Evening Briefing Wednesday 1st 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. 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.

Hello, this is your time's evening briefing for Wednesday the 1st of January with Meet James Kitchen. Police in New Orleans say a man was hell-bent on creating carnage when he drove a pickup truck into crowds celebrating the New Year killing 10 people.

The suspect, who's died in police fire, has been identified to NBC News as 42-year-old Shamsa Dinjaba. The FBI is leading the investigation as suspected terrorism, with US President Joe Biden promising to give authorities all the resources they need.

Meanwhile, President-elect Donald Trump has called the attack an act of pure evil. The US correspondent for The Times in the Sunday Times, Charlotte McDonald Gibson, says Bourbon Street, the location of the attack, is an iconic destination. It's this place with like a wonderful atmosphere of anything goes and everyone's in a good mood and having something to drink. I mean, it's really sort of encapsulates the spirit of the city.

It's, you know, I think it's fair to say it's one of the most famous streets in the hall of the US, Bourbon Street. So it's a place imbued with a lot of history, a lot of culture, a lot of sort of symbolism. So perhaps this is what made it a target in this attack. The government pledged to recruit 6,500 extra teachers could cost £5 billion a year. That's according to new research. It comes amid warnings Labour may fail to meet its target by the end of the current parliament.

According to the National Foundation for Educational Research, ministers would have to raise teacher salaries by 10% a year for the next two years. The cost far more than the £1.8 billion a year ministers say they'll raise from adding VAT to private school fees. James Akolo is Director of School Workforce at the Education Policy Institute. He says the government needs to make teaching more attractive. The job has become much harder, much more emotionally taxing. And it's no wonder that so many teachers are saying

it's just not worth any more pay in a sense a sticking plaster for order but if you're asking people to do a harder job you have to pay them more if you want them to keep doing it or make the job better but that's a hard thing to do and I don't think there's an immediate path to that

Heating and hot water have been cut in some parts of Moldova as Russia stops supplying gas via Ukraine. Exports to Central Europe have been cut off after a deal between Moscow and Kiev ended. Ukraine says the deal to use Soviet-era pipelines that cross the country won't be renewed while the war continues. Slovakia's Prime Minister says that'll have drastic consequences on EU countries as prices rise.

The Times' Germany corresponded Oliver Moody says the move will have little impact on the outcome of the war, but Russia has lost another lever of energy power. The amount of gas that was going through this pipeline by the end was only about 5% of the EU's total imports and most of those Russian gas contracts are going to be honoured just by a different route. So it'll go through NNG shipments, it'll go through a Turkstream pipeline, up through the Balkans or whatever. So Russia will still be selling

the gas. But what is also true is that this is a moment where the Putin regime's energy leverage over Europe has never been weaker

The home office says it'll stop at nothing to dismantle people smuggling gangs and bring the criminals to justice. It's been revealed nearly 37,000 migrants crossed the channel to the UK in 2024 up 25% on the previous year. And a major incident's been declared in Greater Manchester where severe floodings preempted three-day forecasts of snow and ice across the UK.

Cars are submerged as high as their wing mirrors in some places, with roads underwater too in Timpalee. Many trains around Manchester, Cheshire and on transport for whale services either cancelled or delayed too, including in tomorrow. 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.

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.