The Guardian

Italy’s data protection body investigates claims police shared names and addresses with firm collecting penalties for TfL

The names and addresses of thousands of EU drivers were unlawfully accessed by Italian police and shared with the company that collects Ulez penalties on behalf of Transport for London (TfL), investigators believe.

The Italian data protection authority is investigating claims by Belgium’s government that an unnamed police department misused official powers to pass the personal details of Belgian drivers to Euro Parking Collections, which is employed by TfL to issue fines to enforce London’s low emission zone (Lez) and ultra-low emission zone.

Feat by scientists at Oxfordshire facility described as ‘fitting swansong’ for pioneering project as reactor is decommissioned

The prospect of a green energy source based on the power of the stars has received a boost after scientists set a world record for the amount of energy created by fusing atoms together.

Researchers at the Joint European Torus (JET), an experimental fusion reactor at the Culham Centre for Fusion Energy in Oxfordshire, generated 69 megajoules of energy over five seconds from a mere 0.2 milligrams of fuel in the final fusion experiment performed at the facility.

As the photographer turns 80, we look back as some of his most striking images from around the world. Salgado has been awarded Sony’s Outstanding Contribution to Photography Award 2024, and a selection of his work can be seen at Somerset House in London between 19 April and 6 May

• Photographer Sebastião Salgado at 80: ‘They say I was an aesthete of misery’

A volcano in south-western Iceland has erupted for the second time this year, the country's meteorological office has said. Live images captured lava gushing out of a fissure, sending plumes of smoke and ash into the air. It the sixth outbreak on the Reykjanes peninsula since 2021, before when the volcano had been inactive for about 800 years. 'Reykjanes is fed by five volcanic systems, many of which come to life every 800 to 1,000 years,' said Dave McGarvie, a volcanologist at Lancaster University

• Iceland’s Reykjanes fires may burn for decades, history suggests

Warming of the land surface increased from 1.48C after another year of data was added, annual climate statement reveals

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Australia’s climate has officially warmed by 1.5C since 1910, according to the Bureau of Meteorology’s long-term record of temperatures.

The figure is revealed in the bureau’s annual climate statement that found 2023 was Australia’s joint-eighth warmest year on record, with the national temperature 0.98C above the average between 1961 and 1990.

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Experts say the endangered insect numbers fell by 59% this year, blaming pesticide use and climate change for the reduction

The number of endangered monarch butterflies at their wintering areas in Mexico has dropped by 59% this year to the second lowest level since record keeping began, experts said, blaming pesticide use and climate change.

The annual butterfly count doesn’t calculate the individual number of butterflies, but rather the number of hectares they cover when they clump together on tree branches in the mountain pine and fir forests west of Mexico City. Monarchs from east of the Rocky Mountains in the US and Canada overwinter there.

Ruling, specific to three dicamba-based weedkillers, is major blow to Bayer, BASF and Syngenta

Dealing a blow to three of the world’s biggest agrochemical companies, a US court this week banned three weedkillers widely used in American agriculture, finding that the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) broke the law in allowing them to be on the market.

The ruling is specific to three dicamba-based weedkillers manufactured by Bayer, BASF and Syngenta, which have been blamed for millions of acres of crop damage and harm to endangered species and natural areas across the midwest and south.

The press is covering the 2024 campaign as if climate isn’t on the ballot, but 56% of US voters are ‘concerned’ or ‘alarmed’ about the crisis

Fact one: more voters face national elections in 2024 than ever before in recorded history – about 4 billion people, nearly half the human population.

Fact two: last year was the hottest in recorded history – and scientists warn that oil, gas and coal burning must be rapidly phased out if we are to preserve a livable planet.

Mark Hertsgaard is executive director and co-founder of Covering Climate Now, a global journalism collaboration committed to more and better coverage of the climate story, and the Nation magazine’s environment correspondent

Kyle Pope is executive director of strategic initiatives and co-founder of Covering Climate Now, and a former editor and publisher of the Columbia Journalism Review

This article is published here as part of the global journalism collaboration Covering Climate Now

The Biden administration suspended new permits for natural gas terminals. Can we see more of this kind of backbone?

Ten days ago Joe Biden did something remarkable, and almost without precedent – he actually said no to big oil.

His administration halted the granting of new permits for building liquefied natural gas (LNG) export terminals, something Washington had been handing out like M&Ms on Halloween for nearly a decade. It’s a provisional “no” – Department of Energy experts will spend the coming months figuring out a new formula for granting the licenses that takes the latest science and economics into account – but you can tell what a big deal it is because of the howls of rage coming from the petroleum industry and its gaggle of politicians.

Bill McKibben is the founder of Third Act, which organizes Americans over 60 for progressive action and which worked this fall to persuade the administration to stop granting the LNG permits

Campaigners argue in legal challenge that loophole has allowed poultry farmers to pollute river

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The Environment Agency and the UK government failed to protect the River Wye from catastrophic decline by allowing pollution from industrial chicken farming to saturate the land and devastate the protected river, a legal challenge is to argue.

