Morning briefing Wednesday 24th September

0:00This episode of the Times Radio News Briefing is sponsored by PwCWC. Staying competitive means getting ahead, not just keeping up. So how do business leaders cut through the noise and focus on what really matters. PwC takes you further with tech, from optimising the systems that put your data to work, to scaling AI from proof of concept to competitive edge. PwC helps you meet tomorrow's tech demands, so you can compete at a speed that rewrites the rules. Discover more at pwc.co.uk. This is the Times Morning Briefing for Wednesday 24th September. President Trump has refocused his approach to the war in Ukraine, calling President Zelensky a brave man and saying he now believed Ukraine could win back all the territory that it had ceded to Russia.

0:50During meetings with Zelensky and President Macron of France at the United Nations, Trump continued to express support for Ukraine. And in a brief exchange with reporters in New York, he suggested Russia is a paper tiger. Nick Westcott is a former British ambassador. Speaking to Times Radio, he said it's a significant shift by the US president. And it's interesting to reflect whether the meeting he had with Putin in Alaska is actually sinking in that he was humiliated. And I think it is quite possible that he's been reflecting on that, in which case his words in support of Zelensky and of NATO are both very significant changes.

1:33Trump has also said he'll end the war in Gaza after talks with Arab leaders at the United Nations. Cedric Layton is a former member of the Joint Staff for the Pentagon. Speaking to Times Radio, he said there is no question of Trump intensifying the pressure on Israel ahead of next week's meeting with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu at the White House. The fact that the Trump administration is unwilling to draw those red lines, that is really going to give Netanyahu an excuse to go forward with this, but it's going to, in the long term, I think, create a lot of problems for Israel in terms of its ability to control that area.

2:09A Labour lawyer advised Sir Keir Starmer's chief of staff that a failure to disclose£700 ,000 of donations should be marked as an administrative error. In a leaked email from 2021, seen by the Times, Gerald Shamash told Morgan McSweeney there was no easy way to explain the failure to disclose the donations. Kevin Hollenrake, the Conservative Party chairman, accused McSweeney of hiding hundreds of thousands of pounds that helped install Sir Keir Starmer as the Labour leader. The UK parking industry is now estimated to employ more people than there are full-time soldiers in the British Army. The Times has learned that annual fines and charges imposed on motorists by councils have now reached£2.3 billion.

2:54Oliver Wright is the policy editor for the Times. He says councils are facing accusations of imposing a further tax on driving. There are certainly councils where there's been quite a lot of effort to reduce the amount of cars on the roads. You've seen a big rise of low-traffic neighbourhoods, which are highly controversial. But, you know, also, these councils are struggling financially, and this is an extremely good source of revenue. Some of them might argue that the two aren't mutually exclusive. And scrapping the two-child benefit limit would reduce child poverty, but not necessarily help with a youngster's readiness for school.

3:28The Institute for Fiscal Studies says the policy has no statistically significant impact on the proportion of children in England, achieving what is known as a good level of development by the age of five. Among those calling for the government to scrap the policy is the former Labour Prime Minister, Gordon Brown. You can follow the Times News Briefing on Spotify and listen live to Times Radio online.

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