Morning briefing Friday 16th October

0:00This Monday.com ad was created by a team of people and AI agents. The agents wrote the copy and managed the timelines, while our human creative director made sure it all made sense. Easy! Create your own AI agent today on Monday.com.

0:34calls from trade unions for a tax rate on bank profits. Chief Economist at NetWealth Gerard Lyons says changing how interest is paid on bank cash reserves at the Bank of England could raise over £10 billion annually. They get paid bank rate on that 3.75 % is a lot of taxpayers' money that is paid to the banks each year. In Europe and in the States, the banks that have their money at the central banks there only received bank rates on the partial amount of the reserves." Three children and a teacher have been killed in a shooting at an elementary school in Oregon in the USA. Police say a 16-year-old suspect was shot dead at the scene by a local community member.

1:16Defense Secretary Wes Streeting says that vital satellite communications needed for Ukraine's military have been restored following top-level talks in Washington. Speaking after a meeting with US War Secretary Pete Hegseth, Mr. Streeting said he was directly reassured that Starlink internet services were back online. Professor of Politics Scott Lucas from University College, Dublin, says significant questions remain over why the technology was restricted in the first place. Whether there could be some type of astounding technical explanation for both the cutoff of early warning intelligence and the Starlink restriction, or as they suspect, that someone within the Trump administration ordered that to be done, or as a warning, I should say, to Ukraine to stop striking Russia's oil refineries.

2:05Hospitals in England have been ordered to bar transgender women from female wards under new single-sex rules issued by NHS England. In a major policy reversal, health bosses say patients must now be accommodated according to their biological sex. Campaigners have welcomed the move, while the British Medical Association warned it could risk excluding transgender patients. Co-founder of Sex Matters, May Forstatter, told Times Radio that she believes that the rules needed to change. If there's one place where people should know what sex people are, it's in hospital. And where you have single-sex wards, that needs to mean single sex, just for dignity, privacy and security, particularly for women.

2:48The mother of the man who murdered Southampton student Henry Novak is set to be released from prison early. Kiran Kaur was jailed for three years for assisting an offender after hiding the murder weapon. She'll be freed having served less than half her sentence under a government release scheme. Kaur, who is an Indian national, could be eligible for the government's deportation scheme, and in a Home Office statement, they said that we will always seek to deport foreign criminals at the first opportunity. You can follow the Times Radio news briefing on Spotify and listen live to Times Radio online and on DAB.

3:32Outdated technology isn't going to improve a disconnected healthcare system. Next. So what will? At Optum, we wake up every day and work for better. We call it healthy optimism. It's how we use insights and technology to help providers focus less on paperwork and more on patients. Will we fix it all overnight? No, but we'll wake up trying again and again until healthcare works as one for everyone. That's healthy optimism. Learn more at Optum.com.