The Danish photographer Soren Solkær first saw starling murmurations as a child near Wadden Sea in the south of the country. After photographing the phenomenon for three years in the marshlands of Denmark, Solkær’s new work, Starling, published by Edition Circle, expands his scope to trace the birds along their migration routes to the Netherlands and Italy

This year, photographers had the chance to win up to £100 for capturing a striking image of the night sky over South Downs national park, England, in one of three categories: Starry skyscapes, Nature at night and Magnificent moon

‘Huge disconnect’ between employers’ public ambitions on diversity and their actions, say workers

Workers at environmental charities have said bold words on inclusion are not being matched with action, as research shows the sector still lags far behind others in racial diversity.

Only about one in 20 workers in the environmental charity sector identified as an ethnic minority last year, according to a survey of organisations, compared with one in eight in the wider UK workforce.

A huge retrospective of Canadian photographer Edward Burtynsky’s work showcases the terrifying, but oddly beautiful marks we can leave on the planet

Andrew Bowie wrote last year that concerns among his constituents about new pylons were ‘a priority’

The UK minister responsible for the building of new pylons has been quietly reshuffled after it emerged he had campaigned against the structures in his own constituency.

The energy minister Andrew Bowie had been in charge of energy networks, including building pylons, since he took up his post in February 2023.

Shareholders on all sides want to know where the oil giant stands on renewables, yet Murray Auchincloss opts for ambiguity

If in doubt, throw cash at the shareholders. It’s a safe tactic for a new chief executive assailed on two sides by investors with conflicting grumbles. BP’s Murray Auchincloss seized his debut moment. There will be $3.5bn of share buy-backs in the first half of this year, accelerating to a total of $14bn by the end of next. The shares rose 5%. For a week or two, that might stop people pointing out how BP’s share price has lagged its peers’.

Yet shareholders of all hues – those who want to transition faster out of fossil fuels and those who can’t see the point – surely also wanted to hear a clear statement from Auchincloss on where he stands in the great debate. How will BP prioritise its spending of cash that isn’t going on buy-backs and dividends?

Repetition has blunted the art museum protests so much that the pumpkin soup assault on the Mona Lisa felt pathetic. More effective tactics are needed

How many of the 38 environmental protests staged in museums in 2022 can you remember? How many of the more recent ones only generated widespread outrage? Did any of them lead to tangible change? The protesters’ cause is serious, the threat is very real, the message is important and urgent. But is it not getting through to the public?

Sixty years ago, Andy Warhol’s Brillo Boxes and multiplied Marilyn Monroe screen-prints exposed modern repetition as an ideal of mindlessness – an inescapable capitalist pattern ingrained in the oversaturated modes of production and consumption that distract and overwhelm while nurturing an irreducible sense of modern apathy. How many times is too many? Repetition is a complex phenomenon: it can deepen or hollow out experiences depending on how it is deployed. Repeated ad libitum anything shocking quickly becomes commonplace. Aware of the risk, good artists try not to repeat themselves; instead they strive to constantly reinvent. From Friedrich Nietzsche to Søren Kierkegaard, Jean Baudrillard, Walter Benjamin, Mark Fisher, Frantz Fanon, Robert Hughes, and Amia Srinivasan, modern thinkers have dwelled extensively on the all-pervasive pacifying powers of unwitting repetitiveness. The shock of the new quickly melts into the air.

Move is among bloc’s latest environmental concessions to farmers as protests continue across Europe

The European Commission is shelving plans to cut pesticide use and is taking the pressure off agriculture in its latest emissions recommendations, as farmers around Europe continue protests demanding higher prices for their products and an easing of EU environment rules.

The original proposal to halve chemical pesticide use in the EU by the end of the decade – part of the EU’s green transition – “has become a symbol of polarisation”, said the commission president, Ursula von der Leyen. She added that she would ask the commission to withdraw the proposal.

Proposal is part of European Commission’s aim to become world’s first climate-neutral continent

The EU aims to slash its net greenhouse gas pollution by 90% by 2040 as part of its push to become the world’s first climate-neutral continent, the European Commission has announced before elections in June.

Under a landmark proposal laid out by its executive body on Tuesday, the bloc will have to pump 90% less planet-heating gas into the air by 2040 than it did in 1990, a figure which includes the carbon it removes from the atmosphere.

Parisians have voted to triple parking charges for these behemoths. Let that be the start of a much wider crackdown

Paris has developed a taste for better city living. Its vote to begin pricing sports utility vehicles (SUVs) off its streets by tripling parking charges is part of a diet for reversing autobesity – the trend by car manufacturers towards larger, more dangerous and polluting cars.

It’s not difficult to see what has driven Parisians’ ire: the reasons to dislike SUVs form a tailback so long it’s hard to see the front of the queue.

Andrew Simms is an author, co-director of the New Weather Institute, coordinator of the Badvertising campaign and the Rapid Transition Alliance, assistant director of Scientists for Global Responsibility and a research associate at the University of Sussex