Medical experts debunk Trump's autism-paracetamol link

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This is the Global News Podcast from the BBC World Service.

I'm Chris Barrow, and at 5 GMT on Tuesday, the 23rd of September, these are our main stories.

Medical experts debunk President Trump's claims about taking paracetamol during pregnancy causing autism.

France becomes the latest Western country to recognize Palestinian statehood.

And the late-night talk show host Jimmy Kimmel is set to return after a highly criticized suspension.

Also, in this podcast.

We talk a lot about being equal here in Denmark.

So, yeah, I think it's a pretty good idea.

But being forced to go to the military, I don't think it's good for anybody to be forced to do anything in the world.

Denmark extends conscription to women.

And who's won the Ballon d'Or Football's Top Individual Award?

We begin in Washington, where President Trump has given what he called a very important and amazing announcement about tackling autism.

In an impassioned address and without providing scientific evidence, the U.S.

President claimed that taking the common painkiller paracetamol, also known as Tylenol during pregnancy, could lead to an increased risk of autism in children.

Taking Tylenol is not good.

I'll say it.

It's not good.

For this reason, they are strongly recommending that women limit Tylenol use during pregnancy unless medically necessary.

For instance, in cases of extremely high fever, if you can't tough it out, if you can't do it, that's what you're going to have to do.

You'll take atylanol, but it'll be very sparingly.

President Trump said he's advised doctors in the U.S.

not to prescribe the painkiller to women who are expecting a baby.

His administration has previously restricted pregnant women's access to COVID vaccines and antidepressants.

In a lengthy press conference flanked by his top health officials, the president also railed against a number of so-called combination vaccines for children, such as the measles, mumps, rubella jab.

Experts have said the science does not back Donald Trump and warned that making such unsubstantiated claims is dangerous.

Our medical editor, Fergus Walsh, has this assessment.

So I think the trigger for this may be a study that was published last month.

Researchers at Harvard University and Mount Sino Medical School, they found a possible association between the use of paracetamol in pregnancy and autism, but no causal link.

And against that, there have been lots and lots of studies, including a very significant one of 2.4 million children in Sweden last year, which looked at autism rates among siblings and found absolutely no link.

And the words of President Trump, his claims, have been absolutely roundly condemned and rejected by experts across the board.

It was extraordinary to listen to because it started off at that paracetamol and then it went into childhood vaccines and some really astonishing claims from President Trump.

The MMR vaccine, he said, should be given separately.

He said all these childhood vaccines should be given separately and he said there would be no risk here.

Of course when you're not vaccinated as a child and you have to wait to get the later dose whether it's measles, mumps, rubella or all the other childhood vaccines, you are potentially at risk of each of those diseases.

But President Trump said they should all be given separately and then he brought on Robert Kennedy, the health secretary who's known to be a vaccine sceptic and has supported Dr.

Andrew Wakefield who was struck off for his incorrect claims back in the 90s,

claiming a link between MMR and autism.

So you go full circle there.

Fergus Walsh, France has become the latest country to recognize Palestinian statehood with an announcement at the UN General Assembly.

More than 150 countries had already taken the step, but recent criticism of Israel's war in Gaza has encouraged Britain, Canada, and Australia to add their names to the list.

The vast majority of UN member nations now recognize Palestine.

Our correspondent in New York, Tom Bateman, told us that this is an important moment.

It is a moment in history because you have the two European members of the United Nations Security Council recognizing a state of Palestine for the first time.

Also, I think important because historically these were the two powers that carved up the Middle East as the colonial rulers a century ago.

It was when Britain was in control of that part of the region that the modern form of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict really began.

It was on Britain's watch.

But the key reason that this is important now, that these countries are saying effectively that this is the only way to keep alive the hope of a two-state solution to solve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

I thought it was notable Antonio Guterres, the Secretary General of the United Nations, stood up and said, if we don't do this, what is the alternative?

And he talked about the alternative being a one-state solution in which Israel controlled the whole region and which Palestinians were, in his words, subjugated.

He asked, how could this be acceptable in the 21st century.

Do you think there's any appetite from the US to kind of curb the attacks and the offensive from Israel?

Because I know there's a meeting later on in the week between Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu.

Or do you feel like that they're not going to wade in and not going to do anything?

The Trump administration simply does not criticise the Israelis in public.

You never really hear them doing that.

It's extremely rare.

I think they're basically going to allow the Israelis to carry on and do what they want until the end of the year.

But of course what the Europeans are saying is what is actually being achieved here?

