Evening Briefing Tuesday 19th November

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This is the time's evening briefing on Tuesday the 19th of November. There's concern that the war in Ukraine is closer to becoming a nuclear conflict. Russia has updated its wartime doctrine to permit a nuclear response if it's attacked by any country that's supported by a nuclear state. That would include Ukraine, which is believed to have carried out its first strike on Martian soil using U.S. supplied missiles.

The general Ben Hodges former commander of US Army Europe has told us this is more posturing from Moscow.

Well, of course, you know, Russia does have thousands of nuclear warheads, so you have to take it seriously. But I think there is almost zero chance that Russia uses a nuclear weapon because there is no benefit for them to use a nuclear weapon. The Chinese, India have all told Moscow, do not use this. Not a moral thing for them, but they don't want to see any disruption of their access to cheap Russian oil and gas.

Jeremy Clarkson has joined thousands of farmers in London to protest against inheritance tax changes, urging the government to back down. The TV presenter, who also owns a farm in Oxfordshire, says farmers have suffered a hammer blow. While thousands have taken to the streets around Westminster, to protest over the changes on farms worth more than £1 million, we've been speaking to one of them, Stephen Thompson, a farmer from near Sheffield.

The only way that you can afford to pay something like this would be doubling the food prices overnight. It was bad enough with 20% food inflation. We need 100% food inflation to pay these taxes or else you lose all the family farms and that's the backbone of the farming economy. That's 60% of the food production in this country comes from small family farms and it's just pointless what they're doing.

Peter Mandelson has told Times Radio that the British government should call on Nigel Farage to help build bridges with Elon Musk. Speaking to Hugo Rifkin for the How to Win an Election podcast, the Labour pair said the party needs to reach out to Musk through allies, including the reform leader.

cannot just continue this feud indefinitely. We've got to get over it. We've got to be reintroduced to the British government and one good way of doing that might be through some of his British friends, even if they are not, as I'd say, you know, bright red supporters of the Labour government. Including Nigel Farage then? Yes, I would include Nigel Farage.

and more than 200 schools across the four nations had to close today after the first significant snow of the season hit parts of the UK overnight. The Met Office has issued four new yellow weather warnings for ice and snow. Meteorologist Joe Wheeler has told Times Radio whether this week may catch people out. This was the first alert of the season and rightfully so to be perfectly honest. We don't often see this kind of wintery weather in November.

It will catch people out. We barely had a frost, let alone, you know, ice on the roads, you know, all the need to shift, if they were anything like that. And don't forget, you can follow The Times News Briefing on Spotify, and you can listen live to Times Radio online.

Hello, I'm Holly Mead and with me is Lucy Andrews and we are both from the money team at The Times and Sunday Times. And our new podcast is called Feel Better About Money. It's a safe place to talk positively about money and personal finance. Each week, we will tackle a specific financial topic from managing debt, saving for a pension, buying a house or deciding whether to ensure you're cat or dog or goldfish. Feel Better About Money is sponsored by Lloyd's ready-made investments.