Category: English

Source: The Conversation – UK – By Francesco Grillo, Academic Fellow, Department of Social and Political Sciences, Bocconi University

The so-called world order and the international rule of law are both officially dead in the wake of operation “absolute resolve”, the US infiltration of Venezuela to capture its president Nicolás Maduro.

It is true that both have been sick for some time – and Venezuela is a demonstration of this. Maduro was condemned by foreign leaders for illegally seizing power as long ago as 2013 – years before Donald Trump even became president. No concrete action was ever taken.

Operation “absolute resolve”, however, is a red line crossed.

Even when the US invaded Panama in 1989, there was some attempt to preserve a world order that no longer seems to matter. This invasion (more humbly named “just cause”) was anticipated by a declaration of war that came from Panama. The US Congress was, at least, informed and some countries even tried a mediation.

More importantly, the reaction when the US went ahead was much stronger. Even before the capture of Panamanian president Manuel Noriega, the General Assembly of the United Nations, the Organization of the American States (which includes the US) condemned the invasion as illegal. The European Parliament did the same immediately after.

In the case of Venezuela, the silence is deafening. And seeing that no one has challenged it, the US government has immediately started talking about taking Greenland, hinting that it wouldn’t even need to use force. The world order is dead because nobody is willing to defend it.

However, it is equally evident that the alternative to the defunct world order cannot be no order at all. It’s not feasible that the world should operate according to the law of the jungle. It is too complex and big to be governed by just one empire.

This much was acknowledged even in the controversial US security strategy published at the end of 2025, which says that US elites “badly miscalculated America’s willingness to shoulder forever global burdens” and that “they overestimated America’s ability to fund … a massive military, diplomatic, intelligence, and foreign aid complex”.

“We live in a world in which you can talk all you want about international niceties and everything else,” Stephen Miller, deputy chief of staff to Donald Trump, now says of the US’s changed vision. “But we live in a world, in the real world…that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power.”

But a world governed on these terms is obviously a world heading towards mutual destruction. In such a system, all countries would, legitimately, scramble to defend themselves militarily. For those countries not already equipped, the pursuit of nuclear weapons would be the only obvious route to invulnerability.

Turning crisis into opportunity

So, what should Europe do in the face of this problem? And in the current world order, it’s possible that I do really mean Europe rather than the EU.

This situation requires cooperation with the UK, Norway, and probably Canada and Switzerland. If necessary, it may require moving ahead without Hungary or whichever other EU countries are still doubtful about the need for an urgent, defence-based European integration.

In theory, a world without a world order is a much greater problem for Europe than for any other economy of the world. According to the World Bank, trade with other countries represents more than 60% of the five biggest GDPs in Europe but less than 40% of the GDPs of China, the US and Russia.

However, Europe is also probably the part of the world that is best equipped to try to be the broker a new framework. It has fewer enemies than other contenders and more friends (16 of the 20 countries whose passports enable entry to other states without a visa are European).

It has the strongest tradition of being a global meeting place (the top five host cities for international organisations are all in Europe).

So yes, Europe can, in theory, transform its biggest problem into its biggest opportunity. Indeed, I would even say that the only way to survive the chaos is by being ambitious. Europe must present itself as the only credible broker of a difficult and yet indispensable new world order.

Miller is right that this will take force, strength and power – but it is the force of standing up without double or triple standards over defending those rights that once inspired a “universal declaration” inspired by the United States.

It is about having the strength of ideas for drafting new institutions to reinforce those values. But also, it’s about having the power, even one based on a military deterrence, to defend freedom if somebody wants to impose a different vision of what civilisations are about.

Will Europe find the courage to be strong? It probably needs a trigger to wake up. Greenland could be that trigger.

If Europeans don’t manage to negotiate what they’ve mastered so far – another humiliating compromise that would only serve US interests and reinforce Miller’s worldview – then an incident over Greenland may be the end of an alliance that is already increasingly unstable. But it would also be an opportunity to draft a new vision for governing the world.

