Morning briefing Thursday 6th 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. This is your Times Morning Briefing for Thursday 6th August. Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch is under fire for wanting a former neo-Nazi as an advisor to her party.

0:44Joshua Bonehill-Payne, who was once convicted of abusing a Jewish former Labour MP, announced yesterday he'll no longer be standing as a council candidate for the Tories. Instead, he'll advise on radicalisation. Campaigners have criticised the move, but former MEP Annunziata Rees-Mogg, who's head of communications at Popular Conservatism, says he's the perfect choice for the role. He has actively been working to highlight the danger of people being pushed into extremism as he feels he was. We need people who have been radicalised to help prevent other people doing so. A star professor at Cambridge who's been accused of plagiarism and dishonesty quit last night, saying he no longer wants to live under a constant spotlight.

1:34Jason Arday, who was the youngest black professor in the history of the university, resigned after it launched an investigation into him. Cambridge says it'll look into his academic qualifications, appointments and research misconduct linked to his publications and journals. Roger Mosey is the former head of BBC TV News and was on the Equality, Diversity and Inclusion Committee at Cambridge. He didn't have the standard qualifications you'd expect of a Cambridge professor of first class degrees and multiple degrees and doctorates at top universities. What he had instead was a life story and the life story was very compelling and the life story may well be something that mitigates a lack of absolute top level academic experience.

2:17The problem is when the life story starts to unravel and that seems to be what's happened here. Marco Rubio has told the new foreign secretary to boost British defence spending. Ed Miliband's been in Washington in meeting the US Secretary of State, who's warned him that Europe must play a greater role in its own security. Katie Balls, who's Washington editor for The Times, told us nothing the pair discussed came as a shock. There's just a sense that something we've heard time and time again from the Trump administration, which is NATO needs to carry its weight and not just rely on the US, which is clearly part of NATO, but they want to do shared burden carrying.

2:53And they discuss things like efforts to reopen the state of Hormuz. And of course, the backdrop of all this is the Trump administration. There had been concerns over Mr Miliband's previous comments about President Donald Trump, where he had called him a misogynist and a racist, but he says the subject didn't come up. And more than 100 deaths have been recorded after use of GLP-1 weight loss drugs like Manjaro or Wegovy. The regulators also received 150 ,000 reports of side effects from fat jabs. More than one report can be made per patient, meaning the figure may not reflect the total number of individuals complaining.

3:30For more stories like these, listen to Times Radio throughout the day.

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