Reuters World News - Trump’s Ukraine U-turn, Kimmel’s return and Typhoon Ragasa

Episode Date: September 24, 2025

U.S. President Donald Trump makes a U-turn saying Ukraine could retake all its land occupied by Russia. He also tells world leaders their countries are ‘going to hell’ in a combative UN speech. Jimmy Kimmel defends free speech as he returns to late-night television after his suspension. And Typhoon Ragasa takes aim at China after leaving more than a dozen dead in Taiwan and lashing Hong Kong. Plus, French President Emmanuel Macron’s New York City traffic woes.   Sign up for the Reuters Econ World newsletter here. Listen to the Reuters Econ World podcast here. Find the Recommended Read 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

Today, President Trump changes his mind on Ukraine, saying Kiev should get back all the land Russia has taken during the war. That, as he tells world leaders, their countries are going to hell in a combative UN address. Jimmy Kimmel apologizes in his first show back, and Typhoon Regassa makes its way to Hong Kong. It's Wednesday, September 24th. This is Reuters' world news, bringing you everything you. you need to know from the front lines in 10 minutes, seven days a week. I'm Kim Vinal in Wanganui, New Zealand. US President Trump has announced a drastic change on his stance in Ukraine,

saying Kyiv should get back all of the land that Russia's taken control of during the war. He made the declaration on Truth Social, after giving a fiery speech at the UN, where he slammed global migration. Your countries are going to hell. Called open borders a failed experiment, They repaid kindness with crime. It's time to end the failed experiment of open borders. You have to end it now.

Dismissed climate change as fake. It's the greatest con job ever perpetrated on the world. And urged Europe to ditch green energy and go back to fossil fuels. And while more U.S. allies are backing a Palestinian state, Trump says America won't. The rewards would be too great for Hamas terrorists for their atrocities. Rapping it up with a jibe at the UN itself, after an escalator stopped working when Trump stepped on it. And his teleprompter stopped working mid-speech. These are the two things I got from the United Nations.

A bad escalator and a bad teleprompter. On the Ukraine front, Reuters' foreign policy editor Don Durfey says Trump's shift in rhetoric may not signal a shift. shift in policy. So first of all, it would be a remarkable thing if Ukraine were actually able to do that because that includes Crimea. But more fundamentally, it's not entirely clear how serious Trump is being here. His statement isn't necessarily matched by a different set of U.S. actions, right? The U.S. has been continuing to provide weapons to Ukraine, but it would require a dramatic increase in U.S. military support for Ukraine to really sort of turn things around. So it's very possible that what this is is strong verbal support for Ukraine.

And perhaps the intended audience is Vladimir Putin, right? It's to give Putin the sense that the U.S. really is serious about its support for Ukraine and therefore wants Russia to come to the table in a more serious way and sooner. Now, with the U.N. in town, New Yorkers know that means gridlock. And even French President Emmanuel Macron isn't immune. He was stopped by NYPD officers, while trying to cross the street because of President Trump's motorcade.

I'm sorry, I'm President, I'm really sorry. It's just that everything's in frozen right now. There's a border kid coming away. Let me cross. I negotiate with you. Negotiating with the officers didn't work. But McQuan has something most people don't, President Trump's number.

So he called the U.S. president from the sidewalk. Guess what? I'm waiting the street because everything is frozen for you. In diplomatic style, Macon laughed the whole thing off. Jimmy Kimmel has returned to television. You understand that it was never my intention to make light of the murder of a young man. For the first time since being taken off air, of the comments he made about the assassination of conservative activist Charlie Kirk.

But while ABC has taken him back, about a quarter of its affiliate stations won't be airing the show. Reuters Entertainment Reporter Dawn Chimalesky has more. He opened with a joke, which is, of course, what you'd expect from a comedian. He said, I don't know who's had a tougher, a weirder 48 hours, me or the CEO of Tylenol. It was a good, it was a light way to start a conversation. And Jimmy Kimmel addressed the heart of the issue, some of the remarks that he'd previously made about the shooter of conservative activist Charlie Kirk. He became choked up with emotion as he spoke.

And he also said he didn't, it was not his intention to blame any specific group or what transpired. And he also talked about the Trump administration's attacks not only on television critics, but also lawsuits that have been brought against journalists, some of the new curbs that are being placed on reporters. And he said that it's compelling to talk about muscling a comedian, but those threats are even more dire. Not everyone is welcoming him back with open arms. About a quarter of local ABC affiliated stations are not showing Jimmy Kimmel's show. The U.S.'s largest owners of local television station, one is an X star and the other is Sinclair, announced that they were going to be preempting the late night show even before Disney and ABC took action to remove it from the air for six days. It's hard to know whether this is permanent or if these two giant stations.

station groups wanted to see what Kimmel had to say before returning him to air. Over on markets, Chinese tech company Alibaba is lifting the mood. It's hiking its AI budget passed an original target of $50 billion plus as it races to keep up with rivals. The company also unveiled its largest ever AI language model, the Kwen 3 Max. It contains one trillion parameters, six times as many as the original version of ChatGPT. Super Typhoon Ragasa, the world's most powerful tropical cyclones so far this year, is barreling through parts of Asia, bringing deadly storm surges.

In Taiwan, more than a dozen people are dead after a barrier lake overflowed, flooding the small town of Guangfu. More than a hundred people are missing. In the Philippines, rescue teams used chainsaws to cut through the hull of a boat to rescue fishermen trapped inside, after their boat capsized, Kigayan province. The typhoon is now heading toward Hong Kong. People flock to supermarkets to stock up, with much of the city now shut down in anticipation of the cyclone. Regasa is then expected to make landfall in China's southern Guangdong province, home to some 125 million people. Donald Trump

has cancelled a planned meeting with top congressional Democrats, raising the chances of a government shutdown just days before government funding runs out. The president post. on Truth Social that talks would be unproductive, accusing Democrats of pushing radical policies. With Congress divided, a stopgap funding bill has stalled, with the October 1st deadline looming. Flights are back on at Copenhagen and Oslo airports after drone sightings shut down airspace for nearly four hours. It's the latest in a string of disruptions at European airports, including a cyber attack last week that hit check-in systems. Reporter Jakob Gronthold Pedersen is in Denmark.

The Danish police did not name any suspects, although they did say that it was a, quote, capable actor. They did not exclude Russia could be behind this attack. They said they were looking into several hypotheses, including that the drones were launched from a ship, sailing through the narrow strait between Denmark and Sweden. And authorities have said that they are working with allies, including Nordic allies.

EU health agencies and the World Health Organization are pushing back over President Trump's claims of a link between Tylenol and pregnancy and autism. The WHO says if there were any link, it would have been consistently seen across multiple studies. The European Medicines Agency says there's no new evidence to change its advice, which is that paracetamol, its version of Tylenol,

is safe to take during pregnancy, recommending the lowest dose for the shortest amount of time. And for today's recommended read, a look ahead to the EU's possible next problem child. Billionaire Andre Babbage is widely expected to return to power in the Czech Republic election next month. And that would be a boost for the populist anti-immigration camp and weakened support for Ukraine.

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 favourite 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.