Evening briefing on Tuesday 15th July

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0:35This is your Times Evening Briefing on Tuesday 15th July. The Defence Secretary says it's been deeply uncomfortable to cover up a data breach in 2022, which lawyers argued risked the lives of Afghan nationals who helped British troops. An unprecedented super injunction has been lifted following a two-year court battle spearheaded by the Times, as it's revealed 7 ,000 people have been relocated to the UK as a result at a cost of£850 million. It's understood a soldier leaked the personal data as he was trying to verify Afghan applications to come to Britain Times' defence editor Larissa Brown says there are so many unanswered questions This individual we are told was under the command of General Sir Gwyn Jenkins He's the current head of the Navy, he was Director of Special Forces at the time Was he going to face any repercussions as a result?

1:22There's so much more and even today all the Afghans are being told in Afghanistan that their data's been breached They don't know the full story. A lot of the hearings were behind closed doors. We couldn't be in them. Conservative James Cartlidge was a defence minister in August 2023 when the breach became known. He's explained what the government was trying to avoid at the time. An error by an official of the British state leading to torture or even murder of persons in the data set at the hands of what remains a brutal Taliban regime. that scenario thankfully appears to have been avoided. John Turode has been sacked as Master Chef presenter after it emerged an allegation against him of using racist language was upheld.

2:06Earlier the BBC insisted Master Chef can survive after more than 40 allegations were upheld against its second presenter Greg Wallace. The corporation claims the show's bigger than any individual. Two men have been sentenced to four years and three months in prison for cutting down the Sycamore Gap Tree in September 2023. The world-famous landmark, which stood near Hadrian's Wall, was felled during a storm in what prosecutors called a moronic mission. Daniel Graham, who's 39, and 32-year-old Adam Carruthers were convicted of criminal damage in May. In sentencing, Mrs Justice Lambert accused the pair of acting out of bravado.

2:41Police say they've recovered three of four bodies from a plane that crashed at Southend Airport on Sunday. All on board were foreign nationals and included a commander, co-pilot and doctor who were men and a female nurse. The aircraft had dropped off a patient and was due to return to its base in the Netherlands when it crashed. The airport remains closed. Thames water bosses have apologised to MPs after their annual report suggested big losses and a rise in sewage spills. Pollution incidents rose by a third and the country's biggest water company lost£1.65 billion. That drives its debt to£16.8 billion in total.

3:17Chairman Sir Adrian Montague told MPs they're working to keep the company solvent. I joined this company two years ago in the wake of the resignation of the chairman and chief executive. We had a crisis. We have been living in crisis mode ever since. But we are trying to refinance this company and preserve it from a special administration, which would be very bad for everybody. A new report is suggesting last summer's riots could soon be happening again. British Future claims the UK is a melting pot of social tensions, with seven in ten people surveyed saying they've never met or interacted with local asylum seekers.

3:52The think tank's director, Sundar Katwala, has told Times Radio it's crucial that people interact with others from different backgrounds. If you don't meet people, you don't know people are different from you, and then you hear something shocking in the news, you're much more likely to think, they're all like that and they're a threat to me, than if you think, OK, somebody's done something quite extreme on the white far right from Islamist extremism, but actually I know most people in that group aren't like that. So the meaningful contact, whether it's in schools, whether it's up the generations, is a really important source of resilience against those kinds of shock events.

4:26You can follow the Times News Briefing on Spotify and listen live to Times Radio online. That's your Times Evening Briefing on Tuesday 15th July.

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