Morning Briefing Monday 20th April

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. This is a Times Radio Morning Briefing on Monday the 20th of April. Donald Trump says a U.S. Navy intercepted an Iranian flagship as it tried to get past a U.S.

0:43naval blockade in the Strait of Hormuz. Yesterday, the U.S. president said a U.S. delegation will head to Pakistan today, renewing his threat to bomb Iranian power plants if it doesn't agree to a deal. Iran has said it won't take part in talks. Sir Robin Niblett, foreign affairs analyst and former director of Chatham House, told Times Radio the Americans cannot bomb the Iranian regime into submission. But what you can do is threaten their survival, not actually by military activity, and this is where I think Trump's got it wrong. The real threat for them, in a way, is peace, because the minute you have peace, and if it's a peace that is then going to allow those many, many Iranians who actually hate the regime and would rather see it overthrown, the minute peace comes back in, The Islamic regime is probably going to face this moment of maximum danger.

1:34Yvette Cooper says any talk between the US and Iran must result in a toll-free passage for vessels through the Strait of Hamuz. The Foreign Secretary says Tehran has been proposing to introduce tolls on the crucial waterway once the conflict ends. Lord Dannett, former head of the British Army, told Times Radio Iran's hold over the strait won't affect the world for too long. The world's flow of oil and energy is not stupid. It will quickly adjust to realising that actually the flow of oil out through the Straits of Muz is a weakness. It'll find ways of getting out other oil through the Saudi pipelines.

2:10Other shipping will go around South Africa. And I think we'll find that the effect that the Iranians can carry out will actually be reduced over time. Sir Keir Starmer will battle to save his job in Parliament today after officials failed to tell him Peter Mandelson had failed his security vetting to become US ambassador. The Prime Minister will be faced with allegations he misled Parliament after telling MPs the proper process had been followed. The Foreign Office's top official, Sir Ollie Robbins, was fired over the incident last week. David Maddox is the political editor of The Independent and told Times Radio that Downing Street knew about this last year.

2:46Even the claim that he only found out last week kind of falls apart just on what we did at The Independent in September. we broke this story that Peter Mandelson had actually failed his security vetting. I published my initial communications with the then director of communications in Downing Street so they knew about this problem back in September. They chose to ignore it. Police have identified Sharma Elkins as a suspected gunman who killed seven of his own children and wounded their mother in a mass shooting in Louisiana. The children aged between 1 and 12 were killed on Sunday morning in Shreveport.

3:24Police say the suspect first shot the mother and a total of eight children, one of whom was not his child. Brian McCallum is a journalist in Louisiana and told Times Radio more about what happened. Police responded, found the bodies and about nine blocks north of there, the suspect carjacked someone in an intersection, a major intersection. Police saw the vehicle fleeing and followed to Bossier City, which is right across the river. And he got out of his car in a neighbourhood with his weapon. Not quite clear yet whether he started firing first or the Shreveport police who had pursued him fired first, but he was killed.

3:59And you can hear more on all of those stories throughout the day on Times Radio. This 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.

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