Hamas, according to the American accounts under the Biden administration, was decimated early into last year and incapable of carrying out another October the 7th.

And so there is very little evidence that further continual military pressure, as the Israelis see it, is shifting Hamas to releasing the hostages.

And so I think that's why you're seeing the Europeans pushing harder for the use of diplomacy.

Tom Bateman at the UN.

Away from the diplomatic circles of New York, Palestinian state recognition hasn't changed much on the ground.

Our correspondent John Donnison has been hearing what the move means for people in Israel, Gaza, and the occupied West Bank.

Amid all the diplomatic fanfare, Palestinians and Israelis both know that a state of Palestine remains only on paper, not in practice.

Nothing has changed.

Many on both sides will tell you the so-called two-state solution is no longer possible, given the extent of illegal Jewish settlement expansion in in the occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem.

It's important

for Asem Barakat, a Palestinian from Bethlehem.

Recognition is taken with a pinch of salt.

They will recognize us as a Palestinian.

We have a state, something like this, but on the ground, it's like become so difficult for us.

The problem is that the situation here is very bad.

It's not about recognizing, it's about what should you do after recognizing this Palestinian state.

Israel's Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, has said a state of Palestine will never exist, and there is a fear among some Palestinians that Israel could respond by accelerating the growth of Jewish settlements or even annexing parts of the West Bank, adding legal permanence to Israel's control.

Recognition from Britain and others has come partly because of the growing frustration of how Israel is conducting the war in Gaza.

But Udi Gorin, whose cousin Tal Haimi's body is still being held by Hamas in Gaza,

says it will do nothing to end the conflict.

This will not change a single thing.

We are on the verge of the two-year mark of this catastrophe that both Israelis and Palestinians are suffering from.

And recognizing a Palestinian state will not bring back a single hostage, nor will it save a single Palestinian baby.

And in Gaza, there has been no let-up in Israel's offensive, focused on capturing Gaza City.

The Health Ministry in the Strip says more than 60 Palestinians have been killed in the last 24 hours.

John Donnison in Jerusalem.

For nearly a week, the Walt Disney Corporation has found itself at the center of a fierce debate over freedom of speech in the U.S.

It followed the decision by Disney, which owns the ABC network, to pull the late-night TV host Jimmy Kimmel off air over comments he'd made after the killing of the right-wing activist Charlie Kirk, accusing Donald Trump's supporters of trying to score political points from it.

In response, the Trump-appointed head of the FCC, which regulates U.S.

television, threatened to revoke ABC's broadcast license.

But now, Disney says Jimmy Kimmel Live will return on Tuesday night.

So why the reversal?

My colleague Sumi Somaskanda has been speaking to Dylan Byers, a journalist covering entertainment and politics for the U.S.

news site Puck.

Disney had always telegraphed that they were hoping to bring Jimmy back.

I don't think they saw a situation in which it would be tenable to get rid of him this way.

And I think that became abundantly clear once you saw the pressure that was coming from all corners, really, from the creative community in Hollywood, from the political community.

I mean, even former President Barack Obama waited in.

You saw Bob Iger, the CEO of Disney, was even getting pressure from his predecessor, Michael Eisner, asking where is the leadership.

And now, what I will say is that the situation has not become any easier for Disney necessarily because they are still going to be getting pressure from the FCC and from the Trump administration over this decision.

And they might also get pressure from some of their distribution partners like Nexstar and Sinclair, which we don't know yet whether or not those companies are going to actually broadcast Jimmy Kimmel's show on their stations.

That's an interesting point.

So, Dylan, can this be seen, do you think, as a victory for Jimmy Kimmel, for his supporters?

If you're Jimmy Kimmel, and if you're anyone who cares about this sort of, I guess, freedom of speech or a culture and a climate in which it's okay to go on and engage in satire about political figures, it is at least marginally reassuring to see Jimmy Kimmel come back.

But there are broader concerns here.

I mean, I don't think the Trump administration's campaign against mainstream media is going away, not by any stretch.

I don't think the fact that Disney felt the need to preempt this show at all is cause for solace.

So I think that this is a positive sign that he's coming back on Tuesday in the short term, but I think there are a lot of long-term challenges ahead.

Dylan, can we come back to what you said about the Trump administration's campaign against mainstream media?

I mean, tell us a bit more about what the Trump administration has said here, because they have said that this is about really making sure that lies are not being told on shows like Jimmy Kimmel's program and the aftermath of the killing of Charlie Kirk.

