Afternoon briefing Wednesday 23rd 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. This is your Times Radio news briefing for the afternoon of Wednesday the 23rd of September. Ministers have admitted that the Chagos Islands deal cannot go ahead without Donald Trump's support.

0:45The deal involved handing sovereignty of the islands from Britain to nearby Mauritius. Plans to pay Mauritius millions of pounds a year to then lease back the UK-US military base there were called terrible by the US president yesterday. Wes Streeting, the defence secretary, told Times Radio about the government's response. This isn't news to us. President Trump has been clear that he has concerns about the deal as it's currently constituted. We will work through the detail of the US concerns and seek to reach a point that all of us can sign up to. Piers Morgan has told Times Radio a promise of a reprint from Earl Spencer to correct a mistake made about him in his book is not enough.

1:29Princess Diana's brother claimed in his memoir that Morgan was the editor responsible for publishing private photos of Diana in a gym, which he was not. The former editor told us there are still going to be millions of copies of the first edition sold. He directly accused me of the most egregious invasion of royal privacy in history. And I say that because the Mirror Group ended up paying Princess Diana over a million pounds. That was the biggest payout to any member of the royal family that's ever been for an invasion of privacy. So he's directly putting that on me. There were 105 ,000 divorces in England and Wales last year and just over 900 equivalent dissolutions of civil partnerships.

2:09The number of divorces is a similar figure to the previous few years, but generally rates are lower than their peak between the 80s and 2000s and people are staying married for longer. Reporter Sangeeta Kandola has more. The average length of a marriage that ends in divorce is 13 years and 16.3 % of couples who married in 2015 had divorced before reaching their 10th anniversary. But that's better than the figure from 1995, where nearly a quarter of marriages had ended before a decade was done. The divorce rate for opposite-sex marriages was 8.4 people per 1 ,000 people in 2025. The rate for same-sex marriages was higher, at 19.5 people per 1 ,000.

2:53The Kremlin has said Andy Burnham's comments at the UN about Russia deliberately spreading misinformation in the UK has stoked anti-Russian sentiment and has done nothing to de-escalate the situation in Europe. The Prime Minister launched a verbal attack on Russia at the UN General Assembly. In recent years, we have seen industrial-scale assault by hostile actors on the information environment in the UK and that of many of our allies. Russian agencies have used every means at their disposal to spread lies and disinformation and prey on people's fears. They've used bots and fake websites, falsified newspaper articles.

3:34For more stories like this, listen throughout the day to Times Radio.

3:42This 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. Discover more at pwc.co.uk

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