Donald Trump says Ukraine could regain all its territory from Russia and that Nato countries should shoot down Russian jets that violate their airspace, in what appears to be a major shift in his position on the war. The US president’s comments followed his speech at the UN General Assembly in which he warned that immigration and clean energy policies meant European countries were “going to hell”. The Conservatives have called for an investigation into No 10 chief of staff Morgan McSweeney over allegations he may have misled the elections watchdog. In a leaked email from 2021, a Labour lawyer advised McSweeney to falsely mark his failure to disclose £740,000 in donations to his think tank Labour Together as an “admin error”. A new AI tool designed to crack down on fraud has helped the British government recover almost £500m over the past year. Much of the recouped money relates to fraudulent activity during the pandemic, unlawful council tax claims and illegal subletting of social housing. The British tool will now be licensed to other countries, including the US and Australia.

Trump’s “oddball” turn at the UN

It is more than six decades since a youngish Fidel Castro addressed the UN for a “crisp” 269 minutes, the longest timed speech in the General Assembly’s history, says Alec Russell in the FT. Donald Trump’s “rambling” address yesterday fell short of that, but it was still the most “scattergun, repetitive and oddball” speech ever given by a US president in that setting. He said Europe was “going to hell” because of the “double-tailed monster” of immigration and climate change (“the greatest con job ever perpetrated on the world”). One moment he was complaining that the Scottish countryside was scarred by “windmills”; the next he was falsely accusing London mayor Sadiq Khan of promoting sharia law. George W Bush is said to have remarked that Trump’s 2017 inauguration speech was “some weird shit”. Yesterday, the US president gave us “the global version of that”.

Trump’s most startling comments came after the speech, says Tom Nichols in The Atlantic, when he said Ukraine could defeat the “paper tiger” of Russia. This seems like a huge foreign policy reversal: he previously said Kyiv needed to fold because it didn’t “have the cards”. What’s changed? Unless President Zelensky has told him of some “amazing plan” to win the war there’s no reason to think his view has shifted on that. It could be that he has finally realised Vladimir Putin has been stringing him along. Far more likely is that this was just “one of his tantrums” – he is bored of the whole conflict and wants to wash his hands of it. As he put it: “I wish both countries well.” Besides, Trump is renowned for agreeing with whoever he spoke to last, and his comments yesterday came after meetings with Zelensky and Emmanuel Macron. For now, it’s “just talk”.

🎙️🤷‍♂️ Trump suffered a number of “awkward tech difficulties” during his visit to the UN, says Connor Stringer in The Daily Telegraph. First an escalator abruptly stopped working just as he and Melania stepped on to it (below), something UN workers had reportedly been overheard joking about last week. Then his teleprompter wasn’t working, forcing him to use a hard copy of his speech. “It is always an honour to speak at the UN,” the US president wrote on social media later, “even if their equipment is somewhat faulty.”