Yeah, well, look, there is a feeling among conservatives in America, and it's longstanding, that traditional forums and media, Hollywood, late night, broadcast news, universities, have lean left for a long time.

And they feel now that Trump is in power and that he has Brendan Carr as his FCC chairman, that now is a time to go on offense and sort of correct that drift.

I think the problem is that the intensity of that campaign is so intense, that there are lawsuits that most legal experts agree are meritless against either a Disney ABC, Paramount CBS, the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal.

That does not suggest someone who just wants to sort of stabilize partisan politics and media.

It suggests someone who wants to go quite a degree further in ways that I think are really troubling to free speech advocates on either side of the political aisle.

Dylan Byers.

From Hollywood to Silicon Valley now, and two American tech giants have announced a partnership to build data centers for the next generation of artificial intelligence.

It's understood that Nvidia will sell its computer chips to OpenAI and invest up to $100 billion in the startup for non-controlling shares.

Our technology correspondent Lily Jamali told us more about the AI infrastructure that's being built.

These data centers house all these servers that are used to train artificial intelligence models like the one that OpenAI developed, ChatGPT, the one that exploded on the scene back in 2022 and really got all of us into this AI chatbot revolution.

And so that's what that is all about.

Just to give you a comp on what this means, you talked about $100 billion.

So we're looking at at least 10 gigawatts of computing infrastructure.

So you might remember last month, Meta, the parent company of Instagram, said they were doing something very similar.

They turned heads for the amount of computing power they were talking about.

This project is up to five times bigger.

So I kind of think of this as what I call OpenAI's bigger is better philosophy, where you need ever more computing power, more data centers, more chips to win at AI.

That all costs money.

And NVIDIA being the world's most valuable company, they have that kind of cash.

They certainly do.

And I know that they kind of are planning this $10 billion investment, and then it scales up if they're happy with the progress.

I think there's something about the first sort of power what outage that happens means that they commit that 10 billion, then it continues from there.

What's the product that they're then going to sell?

Once they've got these data processing centers for the AI up and running, what am I going to buy from them?

How is that going to make them money?

Well, I think the idea is, and what I'm hearing everywhere in Silicon Valley, is AI, we've got chat GPT, we're at GPT-5 now, and all of these big tech companies that are in the AI space have their latest models as well.

And what they really want to do is integrate AI into all facets of our lives.

So not just on your phone, but on the smart glasses that they expect us to wear two, three years from now, our smartwatches, et cetera.

And they're pretty lofty when they talk about this stuff.

Sam Altman, who's the boss over at OpenAI, talks about laying the groundwork of the economy of the future.

But, you know, more practically, I think for him as the front runner in AI now, his goal is really to just make sure that OpenAI stays as the leader in that AI chatbot space.

And NVIDIA has this very symbiotic relationship with OpenAI.

NVIDIA has been around a lot longer, but these two companies kind of exploded into the public consciousness together just a few years ago.

And oftentimes, what we're really talking about, too, is geopolitics.

China looms large here because Beijing has been hitting NVIDIA pretty hard with some recent decisions, ordering its AI firms to stop buying chips from NVIDIA.

So they're looking back at home for more investment opportunities.

And just very briefly, it all sounds great, but it's not happening particularly anytime soon.

Well, yes, the first gigawatts are set to be deployed towards the end of next year.

So that's, yeah, about 12 months from now.

But this does appear to be a longer-term commitment between these two companies.

But the first phase of this will start just in the next couple of months, from what we understand.

Lily Jamali.

Now, football's top individual trophy, the Ballon d'Or, has been awarded to the best players of the past year.

The prize is voted for by a panel of journalists, one from each of the top 100 countries in the FIFA World Rankings for the men and from the top 50 for the women.

In the men's game, Usman Dembele, the French international striker for Paris Saint-Germain, scooped the award for the first time.

The French journalist Julien Laurent told the BBC that Dembele was a worthy winner.

PhD brought him back to France from Barcelona after a few years there where he had highs and also a lot of lows on and off the pitch, really.

And again, not fulfilling completely that potential.

And I think PhD always had a thought that there was an incredible talent there, that you just had to work with and polish a little bit more, even at the age of 26, 27, to make the finished article, which is not even now.

I still think there's another step up for Osman Dembele in terms of consistency and if he can reproduce this kind of season then he would be even better.

But what he did for PhD this year from December onwards is just again incredible.

And Aitana Bon Mati, the midfielder for Barcelona and the Spanish national team, made history to become the first woman to land the ballon d'Or for the third time in a row.

