Afternoon Briefing Tuesday 18th August

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 for Tuesday, the 18th of August. Russia is threatening the UK with consequences after the Sunday Times revealed that Ukraine has used British drones to strike deep into Russian territory.

0:49Russia's embassy in the UK says Britain is deliberately opting for an escalation of the Ukraine crisis. Defence correspondent Dominic Housechild wrote the story for the paper. Russia is already attacking the UK. I mean, we've had a sustained campaign of sub-threshold grey zone hybrid attacks, whatever you want to call them, for years now. espionage, sabotage, attacks on our critical infrastructure, sabotage of our undersea cables. So we're already at sort of a state of hostilities with Russia. Green Party activists have said that British Jews are a weapon of Israel. The Times has seen messages on a WhatsApp group which also say that hostility towards Jews is understandable, which discuss killing Zionists and which describe the majority of Israeli Jews as genociders.

1:35The Times' assistant political editor, Geraldine Scott, says the party is split. There's an ongoing kind of argument within the Green Party about how much focus should the party be putting on things like the conflict in Gaza, potentially at cost of things like the environment. If you speak to some older members of the Green Party who would traditionally be campaigning about recycling or cleaning up the rivers and things like that, some of them are aghast at the way that the party has gone and the focus on these kind of foreign policy issues. The Conservatives say they would remove employment restrictions which stop young people getting weekend and summer jobs.

2:13The Tories would allow 16 and 17 year olds to work until midnight at weekends during term time. They would also relax rules on break times. The CEO of UK Hospitality Kate Nicholls is backing the plan and says the pandemic is partly to blame for fewer opportunities for young people. Certainly the link was broken when we went into Covid. Younger workers in particular did not get that rite of passage of starting their first job having work experience. I mean my daughters were younger during the Covid era they didn't even have their two weeks work experience at school because of Covid and so we've broken that habit of having those temporary short-term jobs that got you on the first rung of the ladder and this is about life experiences it's about transferable skills.

2:56A stag has been put down after a man was injured during a picnic in southwest London. A deer apparently approached a group at Richmond Park on Saturday looking for food. The man's injuries are not life-threatening. Officials are warning the public not to feed or to approach the animals. And the pub chain J.D. Weatherspoon has banned the use of smartphone loudspeakers in all 792 of its outlets. It says customers have been driven nuts by the antisocial behaviour. Signs will be put up asking customers to keep their handsets on silent. You can follow the Times Radio News Briefing on Spotify and listen live to Times Radio online.

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