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In 2021, Google set a lofty goal of achieving net-zero carbon emissions by 2030. Yet in the years since then, the company has moved in the opposite direction as it invests in energy-intensive artificial intelligence. In its latest sustainability report, Google said its carbon emissions had increased 51% between 2019 and 2024.

New research aims to debunk even that enormous figure and provide context to Google’s sustainability reports, painting a bleaker picture. A report authored by non-profit advocacy group Kairos Fellowship found that, between 2019 and 2024, Google’s carbon emissions actually went up by 65%. What’s more, between 2010, the first year there is publicly available data on Google’s emissions, and 2024, Google’s total greenhouse gas emissions increased 1,515%, Kairos found. The largest year-over-year jump in that window was also the most recent, 2023 to 2024, when Google saw a 26% increase in emissions just between 2023 and 2024, according to the report.

Air pollution has been linked to a swathe of lung cancer-driving DNA mutations, in a study of people diagnosed with the disease despite never having smoked tobacco.

The findings from an investigation into cancer patients around the world helps explain why those who have never smoked make up a rising proportion of people developing the cancer, a trend the researchers called an “urgent and growing global problem”.

Prof Ludmil Alexandrov, a senior author on the study at the University of California in San Diego, said researchers had observed the “problematic trend” but had not understood the cause.

The scientists analysed the entire genetic code of lung tumours removed from 871 never-smokers in Europe, North America, Africa and Asia as part of the Sherlock-Lung study. They found that the higher the levels of air pollution in a region, the more cancer-driving and cancer-promoting mutations were present in residents’ tumours.

Air pollution has been linked to a swathe of lung cancer-driving DNA mutations, in a study of people diagnosed with the disease despite never having smoked tobacco.

The findings from an investigation into cancer patients around the world helps explain why those who have never smoked make up a rising proportion of people developing the cancer, a trend the researchers called an “urgent and growing global problem”.

The scientists analysed the entire genetic code of lung tumours removed from 871 never-smokers in Europe, North America, Africa and Asia as part of the Sherlock-Lung study. They found that the higher the levels of air pollution in a region, the more cancer-driving and cancer-promoting mutations were present in residents’ tumours.

Kilmar Abrego Garcia said he suffered severe beatings, severe sleep deprivation and psychological torture in the notorious El Salvador prison the Trump administration had deported him to in March, according to court documents filed Wednesday.

He said he was kicked and hit so often after arrival that by the following day, he had visible bruises and lumps all over his body. He said he and 20 others were forced to kneel all night long and guards hit anyone who fell.

The government’s top vaccine official working under Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. recently restricted the approval of two COVID-19 vaccines, disregarding recommendations from government scientists, according to federal documents released Wednesday.

The new memos from the Food and Drug Administration show how the agency’s vaccine chief, Dr. Vinay Prasad, personally intervened to place restrictions on COVID shots from vaccine makers Novavax and Moderna.

Both vaccines were approved by the FDA in May after months of analysis by rank-and-file FDA reviewers.

But internal correspondence show Prasad disagreed with staffers who planned to approve the shots for everyone 12 and older, similar to previous COVID vaccines. The scientists had concluded the benefit from the vaccines and the risk of COVID-19 outweighed the risk of possible side effects, which are rare.

-The US government has tried for the second time to deport a stateless Palestinian woman, according to court documents – despite a judge’s order barring her removal.

-Ward Sakeik, a 22-year-old newlywed, was detained in February on her way home from her honeymoon in the US Virgin Islands. Last month, the government attempted to deport her without informing her where she was being sent, according to her husband, Taahir Shaikh. An officer eventually told her that she would be sent to the Israel border – just hours before Israel launched airstrikes on Iran.

-After her lawyers filed suit on behalf, US district judge Ed Kinkeade issued an order on 22 June barring the government from deporting Sakeik or removing her from the Texas district where she is being detained while her case is decided.

-But on Monday, the government tried once again to deport her. Officers at the detention facility woke her up early in the morning on Monday, and told her she “had to leave”. When she tried to tell the officer there was a court order blocking her removal, the officer responded: “It’s not up to me.”