Ernest Macia is a reporter for Catalunya Radio.

She's the best, she's like a PC, a laptop.

She has the football in her head and she is virtuous in the midfield.

So I think she epitomizes what football should be.

A player who is extremely humble.

She lives 15 minutes away from my home.

And I know her in the village next to mine.

And I know her from the people around her, that she's an example for the kids, for all generations.

And she's an extremely good footballer.

The journalist Ernest Massia on the Ballon d'Or winners awarded at a ceremony in Paris.

And still to come.

There was never such a child for growing.

Nurse, bring the weighing machine, said the doctor.

It's the foot roll you want, sir, said Nurse, if I may make so bold.

The long-lost Virginia Woolf book that's coming out next month.

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What's been called the world's strongest storm of the year is moving across the Pacific, leaving a trail of destruction in its path.

Super Typhoon Ragasa swept through the northern Philippines on Monday and is forecast to reach China by Wednesday.

With wind speeds of more than 250 kilometers per hour and torrential rain, there are warnings of a high risk to life, major damage to homes, and widespread flooding.

Stephanie Prentice reports: Hundreds of thousands of people have been evacuated as the super typhoon moves across the northern Philippines and towards southern China, with warnings issued in Hong Kong and Taiwan.

Videos on social media show waves crashing through houses as it moved through islands in the Philippines.

Schools and government offices are closed in the capital Manila, with the Weather Bureau warning of life-threatening conditions and a high risk of landslides.

Ragasa is then expected to make landfall in China's highly populated Guangdong province.

Authorities there have warned the impact could be potentially catastrophic.

They're preparing to evacuate at least 400,000 people from the coastal city of Shenzhen.

The major worry, the storm is very strong, gaining strength as it travels, and the ferocity is hard to predict.

Dr.

Johnny Chan from the Asia-Pacific Typhoon Collaborative Research Center is one of the people tracking it.

It's still maintaining a very strong storm with winds near the center of about 140 knots, which is close to 250 kilometers per hour.

So it's really very strong.

There are lots of computer models that predict where the storm is going to go.

And at the same time, we at the center are collaborating with other units to look into the typhoon and see whether we can collect some actual data.

This comes as scientists warn once again that climate change is helping to fuel stronger, more destructive storms.

As Ralph Toomey, director at the Grantham Climate Change Institute, explains.

If it's a severe hurricane or typhoon or tropical cyclone, you just have to leave.

So that obviously means leaving property behind, leaving your lifetime investments behind, potentially in your house and so forth.

So property damage.

is almost inevitable, but we can certainly avoid loss of life by evacuating.

Along with research from other experts, he predicts that warmer seas will also make intense storms more frequent and more likely to make landfall in mid-latitude regions that are less equipped for extreme weather.

The issue about intensification is that, yes, we can adapt and we should have more early warning systems, but our climate is also on a runaway path, right?

So we also need to stabilize the climate.

So reductions of greenhouse gas emissions is also part of the story.

It is not just a question of adapting.

We also need to reduce the greenhouse gas emissions because there is a limit to how much you can adapt to something that is extremely catastrophic.

That report was from Stephanie Prentiss.

Compulsory military service has been a rite of passage for young men in Denmark for centuries.

But now, with Denmark taking great pride in its reputation for promoting gender equality and with Europe increasingly worried about Russian aggression, the government is extending the draft to women as well.

Our correspondent Anna Holligan has been finding out what young Danes think of the move.

The sun's setting at the Carousel Festival.

Ravers dance as basslines bounce between pine trees.

But for young Danes here, the rhythm of life is changing.

We talk a lot about being equal here in Denmark.

So yeah, I think it's a pretty good idea.

But being forced to go to the military,

I don't think it's good for anybody to be forced to do anything in the world.

You may have seen the headlines that declared Danish women to face conscription by lottery, fueling anxieties that girls would be drafted straight to the front line.

But what's really changing?

We've come to one of the recruitment centers in Copenhagen.

Peter is the captain in charge here.

The half year before you train 18, then you will receive a letter telling you you will soon be drafted or called to the recruitment office.

For young men that's been the case for generations.

Now though young women get the same letter.

19 year old Sarah has volunteered to be here.

I didn't think about it as oh I'm going here because I'm being sent to war but more as like an interesting opportunity to get to know yourself a little bit better.

I've always wanted to go to the military.

Molly is 20.

If I do pass all the tests, I'm definitely going in and then staying staying for a couple of years.

