Reuters World News - Tariffs, the Louvre and the Russia-Ukraine war

Episode Date: November 15, 2025

President Trump cuts tariffs on coffee, beef, and hundreds of other grocery staples. The U.S. president threatens to sue the BBC for up to five billion dollars over an edited speech. Russia pounds Kyiv in one of its biggest attacks after Ukraine hits a Black Sea oil port. Plus, investigators chase stolen Louvre jewels through Antwerp's diamond underworld. Listen to the latest episode of On Assignment "Trump vs the BBC". Sign up for the Reuters Econ World newsletter here.  Listen to the Reuters Econ World podcast here. Visit the Thomson Reuters Privacy Statement for information on our privacy and data protection practices. You may also visit megaphone.fm/adchoices to opt out of targeted advertising. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hi, I'm Sharon Reisch Garson in New Jersey. It's Saturday, November 15th. Today, Trump removes tariffs on everyday groceries. The hunt for the Louvre Jules targets Antwerp's jewelry underworld. And health care reshapes the 2026 midterm race. This is Reuters World News, bringing you everything you need to know from the front lines in 10 minutes, seven days a week. Tariffs on key food items, including coffee, beef, and bananas are being rolled back. President Donald Trump trying to ease grocery costs after months of insisting tariffs aren't

fueling inflation. Speaking on Air Force One, Trump also promised a $2,000 dividend for lower-income Americans next year funded by tariff revenue. When I pay people $2,000 each for the, you know, low and moderate income and middle-income people. Everybody but the rich will get this. Democrats say the Trump administration is putting out of fire they started and calling it progress.

The Trump administration also announced trade deals with Argentina, Ecuador, and others are in the works, signaling more rollbacks are coming. A crescendo in the war in Ukraine, with Russia launching one of its biggest missile and drone attacks on Kiev. Several people were killed as Moscow pounded apartment blocks in the capital. In the south of the country, it targeted energy facilities. The barrage comes after a Ukraine hit on a black seaport, which effectively took out 2% of the world's global oil supply.

Reuters editor-at-Large might call it White has recently returned from covering the war in Ukraine. The attack was so successful from the Ukrainian point, pointed you that it led to a suspension of oil exports of up to 2.2 million barrels a day or 2% of global supplies. The markets are very worried, and while long-range drones are the main weapon of choice for Ukraine, in this case, the Ukrainians came out and said, we actually used our newly developed Neptune missiles. They can fly a long way, a thousand kilometers, but also significantly they carry a greater payload than a drone. So that means that if they do manage to impact, let's say, in oil refinery, the damage that they cause would be far greater than a drone.

Trump's war of words with the BBC has escalated. He's now threatening to sue the British broadcaster for $5 billion over the edit of his speech. The BBC has apologized, but rejects that the president has a defamation case. Trump hasn't filed the papers just yet, but today's episode of On Assignment, Our Sister Podcast, explores the legal merits of any such suit. Legal reporter Jack Queen joins host Jonah Green. The argument is that these statements harmed his reputation and he suffered all this harm because of it.

It can be a little tricky to square that in your head, right, with the fact that, well, he won the election and he's president. And a lot of reporting suggests that he's making tremendous amounts of money as a private businessman while being president. You can listen to On Assignment on your favorite podcast platforms. We'll put a link in today's pod description. The U.S. government is back in business after the longest shutdown in U.S. history. Flights are resuming, food assistance is flowing again, and paychecks are coming for more than a million workers.

