Evening briefing Thursday 22nd January

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. Welcome to the Times Radio evening briefing on Tuesday, the 22nd of January. President Trump has claimed that European troops stayed off the front lines in Afghanistan.

0:44It follows previous comments about Western allies not necessarily being available if the U.S. requires military support. He's been speaking to Fox News. I've always said, will they be there if we ever needed them? And that's really the ultimate test. And I'm not sure of that. I know that we would have been there or we would be there. But will they be there? And let's hope that that never happens. We've never needed them. We have never really asked anything of them. Numerous NATO countries lost personnel in Afghanistan between 2001 and 2014 following the U.S.-led invasion. 457 British soldiers were killed.

1:21Lieutenant Ben Hodges is a former commanding general of the U.S. Army in Europe. He's told Times Radio he's sickened by the president's comments. Look, I was in Kandahar from 2009 to 2010. thousands of British soldiers, Canadian soldiers, Danish soldiers, Romanians and others. I was out on the runway many nights at what we call a ramp ceremony when the bodies of soldiers from all those nations who had been killed were being flown home. There's no American soldier that believes what our president just said and I am sorry that he did that. There may be a way for the mayor of Greater Manchester, Andy Burnham, to return to the House of Commons and perhaps challenge Sir Keir Starmer.

2:01Andrew Gwynn, a former health minister who lost the Labour whip over offensive WhatsApp messages, has stood down as an MP. Luke Trill for More In Common says Burnham polls well against his rivals for the top job. He has a net favourability of plus four. When we ask about West Streeting, another mooted potential successor to Keir Starmer, he's minus 10. Shabana Mahmood, minus 20, Ed Miliband minus 26, Angela Rayner minus 34, Keir Starmer minus 43 and Rachel Reeves minus 48. A first group of migrants has arrived at a military training camp in East Sussex. The Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood says 27 men were moved to the former barracks at Krobra earlier this week.

2:42They all came across the channel on small boats. Up to 500 single male migrants are expected to be housed there. Local councillor Andrew Wilson. To sneak people in at half past three in the morning is duplicitous and it is an insult to a community which has demonstrated 11 weeks in a row that it does not want this training camp to be transferred into one of the biggest illegal migrant accommodation sites in the country. And you can follow the Times Radio News Briefing on Spotify and listen live to Times Radio online. This episode of the Times Radio News Briefing is sponsored by PwC. AI is everywhere.

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