Daily briefing Sunday 26th July

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 Daily Briefing for Sunday the 26th of July. One person's been killed and 16 have been injured after a van was driven into a gay pride parade in Berlin.

0:44Police say the vehicle struck multiple people at about 8pm local time. Some of the injured are said to be in a life-threatening condition. It happened at Tiergarten Park, close to the Brandenburg Gate. Officers say the suspected driver is someone connected to the local Islamist scene. He's been named as 21-year-old Abdul B and police have released a photograph. Reporter in Berlin, Matthew Karnichnig, has been updating Times Radio. They haven't said whether he is German or from another country. There is a report that he was recently released from a youth detention centre just in May. But that so far is all we know and the photograph presumably should help identify him.

1:28Andy Burnham is to give regional mayors a share of income tax in new powers to be announced on Friday. The idea is to give mayors more control over spending to boost local investment and infrastructure. Claire Ward, Labour's mayor for the East Midlands, has told Times Radio how she thinks it's going to work. What we will be able to do is to get a share of the income tax that's either raised within our region by people working within the region or people living within the region. So some of that detail is still to be determined. But what that does, it gives us an incentive and a longer term pipeline of that money that we can also borrow against.

2:04The Defence Secretary Wes Streeting has been asked on Times Radio whether he backs a commitment to raise defence spending to 3 % of GDP by 2030. His predecessor John Healy resigned over the issue, saying he was unhappy with defence investment. Healy is now Chancellor and Streeting says spending is entirely up to him. Well, it's for John Healy to write the budgets and the spending reviews. And I'm not trying to be difficult or evasive here and answer that question. It's simply a statement of fact and it really is not my place to write John's budgets and spending reviews. Let's just put it this way.

2:37I'm absolutely delighted to have one of my predecessors in the Treasury as Chancellor. His view and my views on these issues are absolutely aligned. Wildfires on the coast of southwestern France have moved inland towards Bordeaux. Thousands of people have been evacuated from the city suburbs. Fires across the border in Spain have claimed their first life. Times reporter Simon Hunter is in the capital. Yesterday, when I woke up yesterday, I opened the doors. I'm in central Madrid, about 50 kilometres from the nearest fires. When I opened the doors yesterday, you could smell the smoke and there was a haze over Madrid.

3:13The whole day yesterday, it was sunny and the light that was coming down had this orange hue because it was going through the smoke. You can follow the Times Radio News Briefing on Spotify and listen live to Times Radio online.

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