Francesco Grillo is affiliated with the think tank Vision which is the convenor of the Siena conference on the Europe of the Future.

– ref. As the US eyes Greenland, Europe must turn a global problem into an opportunity – https://theconversation.com/as-the-us-eyes-greenland-europe-must-turn-a-global-problem-into-an-opportunity-272872

Source: The Conversation – UK – By John Harvey, PhD Researcher, Global Agriculture and Food Systems, University of Edinburgh; University of Exeter

Cutting down the amount of meat we eat helps reduce greenhouse gas emissions associated with agriculture. But what about the meat that our pet dogs eat?

Our new study shows that feeding dogs can have a larger negative effect on the environment than the food their owners eat. For a collie or English springer spaniel-sized dog (weighing 20kg), 40% of tested dog foods have a higher climate impact than a human vegan diet, and 10% exceed emissions from a high-meat human diet.

Dog food comprises a significant part of the global food system. We have calculated that producing ingredients for dog food contributes around 0.9-1.3% of the UK’s total greenhouse gas emissions. Globally, producing enough food for all dogs could create emissions equivalent to 59-99% of those from burning jet fuel in commercial aviation.

The type of animal product used to produce pet food really matters. The environmental footprint of dog food differs for prime cuts and offal or trimmings.

Cuts like chicken breast or beef mince are used in some dog foods but are also commonly eaten by people. Selling these “prime cuts” provides around 93-98% of the money from selling an animal carcass.

By-products like offal and trimmings – which are less sought after for human consumption, much cheaper, but highly nutritious – are widely used in pet food. We assign more of an animal’s environmental footprint to high-value cuts and less to these by-products.

Greenhouse gas emissions for different types of dog foods:

Some previous studies have given by-products the same environmental impact by weight as the highest‑value cuts, directly using figures calculated for human food. This “double counts” livestock impacts and substantially overestimates the footprint of pet food.

A practical problem for pet owners and researchers like us is that it’s difficult to find out which parts of the carcass are in a product. Our study used mathematical models to estimate the composition based on the ingredients list and nutritional composition of each food.

Read more:
Is your pooch better or worse off on a cereal-free diet?

Labelling guidelines allow broad terms such as “meat and animal derivatives”. These give manufacturers flexibility to change recipes but make it hard to distinguish between foods mainly based on low-value cuts and those rich in prime meat. Ingredients listed as chicken may be fresh, dehydrated (made from low value offcuts) or a mixture, and recipes are commercially sensitive.

For this reason, we adjusted our assumptions about nutrient content, environmental consequences of specific ingredients and the comparative values of meat products when estimating feed compositions. After repeating this process 1,000 times, one pattern was consistent: higher shares of prime meat drove up negative environmental effects.

Improved labelling – for example, indicating the proportion of prime meat v by‑products – would enable owners to make informed choices and allow better scrutiny of “sustainable” claims.

The format of pet food also matters. Some owners see raw and grain-free diets as more natural, although for many dogs these diets may offer no benefits and could introduce health risks, including nutritional imbalances and bacterial risks for dogs and their owners. Studies show that carefully formulated plant-based diets can meet dogs’ nutritional needs with similar health outcomes to meat containing diets, and there is increasing acceptance of this feeding approach from veterinary professionals.

On average, wet foods (for example, tinned or those packed in foil trays) and raw foods had more of a negative environmental effect than dry kibble. Grain-free options also have a greater environmental footprint than foods not marketed in this way. While the few plant-based diets we studied tend to be slightly less environmentally damaging than average meat-based ones, particularly among wet foods, this advantage is small compared to the difference between wet or raw and dry foods.

Read more:
Vegan diet has just 30% of the environmental impact of a high-meat diet, major study finds

There are exceptions. For example, the lowest impact wet foods we studied had lower emissions than the typical dry food. And, the foods with the absolute lowest negative environmental consequences we tested included meat by-products.

