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Americas
North America
United States
17 December 2025 Since Trump presented his list of Liberation Day reciprocal tariffs last April, targeting 180 countries and territories, the impacts of tariffs on developing nations have been profound. Since August, 22 African nations have been faced with duties ranging from 15 to 30 per cent. Last autumn, the African Growth and Opportunity Act, which granted duty-free access to the US market for thousands of products from sub-Saharan Africa, was allowed to expire. Replacing this with tariffs affected Botswana, Chad, Kenya, Lesotho, Madagascar, Mauritius, Malawi, Nigeria and South Africa. The Lesotho government was forced to declare a state of disaster and warned that 40,000 jobs in the textile sector were likely to be lost. South Africa warned that the tariffs jeopardise 100,000 jobs within the car industry – exports dropped by 60 per cent in 2025. Several African nations reliant on the US for key agricultural markets have warned that higher duties on tea, coffee and horticultural goods threaten farm incomes and rural employment. Kenya’s producers say rising costs have undercut the viability of smallholder exports, while Malawi and Ethiopia report cancelled contracts. Tariffs hit South and Southeast Asia hard, throwing countries’ short-term economic plans into disarray, undermining the basis of their long-term development models, and pushing them further into an uncomfortable embrace with China. Bangladesh, slapped with a 37 per cent tariff, relies on its garment industry, which employs four million workers and accounts for 13 per cent of the country’s economy and 80 per cent of its exports. Cambodia, hit with 49 per cent tariffs exported more than US$3billion of apparel to the USA in 2024. The apparel sector employs more than 900,000 people, more than ten per cent of the country’s overall workforce. The garment sector is Sri Lanka’s third-largest foreign exchange earner – worth US$1.9billion in 2024 – and exports to the USA sustain much of the industry’s 350,000 workers. Long- established supply chains that link developing economies to US consumers have also strained. Shipping firms report rerouting cargo away from the US after sudden increases in duties left consignments stuck at ports or returned to origin. Manufacturers in Vietnam, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka say the volatility has made forward planning impossible, with many factories operating below capacity for the first time in a decade. The first year of Trump 2.0 on the international stage has withdrawn the USA from the Paris climate accord, started the process of leaving the World Health Organization and scuppered a landmark international agreement to reduce emissions from commercial shipping. At home, it has initiatives to overwhelm opposition and media partly by issuing presidential orders (210 as of November 2025, the highest number by any president). By DOGE, the Department of Government Efficiency, thousands of staff at key agencies related to climate change, industrial pollution and public health have been fired, with targets including the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), the Environmental Protection Agency and NASA, with departure of much institutional memory in a short time. Trump has also moved forward with plans to revoke the ‘endangerment finding’ – a 2009 legal determination that greenhouse gas emissions cause climate change and threaten public health. Musk, initially put in charge of DOGE, said the mission was to end the tyranny of the bureaucracy, save taxpayers’ money and reduce US national debt, which stands at US$36trillion. DOGE claims US$214billion savings as of late November 2025 (though many media outlets have calculated it to be far less); even this figure is barely ten per cent of its US$2trillion target. The very infrastructure needed to do science has been seriously weakened, and will take years or decades to repair. It’s like blowing up a dam and deciding it was a bad idea. You can’t go and glue the pieces back togetherm says Masters, a meteorologist at Yale Climate Connections and a former hurricane scientist with NOAA. The National Science Foundation – which supports basic scientific research at thousands of US institutions – has lost more than 10 per cent of its staff. The National Oceanic Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) faces the elimination of its climate research centres and loss of hundreds of federal and academic climate scientists who track and study human-driven global warming. From hurricane warnings to a heating planet, NOAA has for decades been at the forefront of climate analysis. The agency’s 2026 budget is to be cut by $1.7 billion, about 27 per cent. The White House is seeking to eliminate NOAA’s research arm and cut funding for the agency’s Office of Oceanic and Atmospheric Research (OAR) to just over US$171million, a drop of US$485million. The budget closed the agency’s National Severe Storms Laboratory. It ended support for collecting regional climate data and information, often used by farmers and other industries (the government belatedly restored the data