Morning Briefing Friday 15th 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 Good morning. Donald Trump's warned there's a 25 % chance his meeting later with Vladimir Putin about Ukraine will fail.

0:39A Russian government plane slandered in Alaska ready for talks, which Vladimir Zelensky is not involved in. The US president says if it goes well, he'll give the Ukrainian leader a call afterwards and hinted all three could then get together. Kate McFarlane, former Deputy National Security Advisor to Donald Trump, told Times Radio Mr Trump is skilled in making good deals. I guess the Europeans are nervous that maybe somehow President Trump is going to cave to Vladimir Putin. I think that's highly unlikely. But I think their worries are really quite unfounded. If you look at how President Trump's conducted himself, he's a tough negotiator.

1:16He's a tough real estate negotiator. I'm a New Yorker and I've seen him in action for 40 years. He's tough and he doesn't give in. And so anybody who thinks that somehow Vladimir Putin is going to get the better of him, I think, is probably wrong. Artificial intelligence has been used to design two new antibiotics that could potentially kill drug-resistant strains of gonorrhea and MRSA. The compounds still need years of refinement, but researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology say the use of AI algorithms to create these treatments could launch a second golden age in antibiotic discovery.

1:50Arti Krishnan is the lead author of the report. Generative AI models can come up with very interesting looking molecules that do not exist in nature. So the big breakthrough here is essentially looking at very large chemical spaces where normally you would find molecules that bacteria have not encountered. And we believe that looking in this underexplored chemical space could actually tackle the resistance crisis. Nigel Farage has demanded that Sir Keir Starmer allow him to nominate Reform UK peers to the House of Lords. He says his party has four MPs and controls ten councils, but has no representation in the second chamber.

2:34Kevin Schofield is the political editor of HuffPost UK. He told Times Radio it's not going to work. That's not how it works. Just because you've got 4.1 million votes at the general election, just because you now run 10 councils, that does not automatically entitle you to seats in the House of Lords. And Nigel Farage knows that, and this is just a stunt. He's obviously briefed this story out, he's written to the Prime Minister about it, portray himself as a victim. He gets him a nice story on the front of the Times, but it's not going to make any difference. They're not automatically going to get any peers at all as a result of this.

3:03A 16-year-old boy has been arrested on suspicion of rape and murder after the unexplained death of a 13-year-old girl. Police were called to a flat in Huddersfield on Monday night. The girl was taken to hospital and died there early Tuesday morning. The 16-year-old boy remains in police custody. The King and Queen will attend a service of remembrance at the National Memorial Arboretum to commemorate the 80th anniversary of VJ Day. That's the day Japan surrendered in 1945, which ended the Second World War. There'll be a national two-minute silence at 12 o 'clock. And don't forget you can set the Times News Briefing as your news service on Alexa.

3:43This 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 Here's a tip for you. There's a podcast out there with fans waiting to be your next customer.

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