WSJ What’s News - Drones Close Denmark’s Airspace for Second Time

Episode Date: September 25, 2025

A.M. Edition for Sept. 25. Multiple drones flew over airports and a military base housing most of the country's fighter jets, with Denmark’s government calling the hybrid attack a threat to freedom and safety. Plus, the White House is planning for mass firings if there is a government shutdown next week. And, Delta is upgrading plane engines that are often behind toxic fumes leaking into the air supply on flights. But WSJ aviation reporter Ben Katz explains why the airline’s effort won’t entirely stop the risks. Caitlin McCabe hosts. Sign up for the WSJ’s free What’s News newsletter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Viking, committed to exploring the world in comfort. Journey through the heart of Europe on an elegant Viking longship with thoughtful service, cultural enrichment, and all-inclusive fares. Discover more at Viking.com. The Trump administration tells federal agencies to prepare for permanent mass firings if the government shuts down. Plus, we look at how Delta Airlines is racing to address a surge of toxic fume events happening on planes. The Airbus A320, which is the best-selling aircraft in the world today, is kind of driving this increase in incidents that we measured in our reporting. And that's really the plane that Delta is trying to deal with, trying to curb some of these fume events.

And Senators question big tech companies over how they use H-1B visas. It's Thursday, September 25th. I'm Caitlin McCabe for the Wall Street Journal, and here is the AM edition of What's News. The top headlines and business stories moving your world today. We begin with breaking news from Denmark, which has suffered a professional hybrid drone attack overnight. Drones were observed over multiple airports late Wednesday, including a military airbase housing most of the country's F-16 and F-35 fighter jets. It's the second time in less than a week that unmanned aircraft have disrupted air traffic in the NATO country and follows roughly. Russian violations of Estonian and Polish airspace in recent weeks.

The Danish Minister of Defense said a professional actor was behind the attack and that the drones were launched from Denmark's vicinity. He added that there was currently no evidence linking the drone activity to Russia, but called the action a danger to freedom and safety. The Danish government is now considering calling for national security consultations under NATO's Article 4. U.S. lawmakers have less than a week to reach a spending agreement before the government shuts down, and the situation just got all the more complicated. The White House's Budget Office has directed federal agencies to go ahead with mass firings if the government does indeed go dark next week.

The memo instructs agencies to design layoff plans for employees who work for programs that are, quote, not consistent with the president's priorities. These permanently, layoffs would be in addition to any temporary furloughs that happened during a shutdown. The memo is sharply increasing pressure on Senate Democrats who are demanding that Republicans restore hundreds of billions of dollars in health care spending in order to get their support for funding the government. Democrats do not support the partisan Republican spending bill because it continues to gut the health care of the American people. Republicans have launched an all-out assault on the health care of everyday Americans, the largest cut to Medicaid

in American history. That's Democratic House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffrey's speaking yesterday before the memo was revealed. Later, Jeffrey said in a social media post that Democrats will not be intimidated. The GOP is insisting that their seven-week stopgap measure to fund the government is the only one on the table, and there are no planned talks with President Trump and Democrats after the president earlier this week backed out of a planned meeting. If no bipartisan deal is reached,

the government will shut down at 12.01 a.m. Eastern on Wednesday, October 1st. We are exclusively reporting that lawmakers are ramping up scrutiny of how big tech companies are using H-1B visas. Last night, Republican Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley and Democratic Ranking Member Dick Durbin sent letters to the largest users of the visas. That includes Amazon, Apple, and J.B. P. Morgan Chase, asking them to explain why they continue to hire thousands of H-1B visa holders while also cutting other jobs. It comes just days after the Trump administration overhauled the

visa system, arguing that foreign professionals were occupying jobs that could be done by an American. Yesterday, the senators asked for detailed information on how many H-1B workers the companies employ, what wages they are paid, and whether American workers have been displaced in the process. Meanwhile, the Justice Department is racing to obtain criminal charges against former FBI director James Comey this week, escalating President Trump's unprecedented efforts to prosecute his political foes. We've learned that prosecutors want a federal grand jury in Virginia to indict Comey as soon as today. The case involves allegations that he lied during 2020 congressional testimony about the Bureau's earlier probe of Trump's connections to Russian interference in the 2016 election. The statute of limitations on such a case runs out next week.

The move comes just days after Trump publicly questioned why the Justice Department hadn't brought cases against several top adversaries yet, including Comey. Here's White House Press Secretary Caroline Levitt. The president is fulfilling his promise to restore a Department of Justice that demands accountability. And it is not weaponizing the Department of Justice to demand accountability for those who weaponized the Department of Justice. And nobody knows what that looks like more than President Trump. We are not going to tolerate gaslighting from anyone in the media or from anyone on the other side who is trying to say that it's the president who is weaponizing the DOJ. Comey did not respond to a request for comment.

Now we are exclusively reporting that Delta is replacing engine units to address toxic fume surges on its planes. According to a journal investigation published last week, there have been. several APU-related fume events on Delta's A320 jets over the past year. Here's aviation reporter Ben Katz. A fume event happens when oil leaks into an engine and vaporizes, releasing an unknown quantity of neurotoxins and other chemicals into the air that we then end up breathing inside the aircraft. Most of the time, even the effects are pretty fleeting, pretty mild.