service for farmers). Cuts to NOAA and National Weather Service (NWS) – including the loss of key NWS early-warning staff – are hindering the nation’s ability to prepare for and respond effectively to extreme weather events. In May, NOAA announced that it would no longer update its Billion Dollar Weather and Climate Disasters product, which tracks major weather and climate disasters. Regular twice-per-day upper-air balloon soundings – the most important tool for reliable model weather forecasts – have been lost from 18 per cent of the nation’s upper-air stations, says Masters. Top heat experts at the National Integrated Heat Health Information System were no longer at their government posts at the start of what was a brutally hot summer, involving a massive heat dome over the United States, subjecting more than 255 million Americans to what meteorologists called dangerous, life-threatening conditions. NASA Science’s office faces a nearly 50 per cent cut; the National Weather Service (NWS) has lost 600 staff and the Environmental Protection Agency (EP) faces a 23 per cent budget cut. NASA faces budget cuts of up to 24 per cent. (In April, Trump’s budget request implied slashing the centre’s funding for its science missions by 47 per cent, a measure described by the American Astronomical Society as ‘an existential threat’). A question mark still hangs over the future of its Space Flight Center in Maryland. Hostility towards climate policy has been evident throughout the year. In September, the US Department of Energy instructed staff to avoid terms such as climate change, ‘green’ and sustainable, while criticism continued of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration for what is said to be an exaggeration of climate risks. Regulatory shifts have favoured fossil fuels. After a decade-long trend of rapid growth in solar power, installed solar capacity now totals about 220GW, provide more than seven per cent of the nation’s electricity. The total annual US electricity generation from wind energy increased from about six billion kilowatt hours (kWh) in 2000 to about 434 billion kWh in 2022, when wind turbines accounted for 10.3 per cent of total US utility-scale electricity generation. On his first day in office, Trump signed an executive order declaring a moratorium on permits, new leases and lease renewals for all wind projects on federal land. He calls farmer- destroying solar and called wind and solar the scam of the century. In July, he signed an executive order instructing the Treasury Department to terminate the clean electricity production and investment tax credits for wind and solar facilities. Trump’s ‘One Big Beautiful Bill’ imposed steep cuts to solar energy and placed new restrictions on energy tax credits that will slow the deployment of residential and utility-scale solar. The Department of Energy says it intends to claw back US$13billion in funding for the wasteful Green New Scam agenda of clean energy projects, while a US$7billion grant programme to expand solar energy in low-income communities has been rescinded. Mayes, Arizona’s attorney general said the cuts would increase energy bills by 20 per cent for the poorest. The Environmental Protection Agency has delayed limits on toxic pollution from coal-fired power plants. Analysis by the Rhodium Group warns that dismantled climate rules could cut the pace of US decarbonisation by more than half over the next 15 years. Offshore drilling is set to expand sharply. A draft five-year leasing plan proposes up to 34 oil and gas auctions, including the first new leases off California in 40 years, major sales in the eastern Gulf of Mexico and 21 auctions off Alaska, extending into High Arctic waters previously untouched by drilling. Onshore, the administration has opened 5.3 million hectares of land to coal mining and allocated US$625million to recommission coal plants. A tax bill has also reduced royalty rates on coal production. Internationally, an agreement to cap global shipping emissions collapsed after Trump dismissed it as a green scam. Across at the EPA, critical clean-air and water regulations have been revoked amid 3,700 workforce reductions – a cut of 23 per cent in staff, according to an EPA statement. The administration has encouraged eligible staff across the agency to take early retirements, terminated staff who were recent hires and outright eliminated staff positions in areas related to environmental justice, renewable energy, scientific research and climate change. Furloughed staff have been unable to inspect water treatment plants, chemical factories, oil refineries or monitor air quality. The reoriented EPA says it plans to reinterpret the Clean Air Act (seen as the nation’s most effective safeguard against toxic air pollution from coal-burning plants), repeal all federal limits on greenhouse gas emissions from fossil fuel-fired power plants and rescind recent updates to the Mercury and Air Toxics Standards (MATS). Further proposals by the White House include a 30 per cent cut to the EPA’s science and technology budget, crippling essential research on air pollution, toxic chemicals and climate resilience along with a US$680million cut in