Evening briefing Friday 3rd 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.

This is the evening briefing for Friday the 3rd of January. Amber warnings for snow and ice are in place across the UK this weekend. The Met Office says power cuts are likely with freezing conditions and over a foot of snow possible. It's feared some communities will be cut off with trains and flights potentially delayed or cancelled.

More than 5,000 people were admitted to hospital last week because of flu. Medical experts say the NHS could struggle to cope with the significant outbreak. Hospitals in Worcestershire have now introduced compulsory mask wearing. Dr Adrian Boyle is president of the Royal College of Emergency Medicine.

The problem is that our urgent and emergency care system, our hospital beds, just aren't up to dealing with this. So when you take something which is chronically overwhelmed and then you add flu on top of it, it creates all sorts of additional problems. The biggest problem is that staff start going sick. You also end up having to close wards because you've got flu outbreaks and it creates this massive backlog, both in emergency departments and with ambulances outside the departments.

An IT outage at Germany's airports risks causing delays for people flying there from the UK. Berlin and Dusseldorf say arrivals from outside the Schengen area face longer waiting times because passengers are having to be processed manually. The cause is currently unknown.

The brother of the US Army veteran behind the suspected terrorist attack in New Orleans says reports about him don't match the man he knew. The FBI have now searched his property, a trailer in Houston, spending over 17 hours sifting through his belongings.

59-year-old former U.S. soldier Shamsar Dinja Bar killed at least 14 people when he rammed a pickup truck into crowds celebrating the new year. Police now think he acted alone. However, Michael Tabman, a retired FBI special agent, has told Times Radio he's disappointed with how the FBI initially told the public the suspect was operating as part of a wider network.

Many things are not what they appear to be, and so are those opening moments of an investigation. To go out there and say that there are other people who are acting with them and, you know, made everybody very nervous. So I'm a little surprised they did that. I think they jumped the gun. Again, it doesn't mean they're not going to do a thorough investigation, but just for that particular aspect of crisis management, I think they could have done a better job. They should have reserved judgment until they did a little more investigation.

President-elect Donald Trump has accused the UK government of making a very big mistake by increasing the windfall tax on North Sea oil and gas profits. He's used his truth social media platform to call on Britain to open up the North Sea and get rid of windmills, referring to offshore wind turbines in the area. A US company is pulling out of North Sea operations, citing increasing taxes.

Theowashuad is Times Radio's political correspondent. Of course, this is a man who boiled down his energy policy during the presidential election campaign to the simple maxim, drill baby drill with a promise to increase oil and gas production during his second term. And of course, you know that Ed Miliband and Keir Starmer are taking the UK in a very different direction. And don't forget, you can follow the Times News briefing on Spotify and you can 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.