Reuters World News - Ukraine, US Open, drones, ICE and film festival season

Episode Date: September 7, 2025

Russia's largest overnight air attack of the war sets fire to Ukraine’s main government building in Kyiv. World number one Aryna Sabalenka retrains her US Open crown. President Donald Trump wants America to sell sophisticated military drones abroad. Immigrants are staying away from churches in the United States, fearful of ICE detention. And film festival season is in full swing, with Venice wrapping up and Toronto underway. Listen to our longform podcast ⁠On Assignment⁠ 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

Today, Russia's largest air attack of the war sets fire to Ukraine's main government building. Japan's prime minister resigns. Trump's plan to reinterpret a missile treaty to sell heavy attack drones abroad. How immigrants in the US are avoiding places of worship, fearing iced detention. World number one, Arena Sabolenko retains her US Open Crown, and Jim Jarmush wins the Venice Film Festival's top prize. It's Sunday, September 7th. This is Reuters World News, bringing you everything you need to know from the front lines in 10 minutes, seven days a week.

I'm Tara Oaks in Liverpool. Explosions in Kiev, where an overnight Russian attack set fire to Ukraine's main government building. The attack saw drones rain down before missile strikes, sewing fires across the capital. Moscow did not immediately offer a comment. Number one, Arena Savalenko has been crowned Queen of Queens, retaining her US Open crown with a win over American 8-seed Amanda Anissimova. And Donald Trump will become the first sitting president to attend the US Open in a quarter century later today, joining the legions of fans in New York to catch a highly anticipated

showdown between Yannick Sinner and Carlos Al-Karaz. Japanese Prime Minister Shigero U.S. Shiba saying he's decided to resign. Since he came to power less than a year ago, his coalition has lost its majorities in elections for both houses of parliament, amid voter anger over rising living costs. The Israeli military has warned Palestinians in Gaza City to leave for the south, before bombing a high-rise tower as its forces advance deeper into the enclave's largest urban area. Amina Fifi is a displaced man who, was living inside the high-rise building.

Searching through the rubble, he says he's moved about 15 times with little notice. Israel's Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, says Gaza City is a Hamas stronghold, and capturing it is necessary to defeat the Palestinian Islamist militants, whose October 23 attack on Israel sparked the war. President Trump is pushing to rewrite a decades-old arms treaty. If successful, it would clear the way for the U.S. to sell powerful military drones like the Reaper series. U.S. allies in the Pacific and Europe have expressed an interest, as has Saudi Arabia. Mike Stone covers the U.S. arms trade and defense industry.

The missile technology control regime is a 1987 treaty that was signed by almost two dozen countries. It was supposed to prevent people from giving long-range nuclear technology to each other. Smart idea. Well, they invented the drone. Guess what? The definition of what was a nuclear weapon, a 500-kilogram warhead, turned out to be big enough to be a plane. You make a big enough drone. It's 500 kilograms. It can go over 300 kilometers. And that was the definition of the missiles in the missile technology control regime. So inadvertently, drones were captured in the large net of this definition. When this reinterpretation is unveiled, it will no longer define large armed drones as missiles. It will define them as aircraft, and it will be subject to the clearance of a foreign military sale. Protesters in downtown Chicago demonstrating against President Trump's plans to deploy federal troops to the city. And as with elsewhere across to US. In Chicago, immigrants are staying away from churches they used to frequent, saying Trump's

immigration sweep has them worried about being detained. Trump won the presidency for a second time after making aggressive immigration and border policies central to his political agenda. On his first day in office, he scrapped former President Joe Biden's policy of designating places of worship as sensitive locations, off limits to immigration enforcement. While immigration and customs enforcement or ICE agents have yet to raid a church, they have detained a pastor in Maryland for allegedly overstaying his visa and arrested people in church parking lots. Nathan Lane has been reporting on the story.

We spent this past Sunday with Doris Aguier at her home on the outskirts of Chicago. On normal circumstances, she would be physically at Lincoln United Methodist Church on Chicago's West Side. But that church service has gone virtual. It's completely online, and the church did that because they were concerned about ice raids. They did that in anticipation of Trump's crackdown on immigration. And Doris has been participating in church from her home. Nathan says churches have taken a variety of steps to shield immigrants during the crackdown. They have marked parts of the structures, the actual physical buildings, of churches as private to make it a little bit more difficult for ICE to go inside. They have

stepped up, know your rights training, and some churches have gone online. Attendance has been falling at some churches, the immigrant-focused churches, because a lot of the parishioners are just essentially afraid to go to any place that could be a target of ICE. And so if they don't have to leave the home, they won't leave the home. A 15-year-old who died of leukemia in 2012, 6 is becoming the first Catholic saint of the millennial generation. Colos Acutus learned computer code to build websites to spread his faith. Sunday's ceremony was postponed after the death of Pope Francis. It'll be the first time Pope Leo has presided over such an event.

And staying in Italy? US indie director Jim Jarmash has won the coveted Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival with Father-Mother, Sister Brother, a three-year. part meditation on the uneasy ties between parents and their adult children. They're not supported by corporate studios, really. It's just our own love of cinema. So to be appreciated in this way is really very overwhelming for it. Although his gentle comedy received largely positive reviews, it had not been a favorite for the top prize, with many critics instead tipping the voice of Hindra Jerb. A harrowing

account of the killing of a Palestinian girl during the Gaza War. In the end, that took the runner-up Silver Lion. And even though Venice is over, the film festival season is in full swing, with the 50th Toronto International Film Festival underway. This year, the emotional centerpiece of the festival is a new documentary about Canadian comedy legend, John Candy. How are you? I'm a mog, half man, half dog. Gus Polsky, Polka King of the Midwest, Del Griffith, Director of Sales, Chowardin Ring Division. John Candy, I Like Me, dives into the life of Canada's beloved comedy legend, going beyond the laughs to explore the personal struggles he faced off-screen.

We caught up with our reporter Nibadita Ballou in Toronto. Some big names that moviegoers are really excited about in Toronto this year includes the third film in the Nice Out series, which stars Daniel Craig. And there's also Matthew McConaughey's Last Bus and Aziz Ansari's directional debut, Good Fortune, which starts Kianuris. But there are also films showing a part of the world that this side of the globe has never seen. It's a raw version of what's happening in the Middle East. Palestine 36 transports the viewer to 1930s Palestine. And there are also a couple of others.

The Road Between Us, it's a documentary about one man's quest to say, his family from the Hamas attack on October 17, 2023. The TIF ran into criticism early on when it decided to exclude the documentary, but later it reversed its decision saying it had worked to satisfy legal and safety concerns. And for today's recommended read, the latest part of our culture current series. We talked to the Middle East's first and only female brewmaster in the West Bank about the evolution of beer making and Israeli settler violence in the region. You can read more by following the link in the pod description.

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