Evening briefing Friday 12th December

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 The Times evening briefing on Friday 12th December. Russia's central bank is suing a Belgium-based clearing bank over frozen assets.

0:43Because it's filed in Moscow, the EU is unlikely to recognise any ruling against Euroclear, but it's been filed just before European leaders sign a plan to immobilise£185bn of assets permanently. Belgium's been resisting a push to release those funds to help Ukraine's war effort. The Times' policy editor Oliver Wright explains why. The fear that the Belgians have is that if at any stage those assets get seized and basically handed over to Ukraine, then the Russians would have a case not against the European Union, but against Belgium. And£200bn is basically the equivalent of about a third of Belgium's GDP and that they think that they could potentially legally be on the hook for repaying this money to Russia.

1:23The Belgian Prime Minister has said he's open to finding ways to move forward after talks with Sakir Starmer in Downing Street. Less than half of NHS staff have had their flu vaccines this year, despite warnings of the virus overwhelming hospitals. NHS data shows 43.2 % of frontline workers have taken up their free jab. Health officials say this winter could be their worst-case scenario because of an earlier wave of a stronger flu strain. A senior Labour MP says Rachel Reeves made a glaring error in the run-up to budget with her U-turn on raising income tax. Meg Hillier, who chairs the Commons Treasury Select Committee, says the Treasury had over-egged things in the weeks before and created uncertainty.

2:01She told Times Radio Rachel Reeves needs to make sure things change in future. Frankly, there has been information that's been coming out of the Treasury that should not have been being revealed, and I think people need to button their lip and just take... Sometimes this has been too disruptive. I think the Chancellor wouldn't disagree with me on that, but she needs to take that responsibility to make sure it really doesn't happen again. In October, the economy contracted slightly and unexpectedly by 0.1%. Rachel Reeves told the Select Committee this week there were too many leaks. Democrats in Congress have released more photos from Jeffrey Epstein's estate, which featured Donald Trump, Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor and Bill Gates.

2:35The 19 photos also include images of Epstein with Richard Branson, Bill Clinton, Woody Allen and Donald Trump associates Steve Bannon and Alan Dershowitz. The photos do not imply any wrongdoing. A man has been found guilty in a rare retrial of murdering his wife. Robert Rhodes stabbed Dawn Rhodes in the throat at their home in Redhill in 2016. He then claimed self-defense and got their child to lie for him through his first trial eight years ago when he was acquitted. That child then came forward to police, which prosecutors deemed sufficient new evidence to overrule the usual principle of double jeopardy.

3:08And the author Joanna Trollope has died at the age of 82. Early on in her career, she was dubbed the Queen of the Arga Saga for her novels about the personal, everyday lives of middle-class people in English villages. It was a label she later called patronising, and her friend, the Times columnist Libby Purvis, says there was nothing trivial about her work. People sort of say, oh, well, Arga saga, you know, rural Middle England and so on, you know, Afro and people. But she had, like Jane Austen, that sort of sharp perception of people and their motives and their loves and their sort of occasional heavy disagreements.

3:42And of course in a modern context that means divorces. Don't forget you can subscribe to the Times News Briefing on Spotify or listen live to Times Radio online.

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