Evening briefing Friday 18th 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 the Times Evening News Briefing for Friday the 18th of September.

0:43job despite a major software failure that grounded thousands of flights. An internal review by Nats into last week's four-hour air traffic control outage found the meltdown was caused by a corrupted output triggered by a software defect. More than 2 ,000 flights were cancelled and over 300 ,000 passengers left stranded. Claire Irvin is head of travel at The Times and Sunday Times. She was asked on Times Radio if it could happen again. We know tech goes wrong. Things happen. And to say, you know, that this was a corrupted output doesn't give a huge amount of detail for anyone to speculate about whether it could happen again.

1:23But this is the third serious failure in as many years. So that might suggest that it's possible. The head of the Russell Group has suggested universities should be allowed to charge different tuition fees according to their reputation and courses. Libby Hackett is chief executive of the group of 24 leading universities. In the Times, she said the government should consider differential fees as part of an urgent and whole-scale review of higher education funding. Meanwhile, Imperial College London has been named University of the Year by the Sunday Times. Zoe Thomas, who puts the list together, spoke to Times Radio.

2:01It's done extraordinary things. It's building a challenger to Silicon Valley in West London. It's students, as well as being incredibly high performers and scoring every year the best graduate prospects. They are also scoring very highly on levels of student satisfaction, which is really unheard of in super high achieving research led institutions. Royal experts have questioned the brother of Princess Diana's new memoir. Earl Spencer claims in the book that King Charles, then Prince, sounded giddily elated and like a lottery winner after learning of Diana's death during a phone call in 1997. Royal editor Chris Shipp spoke to Times Radio.

2:39I just think it's very difficult to know exactly what Charles's tone was following the death of his ex-wife. But the other thing I think is, you know, if the mother of your children, even if you're divorced, if the mother of your children has just been killed in a car accident, And would you really be sort of excited? Would you be giddy? Would you be sort of like you won the lottery? I can't personally, I can't see it, but we've just got to take his claims in the book as they are. Buckingham Palace is yet to comment on the latest allegations, but previously said fraternal grief can cloud reason.

3:10A 19-year-old's been jailed for piloting a mega dinghy across the English Channel. Chan Mathok Atak, who's from South Sudan, is said to have been one of two people operating the boat, which was carrying 167 people from France to the UK in July. At the time it was intercepted, it was the most people ever found on a migrant boat in the channel. And Ukraine is calling for a boycott of the boys' under-15s World Cup after FIFA allowed Russia to take part. It's the first competition in which the country will compete since the 2022 invasion of Ukraine. Ukraine's Minister of Youth and Sports, Matvi Bidnyi, says the move legitimised a terrorist state.

3:49There's more on these stories on Times Radio.

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