Evening briefing Friday 19th 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 for Friday the 19th of December. The best-selling children's author David Walliams has been dropped by the publisher HarperCollins.

0:42A statement from HarperCollins, which is under the leadership of a new CEO, said HarperCollins takes employee well-being extremely seriously and has processes in place for reporting and investigating concerns. President Putin has said there will be no more wars after Ukraine if Russia is treated with respect. In a traditional end-of-year televised event lasting more than four hours, He described claims that Moscow is planning to attack European nations as nonsense. Russian and US officials are expected to meet in Miami this weekend as part of the Trump administration's push to end the war in Ukraine.

1:18The US Secretary of State is Marco Rubio. There's only one nation on Earth, there's only one entity on Earth that can actually talk to both sides and figure out whether there's a way to end this war peacefully. And that's the United States. And we've invested a lot of time, a lot of energy at the highest levels of our government. What we're trying to figure out here is what can Ukraine live with and what can Russia live with, sort of identify what both sides' positions are and see if we can sort of drive them towards each other to some agreement. Ukraine has struck a Russian oil tanker in the Mediterranean Sea using drones to inflict what it called critical damage.

1:50The tanker, which was empty, was a part of Russia's so-called Shadow Fleet, a collection of vessels deployed by Moscow to bypass Western sanctions. Earlier, President Zelensky welcomed a loan of 90 billion euro from the EU, despite missing out on the proceeds of more than 200 billion euro in frozen Russian assets. Belgium and Italy were among those nations who argued it would have set a dangerous precedent. Oleksandr Hara is the executive director of the Center for Defense Strategies in Ukraine. It could have been a good precedent. And I believe with this decision to stream this money to Ukraine, It could have been a good example for Russia that whether they have much larger military or a stockpile of nuclear arms, they will not be unpunished and they will face justice.

2:40The former Conservative leader Ian Duncan-Smith has accused the UK of complacency towards China. After government aid was stolen in a hack. The data is understood to have been on systems operated on behalf of the Home Office by the Foreign Office, although officials believe the risk to individuals is low. A Chinese-affiliated group is suspected of being responsible. Mr Duncan Smith is currently sanctioned by China for expressing concerns of human rights abuses. He's now urging Sir Keir Starmer to cancel his New Year visit to Beijing. There's no question this was a cyber attack and by the way I understand that it may well have been an attack engaging visas.

3:19Now if it's to do with visas as well They'll be after those poor people that have fled from China, and they have these fake police stations which they drag them into as well in the UK. And we seem to have done so very little. And UK borrowing has increased to its second highest level on record, despite an increase in tax receipts. The government borrowed more than£132 billion between April and November, an increase of£10 billion over the same period last year. You can follow the Times News Briefing on Spotify and listen live to Times Radio online.

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