There are other protein sources being marketed as sustainable alternatives to feed dogs, the most widely marketed example being insects. We haven’t studied these in detail yet, but plan to in the future, while taking into account ongoing scientific debate about how large the real-world environmental benefits of insect production are.

Wet foods – and probably raw foods requiring refrigeration or freezing – tend to have greater greenhouse gas emissions from packaging and transportation. This further increases the chance that choosing these food types is less environmentally friendly.

Vegan v wolf diets

Pet food choices can provoke strong emotions. One of us should we name them?, a veterinary surgeon working on environmental sustainability, regularly sees owners torn between ideals of dogs as meat‑eating “wolves” and their wish to reduce environmental harm.

Our study shows that it’s not simply a matter of choosing between vegan diets and raw meat. Simple rules like “dry always has a lower environmental footprint than wet” do not hold for every product. The ingredient mix within each product is key.

So, for owners looking to reduce the environmental footprint of their pet food, it’s important to know that choosing grain-free, wet or raw foods can result in higher negative environmental effects compared to standard dry kibble foods. Regardless of food type chosen, selecting foods that use genuine animal by‑products or plant proteins rather than competing directly with meat humans typically eat is also preferable.

Dog foods showed over 65 times more variation in the effect they have on the planet, compared to a 2.5-fold difference between vegan and high-meat human diets. The potential to reduce – or increase – environmental damage by changing dog diets is enormous. By choosing meat products wisely for pet food and making labelling clearer, we can cut this hidden part of our food footprint and have healthy, well-fed dogs.

Don’t have time to read about climate change as much as you’d like?

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John Harvey receives funding from the Biotechnology and Biological Sci­ences Research Council (BBSRC), grant number BB/T00875X/1.

Vera Eory, SRUC, is credited as a co-author of the study and she collaborated with us during writing this article.

Peter Alexander and Sarah Crowley do not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and have disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

– ref. Your dog’s dinner could be worse for the planet than your own – new research – https://theconversation.com/your-dogs-dinner-could-be-worse-for-the-planet-than-your-own-new-research-271865

Source: The Conversation – UK – By Sam West, Postdoctoral Researcher, Primary Care Health Sciences, University of Oxford

Weight-loss injections, like Wegovy and Mounjaro, have been hailed as gamechangers. In clinical trials, people lost an average of 15%-20% of their body weight – results that seemed almost miraculous compared to traditional diet and exercise programmes.

Today, one in 50 people in the UK are using these treatments. Most of them – around 90% – are paying privately, at a cost of £120-£250 per month. But there’s a catch: more than half of people stop taking the drugs within a year, with cost being the main reason.

Our latest research reveals what happens next, and it’s sobering. On average, in clinical trials, people regain all the weight they lost within just 18 months of stopping the medication.

That’s surprisingly quick – almost four times faster than the weight regain seen after stopping weight-loss programmes based on diet and physical activity. The health improvements vanish too, with blood pressure, cholesterol and blood sugar levels returning to where they started.

This matters because it means these drugs may need to be taken long-term – potentially for life – to maintain the benefits. Some private providers offer intensive support alongside the medication, and our review showed this helped people lose on average an extra 4.6kg. But there was no evidence that support during or after stopping the drugs helped to slow weight regain.

The rapid rebound raises serious questions about fairness and whether these treatments represent good value for the NHS. Obesity is far more common among people living in deprived areas, who are also least able to afford private treatment. NHS access is crucial to ensuring everyone gets equal care, regardless of their income.

The NHS is gradually rolling out these medications, but only to people with severe obesity (BMI over 40) and four obesity-related conditions, such as high blood pressure. That means many people who could benefit are effectively excluded unless they can pay privately.

Costs may eventually fall as existing drug patents expire and cheaper oral versions are developed, but that could take years. In the meantime, we need to make sure NHS access to these medications delivers the best possible value so more people can benefit.