ON MAY 26, Alberta announced that it was entering the book-banning business. “Multiple books found in some school libraries show extremely graphic and age-inappropriate content,” warned a government press release. To save Alberta’s children from this material, the government promised to act: first, by inviting Albertans to provide feedback on what is “acceptable for school library collections,” and second, by setting province-wide standards that every school board will be required to implement before classes resume in the fall.

When The Tyee pointed out that three of the four targeted books featured LGBTQ+ narratives, Minister of Education and Childcare Demetrios Nicolaides shot back: “The fact that our actions of protecting young students from seeing porn, child molestation, self-harm and other sexual material in school libraries are being labelled as anti-LGBTQ is frankly irresponsible.”

Book banners can always be counted upon to deny that label while simultaneously invoking children’s innocence to justify the very censorship they disavow. “This isn’t about banning books,” Premier Danielle Smith posted on X. “It’s about protecting kids from graphic, sexually explicit content that has no place in a classroom.” (None of the books appear to have been part of any classroom curriculum, nor were students compelled to read them.)

For decades, successive conservative governments in Alberta have promised that technology will address the massive environmental threat posed by toxic oilsands mine wastewater stored in tailings ponds near Fort McMurray, now so large they are more than twice the size of Vancouver.

On June 12, Alberta’s Environment Ministry released a report by its government-appointed Oilsands Mine Water Steering Committee. One of the committee’s five major policy recommendations was to consider allowing companies to inject untreated wastewater deep underground, “once all other options have been fully explored.”

This recommendation would have come as no surprise to Calgary-based Aqua Solutions Inc. The oilsands infrastructure company wants to use its deep-well injection technology to store billions of litres of mine wastewater underground.

Nor would it surprise environmentalists, academics and others who have long complained about the intertwined, conflict-laden relationship between the oilsands industry and the Alberta government.

Premier Doug Ford says Ontario will try to hit its climate change targets by 2030, despite internal documents suggesting the province is not on track to meet the emissions reduction goals.

Ford was responding to a report from CBC News that shows the province is projected to miss a key climate change target by three megatonnes of emissions in 2030. The premier said Ontario is working hard to hit the mark and committing to nuclear energy as a way to help green the province's electricity grid.

"Our goal is always to hit 100 per cent and we'll do it as quickly as possible," Ford said on Friday. "That's our goal, and that's what we're going to do. We're going to do our very best to achieve it."

Well-known AI chatbots can be configured to routinely answer health queries with false information that appears authoritative, complete with fake citations from real medical journals, Australian researchers have found.

Without better internal safeguards, widely used AI tools can be easily deployed to churn out dangerous health misinformation at high volumes, they warned in the Annals of Internal Medicine.

“If a technology is vulnerable to misuse, malicious actors will inevitably attempt to exploit it - whether for financial gain or to cause harm,” said senior study author Ashley Hopkins of Flinders University College of Medicine and Public Health in Adelaide.

Family members of a Black teenager shot and killed by police in an Alabama suburb say they want answers and are seeking to see the body camera footage of the shooting.

Jabari Peoples, 18, was shot June 23 by a police officer in the parking lot of a soccer field in Homewood, an affluent suburb near the central city of Birmingham.

The family is disputing the police version of events. Leroy Maxwell, Jr., an attorney representing the family, said Peoples was shot in the back and, according to a witness, did not have a weapon when approached by the officer.

A federal appeals court ruled Alabama prosecutors violated the constitutional rights of a man sentenced to death in 1990, saying Blacks were rejected from the jury during his trial.

The Monday ruling from a three judge panel on the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals means Michael Sockwell, 62, is eligible for a retrial. He was convicted of killing former Montgomery County Sheriff Isaiah Harris in 1988 when he was 26-years old.

The panel issued a 2-1 opinion stating Alabama prosecutors violated Sockwell’s 14th Amendment rights by “repeatedly and purposefully” rejecting potential Black jurors who were believed to be more sympathetic to him on the basis of their shared race.