As the WSWS reported earlier this week, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), under the Trump administration, has made a fundamental change to how it evaluates air pollution regulations. According to internal agency emails and documents, the EPA plans to stop calculating the monetary value of health benefits—such as avoiding premature deaths, heart attacks and asthma attacks—when setting limits for fine particulate matter (PM2.5) and ground-level ozone.

The EPA sets the value of human life and health at zero: A further comment

Benjamin Mateus

BRUSSELS : NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte delivered one of the starkest warnings yet to Europe’s political class on Monday, forcefully rejecting the idea that the continent can secure itself without the United States and exposing the enormous economic and strategic costs of any attempt to do so.

Vladimir Putin has offered to contribute $1 billion to join Donald Trump's Peace Council. But there's a catch.

Many, myself included [SCOTT RITTER?], were surprised when Russian President Vladimir Putin announced he was prepared to donate $1 billion from frozen Russian assets in the United States to help fund Donald Trump's new pet project, a "Peace Council" ostensibly tasked with overseeing the reconstruction of Gaza.

After all, Russia has been at the forefront of the concept of a world order based on law and the principles of the Charter of the United Nations.

On December 15, 2025, the European Union slapped sanctions on former Swiss intelligence officer and ex-NATO employee Jacques Baud. No day in court, no charges filed, just abrupt, suffocating, sanctions.

Why did the EU sanction Baud? For “Russian propaganda,” of course, although many of the sources he cites in his reports on the West provoking war with Russia years prior to Russia’s military operation are Western and Ukrainian – including the SBU and Aleksey Arestovich, a former adviser to Vladimir Zelensky.

Welcome to the latest EU insanity.

Widely respected for his deep knowledge and analysis, much of which is based on his own research while working with NATO, Baud has grown increasingly popular over the years, appearing on numerous podcasts and interviews, authoring numerous books and articles as well.

January 2026 marks a year since Donald Trump was sworn in as the 47th President of the United States. Few national leaders can compete with Trump when it comes to public engagement and the range of global issues tackled. He is undoubtedly the most quoted head of state. However, the high level of media attention to America’s domestic and foreign policies is a double-edged sword for the current US administration.

No endgame doctrine: What Trump is doing to the world order
Why America’s new foreign policy struggles to turn pressure into outcomes

BY Alexander Bobrov

Australia’s leaders are trying to avoid becoming a target in a harsher, more coercive world. But silence and caution can’t substitute for strategy – or for honest leadership that levels with the public.

Higher Australian foreign policy has probably never been so simple. Our government, and probably an alternative coalition government (if anyone could imagine such a thing), would like very much to escape international attention for as long as possible.

Jack Waterford

British Conservative lawmaker Suella Braverman, who was home secretary — the UK equivalent to interior minister — between 2022 and 2023, has joined Nigel Farage's populist Reform UK party.

Braverman, a sitting member of parliament, is the latest in a string of high-profile Conservatives join Farage's camp. Reform UK is currently the fourth power in the House of Commons but leading opinion polls ahead of both the ruling Labour Party and the Tories  as both traditional parties struggle.

Moscow and Washington will not engage in dialogue with Brussels’ foreign policy chief Kaja Kallas, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov has said.

Peskov made the remarks after the US, Russia and Ukraine concluded their first round of three-way negotiations in Abu Dhabi on Saturday. EU officials have complained that, despite providing military and financial aid to Kiev, the bloc has been largely excluded from the talks.

In an interview with Russia-1 journalist Pavel Zarubin which aired on Sunday, President Vladimir Putin’s spokesman described the current EU leadership as “incompetent,” adding that its actions “undermine the system of international relations.”

Global warming is one of the biggest challenges faced by humanity today. As emissions continue to rise, global temperatures keep breaking records and the world's poorest nations bear the brunt of a crisis they did little to create.

Time to fix responsibility for climate change

By Hu Yong | CHINA DAILY

However, public discourse on climate responsibility remains mired in individualism. Citizens are told to recycle, go vegan and shrink their "carbon footprints" while systemic sources of emissions — from industrial production to state-backed fossil fuel subsidies — remain largely untouched. It is time the global conversation shifts from personal virtue to structural accountability, from lifestyle tweaks to large-scale political and economic reform.

On the war’s momentum [September 2022]: It has fundamentally shifted, and I’m normally fairly guarded and cautious about this, but the tide clearly has turned because the success of this offensive, as important as it is itself on the ground, is that it reflects a hugely important development: Ukraine has been incomparably better than Russia in recruiting, training, equipping, organising and employing additional forces. Russia has been struggling to do just that, literally running out of soldiers, ammunition tanks, fighting vehicles and so forth.

David Petraeus

Ukraine will win the war

Now, this is a tricky one, George, because it’s a subject on which my opinion has altered violently. And this is a disaster! My God, everyone knows that newspaper readers cling to the opinions of columnists like passengers on the Titanic fastened on to the few lifeboats there upon the chopping, churning sea.

What are the rules about wearing one’s hat indoors?

BY Hadley Freeman

Australia’s alliance with the United States is no longer reliable, and clinging to it now risks Australia’s interests and values. The case for a deliberate, staged Plan B begins with strategic autonomy – and an overdue reckoning with extended nuclear deterrence.

Michael McKinley

One hundred years ago – in The Sun Also Rises – Ernest Hemingway wrote that some things proceed “at first slowly, and then very fast.” This is an accurate description of the decomposition of the Western Alliance in general and Australia’s alliance relationship with the United States in particular.

Right-wing campaign groups and Coalition MPs are again using Australia Day to drive petitions, wedge politics and anti-elite rhetoric. This year’s campaign is being amplified by paid digital ads, ARC grant outrage and calls to “legislate the date”.

Marian Sawer