Cost v benefits

The National Institute for Health and Care Excellence approved these drugs for NHS use because it judged them cost-effective by its usual standards. But those calculations assumed treatment would last two years, with weight being regained after three years of stopping. Our data shows that if treatment ends, weight comes back surprisingly quickly.

We also found that the improvements in things like blood pressure and cholesterol – the main reasons the NHS treats obesity – disappeared within the same timescale. This means the treatments may need to be continued long term to achieve lasting weight loss and health benefits, which completely changes the cost calculations.

More research is needed to estimate how cost-effective these medications really are, outside carefully controlled clinical trials, and for the actual patients being treated.

For people with obesity who don’t yet qualify for the medication based on the strict NHS criteria, the medication may not be cost-effective for widespread NHS use until the price drops substantially.

For this population, traditional weight management programmes remain the foundation of obesity treatment. Total diet replacement programmes, during which people eat nutritionally balanced soups and shakes instead of regular food for eight to 12 weeks, can achieve similar weight loss to the medications at a fraction of the cost.

Group-based weight-loss programmes, such as WW and Slimming World, achieve smaller average weight losses but can be cost-effective and even save the NHS money.

The new weight-loss medications have shown just how desperately people want help to lose weight. But the question of value for money remains unclear. Making cheaper weight-loss programmes available to anyone with obesity who wants support would allow fairer access to treatment and improve public health, though individual results are likely to be less dramatic than what could be achieved with long-term medication.

Sam West receives funding from the National Institute of Health Research and is a co-investigator on three weight loss trials funded by the Novo Nordisk Foundation.

Dimitrios Koutoukidis receives funding from the National Institute of Health Research and is principal investigator in publicly-funded investigator-led research studies where Oviva and Nestle Health Sciences have contributed to the costs or delivery of weight-loss interventions. He supervised an iCASE PhD studentship where Second Nature was an industry partner.

Susan Jebb receives research grant funding from National Institute of Health Research and is principal investigator in a research programme funded by the Novo Nordisk Foundation

Oviva, Second Nature, Nestle Health Sciences have contributed to the costs or delivery of weight-loss interventions as part of some of research studies funded by the National Institute of Health Research.

– ref. Stopping weight-loss jabs leads to much faster rebound than thought – so are they still worth it? – https://theconversation.com/stopping-weight-loss-jabs-leads-to-much-faster-rebound-than-thought-so-are-they-still-worth-it-272314

Source: The Conversation – UK – By Natasha Lindstaedt, Professor in the Department of Government, University of Essex

During a recent interview with CNN host Jake Tapper, the White House deputy chief of staff, Stephen Miller, laid out what appears to be the core of the new ideology driving US foreign policy: the notion that might is right. Or, as he put it: “We’re a superpower. And under President Trump, we are going to conduct ourselves as a superpower.”

Miller was referring to the Trump administration’s ambitions to take control of Greenland, if necessary by force. “We live in a world in which you can talk all you want about international niceties and everything else,” he told Tapper. “But we live in a world, in the real world … that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power.”

The 40-year-old Californian is one of Trump’s most trustworthy advisers and also one of the longest serving, having joined Trump’s first campaign in January 2016. While the president’s first administration had a revolving door of different appointees, many of whom who barely lasted a year, Miller is one of a handful of advisers to serve in both Trump’s first and second terms.

The two reportedly have a close working relationship, meeting daily along with Trump’s chief of staff, Susie Wiles, to go through Trump’s diary and review the executive orders to be signed. Having started out as a speechwriter, Miller’s position has evolved to focus more on interpreting the president’s ideas and executing them as policy initiatives. He is also understood to be a key liaison point between the White House and Capitol Hill, where he briefs lawmakers on Trump’s plans.

Origins of an extremist

Miller’s extreme ideas did not come out of nowhere. In contrast to the vice-president, J.D. Vance and secretary of state, Marco Rubio, whose ideologies have evolved significantly to be in line with Trump’s agenda, Miller has had a long history of supporting radical America First style policies.

