Evening briefing Friday 19th June

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. Good evening. The Prime Minister is thought to be considering his position over the weekend. Sources close to Sir Keir Starmer say he recognises there's pressure from backbenchers for him to go.

0:42It's after Andy Burnham's win in the Makerfield by-election. Labour MP Joe Morris says it's time for the PM to leave Downing Street. I think at this point we don't just need a change of leader, we need a change of direction as a party. Pierre needs to read the room, he needs to see how things are going, and this needs to now be about a managed transition to a new leader. And ultimately, I think Keir's got the opportunity now to go with Grace, to burnish his legacy as a man who took us back into government, rather than fight a process. If you fight a process, it will tarnish Keir's legacy as leader.

1:19The leader of the National Education Union, Daniel Kabady, has told Times Radio that he hopes Labour will crack on with a quick transition of power. He says Andy becoming the leader of the Labour Party is an inevitability from this point on. We have a situation currently where the pupil role is falling. There has been restrictions on funding that are incredibly significant. Rachel Reeves is the most difficult Chancellor for Education since George Osborne left the Treasury. It's no exaggeration to say that Boris Johnson was more generous with school funding than Keir Starmer. So we are hoping for Andy Burnham, if he becomes Prime Minister, to change that direction.

2:04Israel and Hezbollah have agreed a ceasefire after trading deadly strikes overnight. The attacks killed 18 people and four IDF soldiers in southern Lebanon. Iran pulled out of talks in Switzerland yesterday, jeopardising the US-Iran peace deal. Alan Ayers is a U.S. diplomat who was part of Obama's administration negotiation team for the Iran nuclear deal. So it's good news if, in fact, there is a ceasefire. But it just shows how fragile any ceasefire is between Hezbollah and Israel, especially considering that Hezbollah, or excuse me, that Israel controls one fifth of Lebanon. You know, something like a million Lebanese have already been internally displaced and thousands killed.

2:43So this is still the weakest link in the chain of the ceasefire between the United States and Iran. It's understood a three-year-old boy was attacked by at least one crocodile after ending up in an enclosure at a zoo in Cambridgeshire. He remains in critical but stable condition in hospital. A man arrested on suspicion of attempted murder has been deemed unfit for interview. And trans women will be banned from female jails in Scotland after a judgment from the nation's highest court. In a blow to the SNP, Judge Lady Ross has ruled that Scottish prisoners must be segregated by sex at birth, not by gender.

3:20Emma Kirwan has the latest. The Scottish government had argued banning any trans women from female prisons would breach the European Convention on Human Rights. But this latest ruling takes its lead from last year's Supreme Court decision that a woman is defined by her biological sex. For a roundup of news on demand, subscribe to The Times Radio News Briefing on any podcast platform.

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