You may not even notice it. But on occasion, the effects can be longer. lasting and more severe, right? And they range from reports of passengers feeling nauseous or vomiting to crew who have reported brain injuries or even developed cancer. We've learned that Delta has been addressing the issue for some time and has now upgraded about 90% of the auxiliary power units on more than 300 of its Airbus jets. Airbus has previously identified the APU, which is typically a third engine that sits in the tail of an aircraft as a leading cause of toxic fumes contaminating the air that's pumped into the plane when the two primary engines aren't

running. That, for example, happens during taxiing. Ben says Delta's efforts will eliminate some of the fume events, but not solve the entire problem. There's only one modern commercial plane that isn't affected by fume events, and that's the Boeing 787, but every other aircraft is. There are kind of a number of causes of these fume events. You know, they can affect the jet engines themselves. And there's also a fundamental issue with the design of the aircraft that Airbus is still yet to address. So it'll address some of these issues, but it won't eliminate the entire cause. If you want to know more about the fume events and the journal's investigation, follow the link we've left in our show notes. And Apple has asked the European Union to repeal or significantly

scale back the Digital Markets Act, saying the law is making it harder to do business and bring new products to Europe. The request came in remarks submitted to the European Commission where officials are reviewing how the new law is working. Apple is now obliged to let rival app stores set up shop on iPhones and show users a choice screen that allows them to choose a different default browser in the European Union. The commission was quick to open investigations into Apple product changes early last year when the company had to start abiding by the law and is fined the tech giant almost $600 million for failing to comply. Coming up, Chinese leader Xi Jinping takes a veiled swipe at President Trump while speaking to the UN yesterday.

Plus, Jimmy Kimmel was right. His four-day suspension did lead to blockbuster ratings. More on those stories after the break. This message comes from Viking, committed to exploring the world in comfort. Journey through the heart of Europe on an elegant Viking long ship with thoughtful service, destination-focused, destination-focused, dining and cultural enrichment on board and on shore. And every Viking voyage is all-inclusive with no children and no casinos. Discover more at viking.com. Chinese leader Xi Jinping unveiled a new plan to tackle climate change in an address to the United Nations yesterday. Just one day after President Trump used the same global stage to do pretty much the opposite. The Chinese leader, speaking in a video message, presented a

new plan to cut greenhouse gas emissions under the Paris Accord. He called the green and low carbon transition the quote, trend of our time and said that while some countries are acting against it, the international community should stay focused in, quote, the right direction. She's remarks came a day after Trump spoke to the U.N., during which he called climate change a con job and green energy a scam. Matthew Dalton is a journal climate reporter and joins me now. Matthew, some pretty interesting comments from Xi yesterday. Backing up for a second, can you give us some context about China's role in the clean energy transition? China is both the largest emitter of greenhouse gases accounting for about a third of the global total, and it is also the dominant manufacturer of

all kinds of clean energy technologies, from solar panels to wind turbines to electric vehicles and batteries. So it is absolutely essential to both the problem of climate change and the solution to it. What is the Chinese plan that she laid out yesterday promising here and how is it being received? So she said that China will aim to cut its overall greenhouse gas emissions 7 to 10 percent from their peak by 2035. That's the core of the plan and it was received with frankly, a lot of disappointment from environmental groups and analysts because she didn't say what the peak would be. And that's a really important variable to determine what the overall course of the planet's warming is going to be. It leaves open the possibility that China could

increase its greenhouse gas emissions by quite a bit before starting to reduce them. I think most people think that's unlikely because its emissions growth has been slowing very significantly in recent years. And it's more or less flat, I would say, over the last year. And that's because China has been adding so much wind and solar power to its electrical grid that the growth of coal fire generation has basically come to a stop. Now, there are other sources of greenhouse gases growth in China that could mess this all up. So China's at this kind of inflection point where if it keeps on doing what it's doing with renewable energy, then it really stands a good chance of starting to reduce its emissions very soon. And actually the 7 to 10% by 2035 from a peak would be a very

conservative target. But that has been China's trend in climate policy since the Paris Accord was signed in 2015. I think the hope of environmental groups is that China is going to significantly overperform this target, given all the renewable energy. They're adding to the grid, given what a champion of renewable energy they have become. And that will put the goals of the Paris Accord within striking distance. Remember that the Paris Accord calls for governments to try to keep global warming to close to 1.5 degrees Celsius. And it's a target that's in serious jeopardy, but it's something that China's emissions are absolutely crucial for how close to the goal the entire world gets. That's journal climate reporter Matthew Dalton.

Matthew, thanks for joining us today. Thanks a lot, Caitlin. And finally, nearly 6.3 million people tuned in to watch Jimmy Kimmel's emotional return to the airwaves on Tuesday night after the show was suspended over remarks the comedian made about the killing of conservative activist Charlie Kirk. That's well above the 1.8 million viewers that the show averaged in the second quarter of this year, based on preliminary numbers from Nielsen. Tuesday's ratings were also notable in part because Jimmy Kimmel Live wasn't available on broadcast TV in more than 20% of the country, including in big cities like Seattle, New Orleans, St. Louis, and Washington, D.C. Station owners Next Star Media Group and Sinclair Broadcast Group have not said if or when they would put Kimmel's show back on their station. And that's it for What's News for this Thursday morning. Today's show is produced by Daniel Bach.

Our supervising producer is Sandra Kilhoff. And I'm Caitlin McCabe for the Wall Street Journal. We'll be back tonight with the new show. Until then, thanks for listening. Boardrooms love buzzwords. AI, climate, resilience. But what do they actually mean for CFOs and execs trying to survive the next earnings call.

That's where the pre-read comes in. Real experts and real talk. Subscribe to the pre-read, presented by Workiba.