Morning briefing Monday 29th December

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 the Times Morning Briefing on Monday 29th December. I'm Chris Stabbs. President Trump says there are the makings of a deal to end the war in Ukraine after meeting President Zelensky in Florida yesterday.

0:45However, in a 75-minute call with Vladimir Putin, the Kremlin leader rejected a proposed ceasefire, claiming a temporary pause would only prolong the conflict. Despite the disagreement, the Kremlin reports that both Both sides have agreed to continue negotiations on peace and economic cooperation. President Zelenskyy gave this update. We discussed all the aspects of the peace framework which includes and we have great achievements. 20-point peace plan 90 % agreed and U.S.-Ukraine security guarantees 100 % agreed. U.S.-Europe.-Ukraine security guarantees almost agreed. Military dimension 100 % agreed.

1:22However, Charles Kopchin, who's a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, who served as a senior director for European affairs on the National Security Council and the Obama administration, is skeptical of these figures. But I have to say that one has to be skeptical about how much concrete agreement there is. 90 % among the Ukrainians, the Americans and the Europeans, I think that's a bit of a stretch. If you bring the Russians into the picture, I would say we're nowhere near the finish line. Sir Keir Starmer is facing a backlash from his own MPs over the release of British-Egyptian activist Allah Abdel Fattah.

2:01Senior Labour figures have called for Fattah to be stripped of his British citizenship. That's following the emergence of abhorrent past comments, including calls for violence. Number 10 admits the Prime Minister was unaware of the remarks when he welcomed Fattah's release, leading to private criticism of a failure in background checks. John Vine is a former Chief of Borders and Immigration Inspector and told us that he has found evidence that the Foreign Office sometimes hasn't followed the correct procedures. I inspected nationality in the way that it was being granted by the Home Office in 2014-15 and at that point I found that there was very little evidence that Home Office officials were giving weight, proper weight to evidence of character.

2:43New figures show the number of patients waiting four weeks for a GP appointment has risen by nearly a quarter of a million since Labour took office in July 2024. 1.77 million long waits were recorded in November. Labour has defended the figures, saying they include routine follow-ups and warned against misrepresenting the data. Dr Lawrence Buckman is a former chair of the BMA's GP committee and told us that the figures are indeed complicated. They're slightly difficult to interpret because they include patients who've been booked in in advance, who could easily be four-week waits, and people who call on the day urgently unwell, who clearly mustn't wait four weeks or indeed four days.

3:23And these two figures mixed together make it very difficult to interpret. There's more on these stories throughout the day on Times Radio. This episode of the Times Radio News Briefing is sponsored by PwC. 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.

4:08Discover more at pwc.co.uk.

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