Trump addresses UN with mixture of boasts, threats and jibes | First Thing

US-Iran meeting takes place on sidelines despite president’s threat to ‘annihilate’ Tehran regime. Plus, one man’s month-long pilates odyssey Good morning. Donald Trump has used the platform of the UN general assembly in New York to threaten to “annihilate the Islamic republic” of Iran, “and do it quickly”. He called on countries to unite to isolate Tehran and bring down global energy prices. Despite his bombastic rhetoric, Trump also said Iranian officials held three hours of talks with the US special envoy Steve Witkoff on the sidelines of the meeting. Witkoff said he felt very good about the meeting, the first such contact since the US vice-president, JD Vance, met an Iranian delegation in Switzerland in June.

A senior Iranian official also indicated that Iran was prepared to reopen the strait of Hormuz within a week. What else did Trump say at the UN? The president doubled down on his defence of AI development, saying warnings about runaway agents were a “hoax”; announced the US would build new military bases in Greenland; attacked the international criminal court as a “rogue organisation”; and prompted the Cuba’s delegation to stage a walkout when he described the country as a “failed state”. Did he continue his attacks on US media networks ? Trump scolded a CNN anchor for covering him at the UN, saying “I’m surprised that CNN is here covering me. You should not be here covering me. You said you weren’t going to cover…