Evening briefing Wednesday 12th November

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 Good evening. US Democrats have released new emails to and from paedophile Jeffrey Epstein that refer to Donald Trump.

0:40The White House Press Secretary Caroline Levitt has released a statement saying the email released is a fake narrative and an attempt to smear President Trump. Mark Jansen is White House reporter at USA Today. One of the key emails was from April of 2011 in which Epstein is exchanging messages with his aide, Jelaine Maxwell, and says that Trump stayed for hours at Epstein's house with one of the victims, one of the alleged victims. So that sort of puts him in the location, but it doesn't say when that happened, what the time frame is and what might have happened during that visit. President Trump denies the allegations, calling them a hoax.

1:24Sir Keir Starmer has insisted his top team's united. That's despite claims of a leadership plot. Health Secretary Westreating had to come out and strongly deny that he's involved in a coup. He's also criticised the culture at Number 10 and called for whoever's behind the rumours to be sacked. Reports found decades of abuse against young men at a detention centre in County Durham were ignored and dismissed. The independent body for prisons has examined what happened at Medumsley between 1961 and 1987, including widespread physical and sexual assaults by staff. It found extreme violence and acts of sadistic nature at the site.

2:04A thousand of job cuts at the NHS will go ahead after£1 billion for redundancies was approved by the Treasury. The government had already announced its intention to slash 18 ,000 administrative and managerial roles across NHS England and the Department of Health. Daniel Eccles is chief executive at NHS Providers. A lot of people think, and including nearly all of our members who are the provider part of the NHS, that actually simplifying and streamlining the bureaucracy in the NHS will be a good thing. I do think we have to acknowledge, though, and the Secretary of State did acknowledge that in his speech, that the uncertainty that has happened for the last few months from making the decision to lose a lot of posts and actually being able to fund the redundancy costs has been really unfair to those individuals.

2:50So it is really good that there is now a solution on the way forward. Seven men have been charged with more than 40 offences against 11 teenagers after an investigation into child sexual exploitation in Bristol. So the alleged offences took place between 2022 and this year. Military driving examiners will be drafted in to help cut the huge waiting lists for practical tests. Ministers are changing the booking rules to tackle unfair practices that allow people to resell driving tests for profit. And the Victims Commissioner for England and Wales, Helen Newlove, has died at the age of 63. Her office says she passed away following a short illness.

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