grants to states and tribes. They are setting back clean drinking water projects and other projects across the nation, and targeting the Office of Research and Development – the backbone of EPA science – which develops publicly vetted research action plans on the harmful impact of everything from forever chemicals to wildfire smoke. The damage to the infrastructure of EPA is profound. It will result in more exposure to health-damaging pollution if polluters believe they can emit with impunity. Wildlife habitats are being primed for resource exploitation and long-standing safeguards overturned. The US Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS) faces hundreds of job cuts. From the service’s Fish and Aquatic Conservation and Migratory Bird Programmes and the National Wildlife Refuge System the administration intends to fire dozens of officials. In the summer, agriculture secretary Rollins said she was rescinding the Roadless Rule, which for 25 years has protected 23 million hectares of national forest from new road construction, reconstruction and most timber harvesting. Rollins said the rule was overly restrictive and outdated. At the time, Trump said: We just aren’t allowed to use them because of the environmental lunatics who stopped us. Trump has imposed tariffs on timber imports, while a tax and spending bill passed last summer legally requires a 78 per cent increase in the amount of timber sold from national forests in the next nine years. There are roadless areas in 39 states, including nearly a quarter of New Mexico’s Gila National Forest and 3.6 million hectares of coastal rainforest in Alaska’s Tongass National Forest. An executive order outlines policies to maximise Alaska’s natural resource use, including energy, minerals, timber and seafood, repeals earlier measures that restricted development and prioritises the state’s liquefied natural gas potential. It also aims to initiate new leasing and permitting in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge region, protected for its ecological and cultural importance. ‘It will result in more exposure to health-damaging pollution if polluters believe they can emit with impunity. This weakness will propagate through the entire US environmental and public health management system,’ says Dr. Meiburg, executive director for Environment and Sustainability, Wake Forest University and a former Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Deputy Regional Administrator. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has lost a third of its staff and appears set for a radical re-direction in its approach to vaccination. Last September, US Health and Human Services Secretary Kennedy Jr, known for his anti-vaccine advocacy, called for new blood at the agency and the removal of officials with conflicts of interest and catastrophically bad judgement, and political agendas. Staff at the CDC’s climate office were laid off, with outbreak forecasters, policy and data offices affected. The CDC’s Epidemic Intelligence Service – which trains the agency’s disease detectives, typically the first responders in an outbreak – lost at least 30 programme coordinators, though some were belatedly reinstated. More than 130 employees were laid off from the office of the director of the National Center for Immunisation and Respiratory Diseases. Among these were leaders of the CDC’s response to the growing number of measles cases in the country. Some firings had been reversed, but Colorado has reported its worst measles year in three decades and Florida has announced it will be the first state to eliminate all childhood vaccine mandates. All staff at the Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report – which has published surveillance data on the nation’s health for more than a century – were fired. The cuts have excised the next generation of leaders at the CDC, the NIH, and the Food and Drug Administration, according to a former senior CDC employee and risk jeopardising the nation’s ability to innovate in biomedicine and avert disease. There will be direct impacts in discrete areas, such as those resulting from the loss of the tobacco control programme and from the departure of experts in vaccination at CDC, according to Sharfstein, public health professor at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and former deputy commissioner of the FDA. He is most concerned about the loss of integrity in policymaking, as strong processes are critical to success in regulation and grantmaking for health.’ The head of the WHO says the USAID programmes - cut by 82 per cent in early 2025 - to tackle HIV, polio, mpox and bird flu, have been affected by the freeze on tens of billions of dollars of overseas aid from the USA. Last spring saw the laying off of analysts at the Department of Health and Human Services who were responsible for updating poverty guidelines used to calculate eligibility for more than 40 programmes. In September, the Department of Agriculture (USDA) announced that it would terminate not only the annual report on food insecurity in the USA but also eliminate funding for the underlying data. Data collection was suspended for the Pregnancy Risk Assessment Monitoring System, a gold-standard database of maternal mortality data. According to Gibney, senior research analyst at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, these actions are part of a larger pattern that will reduce the availability of data or discredit data that are available and signify increasingly overt politicisation. Decisions to collect or publish less federal data appear to be driven by the current administration’s views on issues such as LGBTQ+ identities and climate change, she says. (Source: Geographical - United Kingdom)
