WSJ What’s News - Europe’s Dawning Terror Threat? Young Online Radicals

Episode Date: May 9, 2025

A.M. Edition for May 9. Chinese exports to the U.S. plunged in April as the Trump administration’s tariff assault forced the world’s second-largest economy to redirect more of its goods to other markets. Plus, President Trump resurrects a proposed ‘millionaire tax’ despite opposition from congressional Republicans. And correspondent Sune Rasmussen explains how European authorities are struggling to respond to a new generation of young extremists being radicalized online. Luke Varg as hosts. Sign up for the WSJ’s free What’s News newsletter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Chinese exports to the US plunge as tariffs bite and Beijing looks to redirect more of its goods. Plus, President Trump puts the recently rejected millionaire tax back on the table, and teenage terrorists are becoming a growing threat to Europe's security. When people, mostly young men, young boys, sit at home and self-radicalize online, that makes them harder to find. It also means that the process of radicalization has accelerated. It's Friday, May 9th. I'm Luke Vargas 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. moving your world today.

Chinese exports to the U.S. plunged in April as the Trump administration's tariff assault forced the world's second largest economy to redirect more of its goods to other markets. It suggests there will be a shift in global trade flows where China continues to export a huge amount,

but fewer of those exports go to the U.S. and more of them go to other countries around the world. Already 85 percent of Chinese exports are not to the United States and Europe, South America, Southeast Asia, Africa, you name it. There are many markets that China can still make deeper inroads into. That's our Asia Finance Editor Peter Landers, who notes that while exports to the U.S. slipped 21 percent, overall exports from China rose 8.1 percent from a year earlier. This was a bigger rise in exports than was expected, but it does show that China has

built this export juggernaut and some would say has a distorted economy that is more oriented towards exports and producers in China than getting consumers in China to spend on products that are made in their own country. So for example, China is making more cars than its domestic consumers are willing or able to buy and they're looking for all those other markets that might be a receptacle for China's excess production. Shares of China's two top chipmakers fell sharply this morning after they reported weak first quarter results and guidance. U.S. export restrictions are blocking Chinese companies access to equipment that's needed for advanced semiconductors, driving increased domestic competition and hurting the sector's profitability. Weak pricing dragged on Chinese champion SMIC and smaller peer HuaHong Semiconductor, even as they ramp up production under Beijing's push to bolster the domestic chip industry

and turn it into a new growth driver. Meanwhile, top American tech execs told lawmakers yesterday that the U.S. risks falling behind China if Washington doesn't streamline AI policy or loosen export controls on chips to friendly countries, curbs that the Trump administration said it was looking to overhaul earlier this week. Microsoft President Brad Smith said the AI race will be determined by whose technology is more widely adopted in the rest of the world.

The lesson from Huawei and 5G is whoever gets there first will be difficult to supplant. We need to export with the right kinds of controls. We need to win the trust of the rest of the world. We need to have the financial architecture that gets not only to the countries that are industrialized, but the nations, say, across Africa, where typically China and Huawei have done so well. President Trump is considering bringing the so-called millionaire tax back to life just 15 days after he rejected it. We're reporting that the president is looking to return the top individual income tax rate

to 39.6% from 37% for people making over $2.5 million. The move aims to ease Republican struggles to fit tax cuts into a fiscal bill they are trying to unveil in the next few days. The higher the top tax rate goes, the easier it could be for Republicans to reduce other taxes and avoid deep cuts to Medicaid. And the president is tapping Fox News host Jeanine Pirro to temporarily step in as Washington, D.C.'s top federal prosecutor after his initial pick faced Republican pushback over his advocacy for members of the mob that stormed the U.S. Capitol.

In her new role, Piro will oversee an office that's led some of the country's most politically charged prosecutions. A former prosecutor, she's frequently defended the president on her talk show, supporting his push to seek retribution against perceived enemies and backing his attacks on federal judges who've struck down his policies. Fox Corp. and Wall Street Journal parent News Corp. share common ownership. Coming up, Europe struggles to contain the growing threat from teenage terrorists.

Plus, Russia hosts foreign leaders, including China's Xi Jinping, to mark its World War II victory. That's after the break. Talking about guns with others might not always feel comfortable, but it could save a life. Here's a way to start a conversation. Your family is going over to your neighbor's home for dinner for the first time. How would you ask if there are any unlocked guns in the home? Hey! Hey, we're so excited for tonight. Before we come over though, may I ask if there are any unlocked guns in the home? Hey! Hey, we're so excited for tonight. Before we come over though, may I ask if there are any unlocked guns in your home? Our guns are stored securely, locked in a safe that the kids can't access.

