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The endangered birds are the only short-tailed albatrosses nesting at Midway Atoll. More information Adding us as a Preferred Source in Google by using this link indicates that you would like to see more of our content in Google News results. George and Geraldine had their first chick during the 2018-2019 breeding season. The Midway Atoll National Wildlife Refuge near Hawaii has welcomed a special couple: George and Geraldine, two short-tailed albatrosses (). The birds have officially found each other for nesting season on the Midway Atoll for the 10th straight year in a row.

Follow this author to personalize your feed and get instant alerts. Follow Go to your personalized feed WHY FOLLOW? Smart Alerts: Get notified about major news as it happens. Dr. Bill Frist is a heart and lung surgeon, former U.S. Senate majority leader, and Chair of the Global Board of Directors for The Nature Conservancy nonprofit. He has emerged as a prominent Republican advocate for climate action, seeking to bridge the partisan divide by emphasizing how protecting the environment benefits human health.

AI leaders claim their tech will fix the climate. The evidence mostly points in the opposite direction so far. This week, as countries meet in Antalya, Turkey for the United Nations climate conference, one topic likely to dominate the conversation is artificial intelligence. The host has already called on countries to commit to ensuring that AI is designed, powered, and deployed in ways that support climate action. But so far, industries around the world aren't doing nearly enough to harness the technology to actually drive down the greenhouse-gas emissions heating up the planet, despite some very optimistic claims from AI companies. In 2024, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman declared that AI would unleash "astounding triumphs," including "fixing the climate."

A sweeping bit of legislation designed to cut red tape could speed up the buildout of energy infrastructure in the US. With the dust barely settled on this week's momentous midterms, the Senate is set to vote on the Bipartisan American Affordability and Jobs Act (BAAJA) on November 9. It's a plan that could finally start an overhaul of the slow, complicated process for getting energy projects approved, as part of something called permitting reform. People on both sides of the political aisle have been pushing for this type of change for some years. The key question is whether this will cut greenhouse-gas emissions from the US energy sector or push them higher still. The federal permitting system is designed to protect the environment against industrial pollution from large projects like power plants, transmission lines, and natural-gas pipelines. Today, permitting is governed by a range of laws, including the National Environmental Policy Act and the Clean Water Act. And if there's one thing you might know about the current state of permitting in the US it's that it's slow and incredibly complicated. So in its 417 pages, BAAJA attempts to tighten things up. The bill has provisions that narrow the sorts of projects that need to apply for federal permits and others that enact deadlines in hopes of speeding up a process that today can take years.

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Finnish police have launched a criminal investigation into suspected breaches of environmental law at the construction site of a planned Google data centre in northern Finland. The project is part of a $15bn deal announced last month by Alphabet's Google to invest in artificial intelligence (AI) infrastructure in Finland, which the US company described as its largest investment in Europe. "We are investigating whether the company's operations have breached the Water Act and resulted in environmental damage," Detective Superintendent Kari Pakanen told the Reuters news agency on Thursday, adding that a guilty finding could lead to a corporate fine. Pakanen declined to say whether any individuals could become a target of the investigation, and a Google spokesperson said the company would cooperate with the police investigation and continue to focus on maintaining compliance at its sites. Videos and photographs showing the scale of the forest clearance at the site of the data centre, and Google's initial reluctance to address the issue in the days after the news broke, have prompted widespread anger in Finland, where there is a high level of respect for the natural environment among the public.

Many residents are concerned about the health and environmental issues a datacenter could bring to the community. Many residents are concerned about the health and environmental issues a datacenter could bring to the community. Inside the long, bitter fight over one man's quest to build the biggest AI datacenter in California Sat 17 Oct 2026 09.00 EDTLast modified on Sat 17 Oct 2026 09.01 EDT Sebastian Rucci zoomed in on a map in late 2024, looking closely at a large block of brown earth. The barren plot sandwiched between sprawling alfalfa fields and sleepy desert suburbs was exactly what he'd been searching for - the perfect place to realize his dream of building the largest artificial intelligence datacenter in California. It was in the Sonoran desert, just north of the Mexican border, where temperatures regularly rose past 100F (37.8C). Water was scarce in the once-booming agricultural area, which gets its supply from the beleaguered Colorado River.

Google has been ordered to temporarily stop work on two datacentres in Finland after failing to do the necessary environmental impact assessments on its construction sites. The planned datacentres in Muhos and Kajanni are part of a €13bn (£11bn) project across multiple sites in northern Finland by the technology company amid huge demand for space to house online infrastructure. It comes after it emerged that Tuike Finland Oy, the company representing Google, had felled 330 hectares (815 acres) of forest in Muhos without completing an environmental impact assessment (EIA). In Kajaani, the company has reportedly been logging across just under 200 hectares (494 acres) of land. The Finnish Association for Nature Conservation said the sites had been reduced to "sand", blaming the oversights on the "overheated" market for new datacentres.

Conservative shadow chancellor Andrew Griffith has said his party, if it was returned to power, would take £50,000 off the cost of building a new home in England and Wales by cutting back on regulations. The £50,000 figure claimed by Griffith reflects estimates by the housebuilding industry of the costs of new regulations and taxes. However, construction and housing experts warn that some of the savings could ultimately lead to higher government spending on schools, roads, and affordable housing. And some analysts also warn the Conservative plans to scrap environmental regulations could potentially push up household energy bills in future. Where does the £50,000 figure come from?