While in high school in Santa Monica, Miller is said to have complained about students having to pick up rubbish, saying janitorial staff should do it instead. As a 16-year-old he contributed an article to a local website, criticising his fellow Hispanic students for a lack of language skills.

While at Duke University, where he studied political science, he contributed a number of articles to the college website, attacking multiculturalism and championing right-wing issues. He was also part of a group at Duke, Students For Academic Freedom, that criticised what they saw as political bias among faculty staff. These ideas would resurface in his attack on universities as a Trump administration official.

Moving to Washington, Miller first worked as an aide to then Republican representative Michele Bachmann before taking a job with Republican senator Jeff Sessions as press secretary. One of his main focuses was in developing critiques of immigration, collaborating with groups such as the Federation for American Immigration Reform and the Centre for Immigration Studies.

This is where he developed the ideas that have formed the backbone of the Trump administration’s anti-immigration policies, including the now notorious family separation policy, by which children were often taken from their parents – who were subject to prosecution for attempting to cross the US southern border illegally. The policy was judged to be so harsh that the UN openly condemned it as cruel and unnecessary.

Immigration has been one of the main focuses of Miller’s work in Trump’s second term. He is understood to behind the decision to deploy immigration and customs enforcement agents en masse on the streets of US cities with power to detain and deport suspected illegal immigrants. Other radical policies bearing Miller’s hallmark are the plan to end the American policy of birthright citizenship, in contravention of the 14th amendment to the US constitution.

But then many of the policy ideas he espouses have brought Miller into conflict with American constitutional law. He has publicly declared that in some circumstances it should be permissible to suspend a person’s habeas corpus right to a trial before they can be imprisoned and he has questioned the power of the judiciary to hold the administration to account over executive decisions on matters such as deportations and due process.

Personality politics

If relatively unknown during Trump’s first term, Miller’s profile has grown considerably in the first 12 months of the second Trump administration. A YouGov poll conducted in September 2025 found that 50% of respondents had heard of him and he had a popularity rating of 18%.

But if he is disliked and feared by many on Capitol Hill, as well as among the wider public, Miller has an ideological ally and staunch supporter in his wife Katie, who achieved instant fame on January 3 after tweeting a map of Greenland with the US flag superimposed on it, accompanied by the word “SOON”.

Within hours the US president had voiced his intention to intervene in Greenland for reasons of national security and to secure access to its huge reserves of mineral resources.

Like her husband, Katie worked in the first Trump administration, at the department of homeland security. She once told a reporter that even the administration’s separation policy was not a problem for her, claiming: “DHS sent me to the border to see the separations for myself, to try to make me more compassionate, but it didn’t work.”

She now runs The Katie Miller podcast, which she established as a “place for conservative women to gather online”. Among other things, it provides a regular and uncritical platform for administration officials.

But the Millers’ growing public profile could prove to be a double-edged sword for the Trump administration. Despite saying out loud what many on the far-right of the Republican party want to hear, their apparent extremism is increasingly a focus for Trump’s critics. California’s democrat governor Gavin Newsom – generally thought to be preparing for a presidential run in 2024, has taken to referring to Miller as Voldemort, the personification of evil in the Harry Potter novels.

All of which is unlikely to resonate well with the independent voters that the Republicans desperately need to win over if they are not to lose vital ground in November’s midterm elections.

Natasha Lindstaedt does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

– ref. Stephen Miller: portrait of Donald Trump’s ideologue-in-chief – https://theconversation.com/stephen-miller-portrait-of-donald-trumps-ideologue-in-chief-272869

Source: The Conversation – UK – By Andrew Serdy, Professor of the Public International Law of the Sea, University of Southampton

Relations between the US and Russia have hit a fresh bump after the US coastguard boarded a vessel sailing in the Icelandic waters, claiming it was in breach of sanctions on Venezuela. The incident immediately sparked claim and counter-claim from the US and Russia.