But the fight that triggered it all, the Affordable Care Act subsidies, isn't resolved. They expire in December, and without them, 20,000. 24 million Americans are facing massive premium hikes. Democrats are still hopeful that they can extend the subsidies, given a commitment by Senate Republicans to take up the issue. But Republicans say Democrats are just propping up a dysfunctional system. I spoke to National Affairs reporter Nathan Lane, who traveled to West Virginia,

one of the nation's most reliably conservative states, where he says this could be the issue, one Republican candidate makes his own in 2026. West Virginia has a rural aging population with high rates of diabetes and other chronic illnesses. It's a difficult place to insure, right? The subsidies really helped get those premiums down. And a lot of people who were not insured got insured in West Virginia during the COVID-era subsidies, right? Essentially, there's this boomerang happening, right?

that all these people took to the marketplace because they found out insurance was affordable. But now that the subsidies are coming off, their premium payments are going from $500 to $2,000, $600 to $3,000. We interviewed a Republican politician Larry Jackson. He's challenging Carol Miller, the incumbent for the seat. And he himself is impacted. He's got a family of eight. He feels like both Democrats and Republicans knew this problem was coming. and they didn't do anything about it.

And he's going to use it as political ammunition in his race. The Louvre Jewel he sent shockwaves globally. Well, Manhattan is underway after priceless crown jewels. The Pariser Louvre, the most-besuished museum of the world, now a month later, investigators are zeroing in on Antwerp. The city is the heart of the global diamond trade, and it's also home to a sprawling underworld. Most shops there are played by the rules, but some give criminals a way to move their stolen gold and jewels.

Paris-based reporter Gabriel Stargarder says the links between France and Belgium's underworlds are well established. For professional jewel thieves all across Europe, Antwerp has become a place where they know that they can take their goods and have no-questions-ask purchase of them by people within this trade. For example, after robbering Kim Kardashian in 2016 in her Paris hotel room, the jewelry robbers went to Antwerp and they ended up selling some of their goods for about 25,000 euros. And different types of criminal enterprises are flourishing in Antwerp at the moment. And of course, in many ways, they will feed off each other. So the jewelry trade offers a very easy way for people involved in the drug trade to launder their cash. So what challenges do investigators face as they're trying to penetrate these groups and gather evidence, maybe even track down the jewels? One former member of the police force that's investigating the crime, he said that he was 100% certain that they would arrest the people who did it and that he was less confident about whether they would recover the jewels.

So far, that has proven exactly on the money. So arresting the people is not the problem, I think, recovering the loot is where it becomes more challenging. If you want to understand the big picture in the U.S. economy, you need solid data. But because of the recent government shutdown, the usual flow of numbers from the Fed has stopped. That means analysts and reporters are a lot more in the dark. No fresh updates on unemployment, inflation, or even GDP. I checked in with reporter Howard Schneider, who covers the Federal Reserve, to find out how hard it is to get a read on what's really going on. As a journalist covering this stuff, the bass and the drums are

kind of gone from the orchestra right now, so you're not sure what you're dancing to. Not only that, but your lead vocalists, in our case, the Federal Reserve, they're kind of patching this all together as well. They don't know if the unemployment rate has gone up a tenth of a percentage point or gone down a tenth of a percentage point. They don't know if job growth accelerated in September in October or didn't. How much did gasoline go up? How much did the price of meat going up. So I don't only have the absence of the data that we usually report about and then use to think about larger stories. The people who are responding to that data, which is a core bit of the coverage, they're kind of hampered in what they can say as well. Now, they'll all say,

listen, we're not flying blind. We've got plenty of things to respond to. But fundamentally, the stuff they usually set policy around, the big benchmark numbers, have been missing. And that's really stilted the debate. Then without that data, what are you using to base your reporting on? It's not a lack of data. The Fed, just like all of us, we're drowning in data. We're drowning in information. The question is, is it representative of the country as a whole?

So one of the interesting things you get to do as a journalist is go out and learn about that and try to see if you can patch it together in ways that add, well, we can get goods prices from here. We may have to turn over here to look at housing prices like the Zillow. indexes of the redfin indexes of the world. I think the Fed is doing this too. And today's recommended read takes us to Colombia. The Navarro del Ruiz volcano erupted in 1985, and families are still fighting to find children missing from the chaos. We'll drop a link to that story in the pod description. For more on any of the stories from today, check out

Reuters.com or the Reuters app. Don't forget to follow us on your favorite podcast player. And if you're listening on a smart speaker, just ask for the latest news from Reuters seven days a week. We'll be back tomorrow with our daily headline show.