If the Danish military doesn't get enough volunteers, there's a lottery system to decide who serves, based on teenagers picking numbers out of a tombola drum.

Under the new law, the duration of military service has been extended from 4 to 11 months.

We joined some of the newest recruits running through their battlefield tactics.

The recruits are crawling through the forest, commanding style, carrying our rifles.

There's a small hill which they're now taking position behind, and they are about to take part in some kind of shooting exercise.

You earn a new skill set and you earn so many friendships and you just learn a lot about yourself.

Catherine is a few months into her training.

This feels quite removed from the battlefield.

Do you see a time in the future where you would be prepared to go to war?

It's a training situation, and I think for many it doesn't really feel real.

But I think if you are considering continuing in the military, it's something you have to be prepared for: that one day it can be real.

Denmark, a NATO member, is seeking to boost its defences.

A response the Danish Prime Minister Mehta Fredriksen said last year to Russian aggression and America's uncertain commitment to European security.

We plan to extend conscription.

We are in no doubt that increased gender equality will deliver a more modern and better defence.

14-year-old Isabella is dreading the day she receives the call-up letter.

I would be like, sort of a military denier and try to take another community service instead of going to the military.

Like, yes, equality and stuff,

feminism, and blah, blah, blah.

But, like, personally, I didn't like the the idea of women going into the military.

But the majority of Danes do accept this new law, mostly in the spirit of fairness, equality, and deterrence.

Among the forest ravers, we meet Nadia.

Yes, I'm from Ukraine.

It makes me feel a bit more safe.

And it might seem like, okay, we're escalating something.

No, we're not escalating anything.

We're just preparing.

So I think it's just

makes Europe stronger.

Anna Holligan with that report.

The British author Virginia Woolf was one of the most influential modernist writers and feminist voices in the English language.

She died by suicide in 1941.

Well, next month, a new book of hers will be published, a lost collection of three comic stories.

Professor Omila Seshagiri said discovering a finished version of The Life of Violet was the luckiest accident.

We knew that it existed in rough draft form, and that draft is in the New York Public Library.

Library.

And it's a rough, almost messy type script that Wolfe had given to Violet Dickinson as a gift, and that it has, and it has Wolfe's hand edits and Violet's hand edits on it.

It's a little bit difficult to read.

It's very informal.

And nobody knew that Wolfe revised that draft and made it into something much more elegant and complete.

It's an interrelated set of three stories that are interconnected.

And it's about a giantess named Violet Dickinson, who grows up to be six feet two inches tall, as the real-life Violet Dickinson, who was Virginia Woolf's friend, did.

And it's about a girl who doesn't get married, who doesn't lead a traditional aristocratic life, who doesn't become a spinster, who doesn't have children, who doesn't do any of the things that are traditional for women in literature and I think in in life at this time.

But she does magical things and she becomes a goddess, she becomes a giantess, she flies, she is able to slay a silver sea monster.

It reads very smoothly, it's very funny, it's very enjoyable, it's very unlike what most people think of when they think of Virginia Woolf, and you can read it from start to finish without any of the hiccups that one might encounter in a rough draft.

Professor Emila Seshagiri from the University of Tennessee.

And finally, a wandering elk, nicknamed Emil and spotted across Central Europe in the past few months, has been captured in Austria and released on the edge of a Czech forest.

Tens of thousands of people have followed Emil's eventful summer online since he first strolled into a village.

Among them was Rob Cameron in Prague.

Emil was first spotted in the very northeastern corner of the Czech Republic on June the 2nd, apparently after crossing the border from Poland.

Since then he's strolled through villages and towns, sixty of them, according to one account, in four countries.

He's forded streams, he's swum across the river Danube, he's stopped trains and closed roads, he's been spotted near two music festivals, one of them heavy metal.

He has fifty thousand Facebook followers.

All of that could now be over after getting too close to a motorway in Austria.

He begins a new chapter in a Czech forest, home to several dozen of his elk kin.

Will he stay there?

That's up to him.

Rob Cameron there.

And that's all from us for now.

There'll be a new edition of the Global News Podcast later on, but if you'd like to comment on this podcast and the topics we're covering, perhaps you're an elk enthusiast, do send us an email.

The address is globalpodcast at bbc.co.uk.

You can also find us on X at BBC World Service and use the hashtag globalnewspod.

This edition was mixed by Caroline Driscoll.

The producers were Anna Aslam and Peter Goffin.

The editor is Karen Martin.

I'm Chris Barrow and until next time, thanks for listening.

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