Afternoon briefing Thursday 5th 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. This is your Times Radio News Briefing for the afternoon of Thursday, 5th March. The Defence Secretaries met with the Defence Minister of Cyprus on the island as an expression of the UK's support for citizens there, despite a British airbase being hit by a drone, likely from an Iranian-backed group.

0:51The Cypriot Defence Minister said he expressed the importance of communication and cooperation. The government's faced criticism for not being able to get its warship to the region until next week. The Times' Defence Editor Larissa Brown is in Cyprus with John Healy and explained the significance of the lack of weaponry. We've always had a warship in the Middle East region and this is the first time since the 1980s that we haven't actually had a ship here. And the reason that they need the ships here is because the Type 45 destroyers are our only capability that can shoot down ballistic missiles.

1:23And we're obviously seeing ballistic missiles fly around in the skies in the Middle East at the moment. Bahrain and the UAE told The Times they had concerns about the UK's response to the conflict. Minister Alex Norris told Times Radio that Britain has been building up its defence capabilities there. I just disagree and I think the evidence from the work we have been able to do in the last few days shows that that's not right. I would never be in a position, as you know, no one would be in a position to talk about the operational configuration of our resources. But we can talk about its impact, which is clear and has been effective.

1:55So that work of building up the air defence, building up radar systems, having our brilliant F-35s there has been effective. In the conflict itself, there are reports of six people injured in Abu Dhabi as a result of debris from an intercepted drone. And Azerbaijan says two people have been injured from missile strikes on its territory from the direction of Iran. Iran's Revolutionary Guards say they have hit a US tanker in the northern part of the Gulf. On the other side, about 174 cities in Iran have been hit by America and Israel, according to the Red Crescent in Iran. One of those was Sanandaj.

2:36Meanwhile, the US and Israel are working to arm Kurdish forces to take on the Iranian regime, potentially drawing Syria and Turkey into the war. The Times' World Affairs editor Catherine Philp explains why. The Kurds are an ethnic group within several different countries, Syria, Turkey, Iran, Iraq, who generally have quite a sort of pro-Western outlook and have been used as support troops in those contexts. In other news, the husband of a Labour MP and two other men have been released on bail after being arrested on suspicion of spying for China. They were arrested by counter-terrorism officers at addresses in London and Wales yesterday and have been released on bail until May, according to the Met Police.

3:21Southeast Water has been fined£22 million over supply failures that affected more than 286 ,000 people. Offwatch says their failures between 2020 and 2023 were significant and caused major disruption. For more stories like this, listen throughout the day to Times Radio.

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