Afternoon briefing Thursday 2nd January

We all want to enjoy food that tastes great and is sourced responsibly. But it's not always easy to know where your favourite foods come from. McDonald's works with more than 23,000 British and Irish farmers to source quality ingredients.

Mike Allward is a dairy farmer from Cheshire who supplies organic milk to McDonald's in the UK for its teas, coffees and porridge through Arla. We're involved in a network which has been set up by Arla to look at the possibilities for farming regeneratively. One of the things we're doing here is moving our cattle and giving them a fresh piece of grass every day to help regenerate the soil.

We're very lucky that we've had a long-term relationship with McDonald's. And I think often people don't realise how seriously McDonald's take their relationships with farmers. Change a little, change a lot. Find out more about McDonald's plan for change on the McDonald's website.

And this is the Times afternoon briefing for Thursday 2 January. FBI agents remain at the scene of yesterday's deadly 4x4 attack in New Orleans, where at least 15 people died. The U.S. President says the suspect 42-year-old Shamsodin Jabbar was inspired by Islamic State. Investigators say they don't think he was acting alone.

As the probe continues, some are asking why bollards to protect pedestrians from being rammed have been removed. Ryan Michael Jenkins is a former counter-terror advisor, told Times Radio it's a type of attack that's hard to prevent. These events are still statistically rare. It's not like ordinary automobile accidents that we see so many thousands of.

But clearly, over the last two decades, we have seen an incline in the number of incidents and in efforts to kill more and more people each time. Meanwhile, authorities are looking into a possible military connection between the suspect in New Orleans and a man who died in a blast in Las Vegas. He's been named as 37-year-old Matthew Livelsberger and was in the Tesla Cybertruck that exploded outside Donald Trump's hotel.

The two men are reported to have served at the same military base. Suspected people, smugglers will face severe curbs and a new government crackdown on small boat crossings. Ministers say new legislation will provide for travel bans, internet restrictions and curfew. The new orders could be used on others believed to be involved in serious crime and could even be imposed before suspects are arrested.

But some MPs say the measures are unnecessarily draconian. The Conservative Shadow Home Secretary Chris Philp told Times Radio nobody should be getting into small boats. These relatively small measures the government are announcing today certainly won't make much of a difference in my view. What you need is a deterrent. We had a deterrent. They're a wander scheme.

which the Labour government cancelled before it even started. And as a consequence, crossings since the general election are 29% up compared to the same period last year.

She's the first in this project that's been produced, so she's about six weeks old. She'll be tested to see what her DNA is like and what her genetics look like in terms of what we predict her methane production per unit of milk produce as an adult cow is going to be. And Neil Young has pulled out of this year's Glastonbury Festival, hitting out at the BBC. In a website post, the 79-year-old rock star said it was over demands from the broadcaster and called the festival a corporate turnoff.

Don't forget you can follow The Times News Briefing on Spotify and listen live to Times Radio Online. We all want to enjoy food that tastes great and is sourced responsibly, but it's not always easy to know where your favourite foods come from. McDonald's works with more than 23,000 British and Irish farmers to source quality ingredients. Sophie Bambridge grows quality potatoes for McDonald's iconic fries in Norfolk.

I think McDonald's are one of the biggest supporters of British farming. They have a real commitment to British potatoes. The Sustainable Fries Fund is a collaborative investment by McCain and McDonald's to help us understand and try different growing techniques.

for potatoes so that we can understand what we can do to help reduce our impact on the environment but still produce a good quality potato. It helps enable us to try things without having the risk and cost of potentially it going wrong. The support from McCain and McDonald's is really useful to us. Change a little, change a lot. Find out more about McDonald's Plan for Change on the McDonald's website.