Evening briefing Wednesday 6th 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. Welcome to the Times Evening Briefing on Wednesday the 6th of August. A White House official says secondary sanctions are still expected to be imposed on Russia on Friday.

0:43That's according to the Reuters news agency. US envoy Steve Witkoff met Vladimir Putin in Moscow earlier. The White House official says their discussion went well. India says additional US tariffs are unfair, unjustifiable and unreasonable. Donald Trump has put an extra 25 % on goods from India, saying the country imports Russian oil either directly or indirectly. A 25 % tariff was already in place, making it now 50%. Fred Flight is a former national security adviser to Donald Trump. He's told Times Radio the president is doing the right thing. Americans aren't happy about the possibility of sanctions against India.

1:23India is such a close friend. They've become a closer friend under President Trump. But the fact that Trump is willing to possibly hurt American relations with India, at least in the short term, to stop the killing in Ukraine shows how serious he is to stop this war. And Trump is exactly right. India, by buying oil from Russia, is helping finance the war in Ukraine. The prime minister is playing down a report suggesting major tax rises will be needed in the next budget. He says he doesn't recognize some of the figures from a think tank, the NIESR. It says Rachel Rees will need to find£41 billion to cover the costs of weak economic forecasts and tax reversals.

2:04But Sakir Starmer says there are positive economic signs as well. We will build on what we've done in the first year of this government. We've stabilised the economy. That means interest rates have been cut now four times. And for anybody watching this on a mortgage, that makes a huge difference on a monthly basis to how much they pay. In the first year, we've raised wages as well, both in the private sector plus the minimum wage, which means people have got a bit more money coming into their pocket. Today is the 80th anniversary of the nuclear bomb dropped by the Allies on Hiroshima. About 55 ,000 people, including representatives from 120 nations, stood in Hiroshima's Peace Memorial Park near the centre of the blast to remember the tens of thousands who died.

2:47Stephen Walker is the author of Shockwave, Countdown to Hiroshima, in which he interviewed a huge number of witnesses. He's told Times Radio how the young men in the plane saw themselves. Largely, this was necessary, this had to be done, this ended the war, this saved light. There's some very strong arguments to support that. I don't think it's quite as clear-cut as that, but there are some very strong arguments to support that. Is this some kind of psychological defence mechanism when you're confronted with the kind of horrible reality of what actually happened? Perhaps a quarter of a million people died, we'll never know the exact figure, in those two attacks.

3:22or is it actually a mantra that they genuinely held onto because they believed it for the rest of their lives? And you can follow The Times News Briefing on Spotify and listen live to Times Radio online.

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