Evening briefing Thursday 29th 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 This is the Times Radio evening briefing on Thursday 29th January. Sir Keir Starmer has opened the door to Xi Jinping visiting the UK after their meeting in Beijing this morning.

0:45The Chinese leader last visited in 2015 when David Cameron was Prime Minister. The move is likely to cause controversy, given Beijing has sanctioned five MPs and two members of the House of Lords. But Lord Beamish, the Labour peer who chairs Parliament's Intelligence and Security Committee, says the government has to engage with China. Well, the alternative to that is you basically hope that China goes away. China is not going to go away. It's important that we have a relationship that are very clear about those values and issues which we want to defend. A report has concluded a surgeon at Great Ormond Street Hospital in London harmed 94 children in his care.

1:23Our reporter in the Times newsroom, Olly Cole, has more. Yasser Jabbar was an orthopaedic surgeon at the prestigious Children's Hospital who specialised in reconstructing lower limbs. But a review has found he harmed more than a quarter of his surgery patients. 36 suffered severe harm, one child who needed an amputation, another may need one in future, and several have been left with serious nerve damage and debilitating deformities. It's brought into question Great Ormond Street's culture, with a survey of doctors criticising managers for being remote, detached and invisible. The hospital's chief executive has apologised.

1:55Mr Jabbar is understood to be living abroad with no licence to practice in the UK. A 15-year-old boy has pleaded guilty to murdering a 12-year-old he didn't know in a random attack in Birmingham last January. Police say there was no clear motivation for him stabbing Leah Ross, who was on his way home from school. A nursery worker in North London has pleaded guilty to another 26 charges of child sexual abuse. It means Vincent Chan has now admitted 52 crimes in total The government has upheld a decision not to compensate women affected by a change to the state pension age Waspy women are women born in the 1950s who say they lost out because they weren't given enough warning to sort out their affairs But the Work and Pension Secretary Pat McFadden says compensation wouldn't be practical because most of them were aware of the change To specifically compensate only those women who suffered injustice would require a scheme that could reliably verify the individual circumstances of millions of women.

2:50That includes whether someone genuinely didn't know their state pension age was changing and whether they would have read and remembered a letter from many years ago and acted differently. Campaigners say WASPy women have been treated with utter contempt. Iran's accusing the European Union of fanning the flames by prescribing the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps as a terrorist organisation. The decision puts pressure on Sakir Starmer to do the same in the UK And a tax row over wigs has led judges to rule that baldness can be considered a disability A wig company argued HMRC wrongly handed them a£277 ,000 VAT bill on the basis that its products qualified for an exemption for drugs, medicines and aids for disabled people Judges have backed that claim and rejected HMRC's argument that wigs are purely cosmetic Don't forget you can subscribe to the Times Radio News Briefing on Spotify or listen live to Times Radio online.

4:10PwC takes you further with tech, strengthening the data quality, processes and workflows that shape how well AI performs. PwC turns innovation into implementation so you can accelerate from experiment to scale. Discover more at pwc.co.uk.