Evening briefing Tuesday 28th October

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 Evening Briefing on Tuesday, the 28th of October. The Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, has ordered his military to carry out powerful strikes in Gaza.

0:44He's accused Hamas of violating the ceasefire by not handing back the bodies of all the dead hostages. There are suggestions that Hamas doesn't know where some of the bodies are, but Fleur Hassan Nahum, an Israeli foreign military special envoy, has told Times Radio that's incorrect. We have intelligence that they know where all of them are, or at least bar two they know where they are, is because they are playing for time. They are biding time. They want to rearm and they want to refresh. And this is why they're not returning the hostages because they know that the minute they return all the dead hostages, they have to go to the second phase of the agreement.

1:22And the second phase of the agreement is disarming. And a terrorist group is not going to disarm so quickly. Rachel Reeves is expected to have to find an extra£7 billion in her budget next month. It appears the Office for Budget Responsibility has downgraded its productivity forecast by 0.1%, resulting in a shortfall. The OBR will send the Chancellor its final economic forecast on Friday. Paul Johnson, the former director of the Institute for Fiscal Studies, has told Times Radio that Reeves and other ministers have made a series of errors. They told us before the last election that they wouldn't need to increase taxes or cut spending.

2:01Well, we knew at the time that wasn't true, and so they did increase spending. and they massively increased taxes last year. And then she left herself with no room for manoeuvre against her, quote, ironclad, unquote, fiscal rules in that budget. And then she made the mistake of saying, and I won't have to come back for more. Well, I'm afraid it looks like she is going to have to come back for more. Hurricane Melissa has made landfall in southwestern Jamaica. It could be packing winds of up to 185 miles an hour. Over the next few hours, the Category 5 storm will rip through Jamaica before moving towards the east coast of Cuba.

2:38Giovanni Dennis, a journalist in Jamaica, has told Times Radio what the feeling is there. Anxiety. A lot of people are anxious. Even the authorities themselves are anxious. One of the calmest persons I know is the head of the Met Office here in Jamaica, Evan Thompson. And his voice was shaking when he spoke at a government press conference two days ago and said we will be having catastrophic floods right across the country, catastrophic winds. And the actress Prunella Scales has died at the age of 93. She was best known for playing hotel manager Sybil Fawlty, the bossy wife of John Cleese's Basil.

3:13Her son Samuel and Joseph say she was watching Fawlty Towers the day before she died. The broadcaster Giles Brandreth was a friend of Prunella Scales. He's told Times Radio she analysed Sybil's character. Why did Sybil marry Basil? Why does she stay? And she said, I had to work that out before it made any sense to me. And she said, I think I came to the conclusion that he was actually quite good looking. And maybe she said he must have been fabulous in bed because he was so impossible in every other respect. And you can follow The Times News Briefing on Spotify and listen live to Times Radio online.

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