Oh, awesome. Learn how to have the conversation at AgreeToAgree.org, brought to you by the Ad Council. European authorities have a new security threat on their hands. Teenage terrorists from Austria to the UK, Belgium to Montenegro. A growing number of terror plots are being traced back to adolescents. And journal foreign correspondent Suna Rasmussen joins me now to look at why that is, as well as how law enforcement is trying to respond. Suna, thankfully, Europe hasn't seen many major terror attacks in recent years, so we

are mostly talking here about increasingly young terror suspects, just to be clear. Am I right about that? And if so, tell us what you've been hearing about. What's going on? Yeah, that's right. A lot of these attacks are foiled and don't come to fruition, thankfully. But that doesn't mean that they're not quite far advanced in planning. So a lot of listeners might remember there were three Taylor Swift concerts that were cancelled

last year in Vienna after three suspects that were aged between 17 and 19 were arrested for... The CIA called it a well-developed plot and said they could have killed hundreds of people if it hadn't been foiled. There's also sort of less publicly known examples. There was a 14-year-old that was arrested in February for plotting to attack a train station in Austria. There was a 14-year-old girl from Montenegro that was arrested last year in Austria for plotting an attack on non-believers and police found in her house an axe, a knife and Islamic State propaganda.

And at least based on the UK statistics that you mentioned you're reporting, this sort of uptick in young terrorist suspects is occurring as sort of overall numbers are going down. So this is flying in the face of broader trends, it seems. In the UK at least, there's been a decline during the pandemic. There was a decline in terrorism related arrests across all age groups except for the minors where it increased. But another factor that has also pushed these arrests up is the October 7th Hamas attack on Israel and the following war in Gaza, which has sort of become like a trigger for political awareness in Europe. And that's also then sort of materialized and more

radicalization. One way that a lot of people, a lot of young people radicalize is that they have personal trauma, a personal grievance that they then tie to a more sort of collective experience of being oppressed, of being unfairly treated. And if those two elements can sort of be connected, that can sometimes lead to radicalization. And there's one researcher at King's College in London who tracked 60 arrests of Islamic extremists in the first eight months following the start of the Gaza war in October 2023. And out of those 60 arrests, two-thirds were teenagers. And he said that that was sort of an unprecedented proportion of young people. In terms of this radicalization process, a lot of this is happening online, right?

I'm curious what law enforcement has been saying about their confidence in being able to stay ahead of this threat. What are you hearing? KK So one of the things that's happening now, experts and authorities across Europe say, is that because a lot of young people now are radicalized online, they're also harder to find. When people, mostly young men, young boys, sit at home and self-rad radicalized online, they're also harder to find. When people, mostly young men, young boys, sit at home and self-radicalize online. That makes them harder to find. It also

means that the process of radicalization has accelerated. So one statistic said that around 20 years ago, it took on average 16 months for a young person to radicalize. 10 years later, that time had decreased by about 40%. Now it can take only a matter of weeks from the first exposure to radical material to a person who's ready to commit a violent attack. What several security agencies told me is that because there's so much propaganda and so much vitriolic content online,

it also makes it difficult to distinguish between pure hate speech and then the stuff that will indicate that someone is actually ready to go out and commit a violent crime in society. And this is something I saw also in a trial I witnessed recently in Belgium where the Fed said, well, all of this material that you're using against my client, this young man who was accused of plotting a terrorist attack in Brussels. All this is performative. He was on these social media platforms where you know that people say stuff without actually meaning it. And that's a huge challenge for European security agencies. I've been speaking to Wall Street Journal foreign correspondent, Suna Rasmussen. Suna,

thank you so much for bringing us this story. You're welcome, Luke. Russian President Vladimir Putin is overseeing commemorations today to mark Russia's defeat of Nazi Germany in World War II. As is tradition, troops will parade through Moscow's Red Square alongside tanks and missiles. But this year's Victory Day has one crucial difference. We have heads of state of about 25 countries from Africa, Asia.

There's an EU member, Robert Fico of Slovakia. He was threatened with countermeasures by the EU if he did show up, but he's there nonetheless. Though the most important guest, according to journal correspondent Thomas Grove, is Chinese leader Xi Jinping. The thing about Xi for Putin is that it really confers on Russia this idea that it's still a great power, which to be fair has slipped in recent years as Moscow has focused more

narrowly on Ukraine. China is a big partner for Russia, both in terms of diplomatic support, in terms of dual use technology that ends up on the front line. And she is also there for four days. It's a very long visit and it means a lot for Putin, obviously. To coincide with commemorations, Russia had said that it had planned to observe a three-day ceasefire in Ukraine. However, top Ukrainian officials have so far accused Russia of more than 700 violations

of that unilateral pledge, calling it a farce. And finally, a remnant of Russia's Soviet spacefaring past is set to return to Earth tomorrow in potentially dramatic fashion. Cosmos 482 was meant to travel to Venus in the early 1970s, but a post-launch malfunction trapped the craft in Earth's orbit instead. Various pieces of it have fallen back, but not its lander.

While small, just three feet in diameter, it's a survivor with heat shields designed to withstand Venus that could help it to survive reentry. Though where that'll be is anyone's guess, with the U.S. Space Force predicting spots as far apart as northeast Africa and the Pacific island of Borneo, so stay vigilant out there. And that's it for What's News for this Friday morning. Additional sound in this episode was from Reuters. Today's show was produced by Daniel Bach and Kate Bullivant. Our supervising producer is Sandra Kilhoff, and I'm Luke Vargas for The Wall Street Journal.

We will be back tonight with a new show. Otherwise, have a great weekend, and thanks for listening.