The US claimed it was acting correctly to execute a warrant issued by a US federal court. Russian officials, meanwhile, were reported by the country’s Tass news agency as saying this was in clear breach of the law of the sea, saying “no state has the right to use force against ships properly registered in the jurisdictions of other states”. The statement asserted that the Bella 1 – which was recently renamed as the Marinera – had received a temporary permit to sail under the Russian flag on December 24.

Unlike the dramatic abduction of Venezuela’s president, Nicolás Maduro, from his Caracas palace on January 3, which the United States (US) does not even appear to be trying to defend in international law terms, the interdiction of the Marinera/Bella 1 appears to raise a new point of the law of the sea which may offer at least some prospect for Washington to show itself to be on the right side of the law.

Before the change of flag, the US seemed to be selecting with some care the ships carrying Venezuelan oil that it was targeting. These were either stateless or suspected of flying a false flag, which provides no protection under Article 92 of the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (Unclos), which is also the customary international law rule for non-parties such as the US.

Stateless ships are vulnerable

Being stateless, or acting in a way that gives warships on the high seas a valid basis for treating it as though it were stateless, is a position that any ship would be recommended to avoid if at all possible. A ship that is stateless has by definition no flag state to assert the protective exclusive jurisdiction over it on the high seas.

Unclos also provides that a ship which sails under the flags of two or more States, and swaps them depending on the circumstances, “may not claim any of the nationalities in question with respect to any other State”. This means it can be regarded legally as stateless.

Thus, until the change of flag reported on December 31, not just the US but any State was entitled to treat the Marinera/Bella 1 as stateless. This made it vulnerable to interception on the high seas and the exercise of domestic law enforcement jurisdiction over it by the State of the interdicting warship or coastguard vessel.

So the legal position remains unclear. It may be a question of whether the US was already pursuing the Marinera/Bella 1 when it changed its flag. If so the US may be entitled to disregard the reregistration.

Unclos allows for what it refers to as “hot pursuit”. It says that: “The right of hot pursuit ceases as soon as the ship pursued enters the territorial sea of its own State or of a third [another] State.” Since no other circumstance in which the right ceases is mentioned, including the ship ceasing to be stateless, this leaves it open to the US to argue that it was already pursuing the Marinera/Bella 1 and was thus not required to call off its pursuit.

But this argument has limited usefulness as there’s doubt as to whether this was actually a hot pursuit at all. The term is used for pursuits that begin in one of the maritime zones of the State conducting it – not on the high seas.

Claim and counter-claim

So far the Russian Ministry of Transport has claimed that the US action is contrary to the Article 92 rule. Russia insists that the change of registry occurred as long ago as December 24. To counter this, the US could say that it wasn’t until the Russian flag was painted on the ship’s hull, which was reported on December 31, that the Article 92 rule could be invoked against the US.

Article 92 also lays down that: “A ship may not change its flag during a voyage or while in a port of call, save in the case of a real transfer of ownership or change of registry.” This is often misunderstood and assumed to mean that a change of flag in mid-voyage – such as appears to have occurred in this case – is not permitted at all. But a closer reading reveals that this is not the case. What it prevents is a change of flag without a corresponding change of registration.

But that is not the position here. Assuming there was a real registration to Russia, that is what counts. Painting on a flag because you don’t have a physical one is simply evidence of that.

Reflagging while under pursuit is a new point in the international law of the sea to the extent that no previous incident of it is known. In the absence of a clear answer on this, the way this incident plays out is itself going to set the precedent for the future on this issue. We’ll need to hear the competing legal narratives of the US and Russia to see which of them is the more convincing.

Andrew Serdy does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

– ref. US boards a ship sailing under a Russian flag: what we know and don’t know about the legal position – https://theconversation.com/us-boards-a-ship-sailing-under-a-russian-flag-what-we-know-and-dont-know-about-the-legal-position-272957