Dec. 16, 2025 US President Trump signed an executive order today declaring fentanyl a weapon of mass destruction. The move dramatically expands the US government’s authority to fight the synthetic opioid blamed for tens of thousands of American overdose deaths each year. It signals Trump’s intent to treat fentanyl as a national security threat on a par with chemical warfare. The classification empowers the Pentagon to assist law enforcement and allows intelligence agencies to deploy against drug traffickers the tools normally reserved for countering weapons proliferation. ’Illicit fentanyl is closer to a chemical weapon than a narcotic,’ Trump's order said. Since early September, the Trump administration has carried out more than 20 strikes against suspected drug vessels in the Caribbean and Pacific, killing more than 80 people. A Reuters/Ipsos poll published on Wednesday found that a broad swath of Americans oppose the US military's campaign of deadly strikes on the boats, including about one-fifth of Trump's Republicans. Trump has repeatedly threatened strikes on land in Venezuela, Colombia and Mexico to battle drug trafficking. In a sweeping strategy document published, Trump said his administration's foreign policy focus would be on reasserting US dominance in the Western Hemisphere. Mexico is the largest source of US-bound illicit fentanyl. Many of the chemicals used to manufacture the drug are sourced from China. The opioid is a leading cause of US overdose deaths. (Source: The Korea Herald - South Korea / Reuters - United Kingdom)
December 13, 2025 "Ending the Ukraine War will ultimately require some US-Russia nuclear arms agreement". The post-war agreement among the United States, NATO, Russia, and Ukraine should establish at least four protocols with respect to nuclear weapons and their roles in public policy. First, the various parties should agree to abstain from explicit nuclear threats against one another, regardless of their political or military disputes. Second, NATO, Russia, and Ukraine should agree that Ukraine will not manufacture or deploy nuclear weapons on its territory, and that Russia will not deploy any of its tactical nuclear weapons in Russian-controlled parts of Ukraine, nor in states outside of Russia that border on Ukraine. Third, the United States and Russia should resume New START negotiations by agreeing to the Russian-proposed one-year extension of the agreement set to expire in February 2026, and also address transparency for non-strategic nuclear weapons and, possibly, agree to limits on their deployment. Fourth, the issue of next-generation nuclear weapons and delivery systems should be included in ongoing future arms control discussions. (Source: The National Interest - U.S.)
by Cimbala and Korb
South America
Chile
15.12.2025 ’Far-right’ Republican Party candidate Kast secured a commanding victory in Chile's presidential runoff election on Sunday. The election featured a significant increase in voter participation, as voting was compulsory for the first time in more than a decade and it was overwhelmingly decided by security concerns, which have surpassed the economy, health care, and education as the country's top issue, according to polls. Kast won with 58.17% of the vote, while Communist Party member and former Labor Minister Jara got 41.83%. Although Chile remains one of the safest countries in Latin America, a recent rise in organized crime, homicides, and high-impact cases such as kidnappings fueled a public sense of lawlessness. Kast is a staunch Catholic known for his opposition to abortion and same-sex marriage. He has been an open admirer of former dictator Pinochet. As a lawyer and former lawmaker, Kast ran on a platform demanding an iron fist to restore public order. Kast was promising drastic measures to tackle security, including the deployment of the military to high-crime neighborhoods, building a wall along the northern borders, and deporting all migrants in the country illegally. Chile's immigrant population has doubled over the past decade, fueled primarily by an estimated 700,000 Venezuelans. The result marks the latest in a series of victories for the ’far right’ in Latin America, following a trend that has seen right-wing leaders rise to power in countries such as Argentina and Ecuador. The US congratulated Trump-inspired Kast for his win. "The United States looks forward to working closely with his administration to deepen our partnership and promote shared prosperity in our hemisphere." the State Department said in a statement. (Source: Anadolu Agency - Turkey)
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