Morning briefing Monday 31st August

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0:34This is Times Radio's morning briefing on Monday 31st August. Two of the men convicted of killing PC Andrew Harper in 2019 will stay behind bars. Andy Burnham has revealed changes to the prison release scheme in England and Wales. The PM will now exclude all forms of manslaughter, as well as those convicted of historic grooming offences, death by dangerous driving and causing or allowing the death of a child. Emily Darlington is the Labour MP for Milton Keynes Central, whose constituency is within PC Andrew Harper's force area. Somebody who goes after a police officer and helps people go after a police officer, I'm afraid, should never be allowed to be part of the early release scheme.

1:17And I'm really pleased that the Prime Minister and Alex Norris, the Justice Secretary, have really listened and have found ways to make the whole early release scheme a lot fairer and a lot safer. The captain and seven crew on a passenger ferry, which capsized in the Mediterranean, are in custody. At least eight people died and around 18 are missing after the catamaran overturned off the coast of northern Cyprus. Authorities in the Turkish-controlled region say it's the biggest maritime disaster there and there's mounting speculation about what caused it. Tom Cleaver is chief reporter at the Cyprus Mail.

1:51There are questions over whether the boat was seaworthy. I've seen rumours unconfirmed that the boat had been in a collision before in 2003. I believe the boat itself is 26 years old, which some people suggested is a danger in and of itself, given how old that is and how many miles it would have had. U.S. forces have struck Iranian rocket launchers in the first military action against the country in a month. A U.S. official said the Islamic Revolutionary Guard had been preparing to launch rockets with sea mines into the Strait of Hormuz. These were then struck by American forces with semi-official news outlets in Iran reporting explosions near Lalek Island.

2:32Rescuers in Nepal are intensifying efforts to find flood survivors with more warnings of heavy rainfall expected in the next few days. The death toll has risen again. More than 800 people are now confirmed to have lost their lives after a collapsed glacier in Tibet caused devastating flooding. Kristen Cook is a geomorphologist at Grenoble Alps University. She's told Times Radio about the long-term prospects for the worst-hit flood zones. The amount of water in the river is back to normal level. But what's happened now is that the river bed has completely changed. So in some places you have tens of metres of new material on the bottom of the river.

3:11Some places the river is much wider. And this can take years to tens of years to thousands of years, maybe never go back to how it was before. It's the second and final day of the Notting Hill Carnival. Police made 169 arrests yesterday but said the mood had been overwhelmingly positive. According to the Met Police, the arrests were made for possession of drugs, possession of weapons, assaults and sexual offences. And there's more on these stories throughout the day on Times Radio.

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