we have to have two vegetarian days a week and increase things such as legumes and porsas. There's so many clever ways that you can hide that in different sources and have that on the menu in a hidden way so that it doesn't impact the budget, meaning that you still have the allowance there for things like the fresh meat and the fresh fish.

3:14You 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.

3:57Discover more at pwc.co.uk. Hi, I'm Katie Prescott from the Times Tech Podcast. AI is already changing business and medicine, but could it also change the way we look after our own health? In a special episode in Paid Partnership with Vitality, we look at how AI, wearables and everyday health data could help shift healthcare from treating illness to preventing it. Listen to the Times Tech podcast wherever you get your podcasts.