Evening briefing Tuesday 26th August

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

0:35This is your Times Evening Briefing on Tuesday 26th August. I'm Laura Cook. Nigel Farage has outlined Reform UK's plans to tackle illegal migration, saying they would use a carrot-and-stick approach to encourage people to leave, followed by forcible detentions and removals. He said he'll send 600 ,000 illegal immigrants back to their home country within the first five years, and set out plans to use military bases to solve the issue. The military bases that we will use, people will be detained. They won't be out walking the streets, on the road to being deported. So I would suggest to you that whichever geographical locations are chosen, local residents will be far less concerned by this plan than they would young men being free 24 hours a day to walk through their village or walk through their town.

1:29Times' chief political correspondent Aubrey Allegretti said there were significant gaps in the detail of the speech.

1:58and he suggested that that was a complex system. He didn't have all of the answers. The Conservatives have accused Nigel Farage of copying their homework while the Lib Dems say he's following in the footsteps of Vladimir Putin by wanting to rip up human rights agreements. A court has heard how a resident of the Bell Hotel in Epping, who'd recently arrived in the UK, attempted to kiss a 14-year-old girl who had offered him some pizza. The prosecution said Haddish Kabartou made inappropriate comments to the girl and her female friend that he wanted to have a baby with each of them and attempted to kiss them.

2:30Gubatu spoke through an interpreter. He denies five charges against him and the trial due to last two days continues. The Minister for Safeguarding says the key tool used by police to determine the level of support for domestic abuse victims is failing. Jess Phillips, who's responsible for tackling violence against women and girls, said the DASH assessment, the 27-question form, has clear flaws. It's designed to spot high-risk situations and connect victims with specialist services, but doubts have been raised over how well it works. Dr. Heather Strang, who heads the Gerry Lee Centre of Experimental Criminology, told Times Radio what she believes should be used as an alternative.

3:09What we should be doing is thinking about the most harmful people and targeting them, rather than relying on very inadequate indicators of the kind that Daesh and Dara are providing in identifying where scarce resources should be assigned. Families of Israeli hostages in Gaza have taken part in large demonstrations, pressing their government to make a deal with Hamas to release hostages and end the war. It comes amid international anger over the deaths of medical workers and journalists in a double strike on a hospital in Gaza yesterday. Political analyst Areh Kovler is in Jerusalem. The mainstream media channels have covered this as a very serious incident, something that shouldn't have happened.

3:58And we haven't seen, as we've seen at other points throughout this war, the kind of mainstream Israeli media rallying around the government narrative, but rather saying this is really bad. And police made 528 arrests at this year's Notting Hill Carnival, but say there were far fewer incidents of serious violence than at previous events. It's estimated around 2 million people attended the two-day festival in West London. You can follow the Times News Briefing on Spotify and listen live to Times Radio online. That's your Times Evening Briefing on Tuesday 26th August.

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5:25This week on The Business, part two of our mini-series Power Struggle. We're asking, will Andy Burnham say yes to more oil and gas exploration in the North Sea? We've gone from an energy exporter as a country to an energy importer. I think it's a tabist to you. Join me, Hannah Prevett and me, Dominic O 'Connell for weekly conversations from the world of business and entrepreneurship Follow us wherever you get your podcasts or find our channel on YouTube by searching Times Business