Evening Briefing Thursday 2nd April

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. Hello, this is your Times Radio Evening Briefing for Thursday 2nd April with me, James Kitchen. The Foreign Secretary has condemned Iranian recklessness for hitting global economic security.

0:44Yvette Cooper chaired a virtual meeting of more than 40 countries aimed at reopening the Strait of Hormuz. Donald Trump has lashed out at Washington's allies for failing to intervene in the vital shipping lane. The Times columnist Edward Lucas says the president should stop living rent-free in European leaders' heads. Well, he does say something. It changes some day to day. He's both declared this war as one and saying he's going to bomb Iran back to the Stone Age if they don't do what he wants. Those two things can't be true at the same time, any more than his claim a few months ago that he'd already dealt with their nuclear programme.

1:17The French president, Emmanuel Macron, has warned a military operation to liberate the strait would be unrealistic, telling his US counterpart it's not a show. Meanwhile, the chancellor, Rachel Reeves, has given her support to two new energy drilling sites in the North Sea as the Energy Secretary weighs up whether to grant the licences. But Ed Miliband has cautioned against an over-reliance on new fossil fuel extraction. Tessa Khan is an environmental lawyer and executive director of Uplift UK. Speaking to Times Radio, she warned further drilling would not help the economy. What the oil and gas industry itself has conceded is that because we simply don't produce enough oil and gas here and these are commodities that are sold on international markets that we then have to buy back, Whether or not we drill for it here doesn't take a penny off our bills.

2:03And more to the point, most of what's now left in the North Sea is oil. And we actually export more than 80 % of the oil that we produce. So from a security of supply perspective, it's really not making much difference either. A funeral director's been described as a monster who should rot in jail after he admitted preventing the burials of 30 people in Hull. 48-year-old Robert Bush gave grieving relatives the wrong ashes while their loved ones' bodies were left at his funeral home for months. Police discovered human remains at the premises in 2024. Nigel Farage has sacked Simon Dudley as Reform UK's housing spokesman after he claimed the Grenfell Tower disaster was a tragedy, but that everyone dies in the end.

2:45A group of bereaved families and survivors described the remarks as deeply dehumanising. The Labour MP for Kensington and Bayswater, Joe Powell, has been speaking with his constituents affected by the fire. People are first and foremost sad because one of the things post-Grenfell that I thought we had in this country was a degree of consensus and even cross-party working about ensuring that a fire like that could never happen again. And people want the right lessons to be learned from Grenfell. They don't want this to be politicised in the way that reform were trying to do. NASA's first manned mission to the moon in more than half a century is well underway after successfully taking off from Cape Canaveral.

3:30Artemis 2 will travel further into space than ever before. Shortly after takeoff, Commander Reid Wiseman checked in with ground control. It was an amazing ride uphill. The views, we've got two moon rises that we've had so far, and the views of planet Earth. We've circled it completely, and we forgot how beautiful it is to look down on Earth. The rocket is orbiting Earth while further checks take place. Later, the astronauts will gear up for the trans-lunar injection burn, which will send them on their way to the Moon. And remember, you can follow the Times Radio News Briefing on Spotify and you can listen live to Times Radio Online.

4:09This episode of the Times Radio News Briefing is sponsored by PwC. AI is everywhere. In the news, in our hands, but return on investment, not so much. So how do you get beyond the hype and deliver AI that powers reinvention and growth across your business? Strong foundations unlock AI's potential. That's why PwC 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