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Thank you for fighting for safe food, clean water, and a livable climate! The Trump administration has made it clear that it doesn’t care about the health of our communities or our environment. That’s why we need to come together to protect each other and the places we love and call home. We know we have our work cut out for us. But thanks to dedicated people like you — who build up our people power and strengthen our movement — we will make progress and defend our livable future. Here are some of the recent protections for our food, water, and climate you made possible. Milestones to Celebrate 1. Defeated Data Center Proposals in New Jersey, California, and Pennsylvania Across the country, public opposition to water-guzzling, energy-hungry, and noise-polluting AI data centers is growing. People of all walks of life, from rural to urban communities, are reaching out to Food & Water Watch to help them fight — and stop — data centers from threatening their hometowns. From this February to May alone, together we’ve helped stop data centers in Montour County, East Whiteland, and East Vincent, Pennsylvania, New Brunswick, New Jersey, and Monterey Park, California. In each of...

The exponential growth of Intelligent Data Networks (IDNs) complex, dynamic systems encompassing IoT ecosystems, social networks, and cyber physical infrastructures–has exposed significant limitations in current analytical methodologies. Traditional approaches remain fundamentally siloed, treating structural analysis and predictive forecasting as distinct challenges addressed by specialized models. This artificial separation restricts holistic understanding and impedes the extraction of synergistic insights from network data. This paper introduces NetStructPred, a novel, unified machine learning framework explicitly designed for the joint structural and predictive analysis of heterogeneous, temporal IDNs. The framework’s architecture integrates a meta-path guided heterogeneous graph encoder, a continuous-time memory-augmented transformer for temporal dynamics, and a multi-task learning core with a novel cross-task feedback mechanism. This design fosters the learning of unified representations that simultaneously encode topological properties, semantic relationships, and evolutionary patterns. Through comprehensive experimentation across six diverse real-world datasets–spanning academic (DBLP, Aminer), social (Wikipedia, Reddit), transportation (METR-LA), and cybersecurity (IoT-23) domains–we demonstrate that NetStructPred achieves state-of-the-art or competitive performance in both structural and predictive tasks. The framework outperformed twelve specialized baseline models, attaining a 0.742 Normalized Mutual Information score for community detection on DBLP while maintaining a 0.924 AUC-ROC for link prediction, and achieving a traffic forecasting MAE of 2.84 mph...

WSJ reports that OpenAI may slash prices of its AI services As competition with Anthropic heats up, and customers balk at the cost of using its products, OpenAI is reportedly considering whether to slash the fees charged for its AI tokens. A report in the Wall Street Journal late Wednesday said OpenAI's chief executive officer Sam Altman is urgently exploring options to lure corporate customers away from its main competitor Anthropic. The obvious strategy is to make its services cheaper. AI service providers use tokens as a unit of measurement when they bill corporates for their products, and in recent weeks there have been signs of a growing discomfort among users at the high cost. Microsoft began cancelling some of its Claude licenses from Anthropic, Amazon (AMZN) removed its AI leaderboard as concerns mounted that employees were 'tokenmaxxing' (using them performatively) and Uber's chief operating officer also questioned the value of its AI expenditure. Under pressure to raise funding and meet targets for its public listing later this year, Altman has acknowledged that the rising cost of its AI product suite was becoming a "huge issue." Competition from rival Anthropic, whose Claude coding tool has been immensely successful since its...

Pennsylvania has become a hot spot for data center proposals and public backlash about where to build them. I’m a law professor and executive director of Penn State’s Center for Energy Law and Policy. I’m also a native of Archbald, a borough of 7,500 residents in the Lackawanna Valley in northeastern Pennsylvania. My hometown has drawn national attention because of proposals for multiple data centers that would cover 14% of its area. Because of my professional and personal interest in data centers, I have been researching local responses to data center proposals across Pennsylvania. I’ve learned there are a host of considerations that local officials and citizens are taking into account when they evaluate data center proposals. Pros and cons of big data centers At its most basic, a data center is a building that houses and runs large computer systems. Because data centers tend to be large developments, hosting one can provide a community more tax revenue. This revenue comes from increased property tax assessments as well as newly created jobs. However, these job are mostly limited to the construction phase. One estimate suggests a moderately large data center would create about 15-30 long-term jobs. On the other hand,...

Defra farming minister Dame Angela Eagle visited Riverford’s organic farm and packing facility at Sacrewell, near Peterborough, as talks continue on an Organic Action Plan for England. The visit on 10 June brought together representatives from Riverford, the Soil Association and the English Organic Forum (EOF) to discuss expanding organic production, strengthening domestic supply chains and meeting rising consumer demand for organic food. The meeting comes as the UK organic market continues its long-term growth, reaching £3.9bn in 2025, according to the Soil Association’s Organic Market Report. See also: Organic sector growth highlights policy divide across UK The sector recorded its 14th consecutive year of growth, with sales rising 4.2% year on year. However, organic farmland in England remains static at around 3%, with much of the growing demand being met through imports. Speaking during the visit, Dame Angela said: “As demand for our organic produce continues to grow here and abroad, we are working with the sector to develop an Organic Action Plan for England – unlocking barriers to growth, strengthening domestic supply chains and giving consumers greater choice of home-grown food.” She added: “Yesterday’s visit was a valuable opportunity to see first-hand how organic farmers are delivering for...

While many economists and policymakers place great emphasis on doom loops and polycrises, positive feedback cycles or “boom loops” can also be fostered to create long-term economic momentum. Boom loops do not emerge automatically and governments can step in to help build successive waves of industrial growth and technological advancement, as seen in South Korea. Decarbonization can be reframed as a boom loop. Investments in clean technologies can drive innovation, lower costs, strengthen competitiveness, create jobs and improve energy, environmental and economic security. At this year's World Economic Forum Annual Meeting in Davos, Switzerland, one recurring theme was that the global economy is caught in a series of self-reinforcing crises. Economist Eswar Prasad describes this dynamic as a “doom loop” – a negative feedback cycle in which economic, domestic political and geopolitical dynamics amplify and reinforce each other in destabilizing ways. Closely related is the idea of “polycrisis,” popularized by historian Adam Tooze: the notion that overlapping shocks, such as climate instability, pandemics, extreme inequality and democratic erosion, interact to amplify risk and uncertainty. There is no doubt that today's challenges are deeply interconnected. But as scholars such as Yuen Yuen Ang have argued, the way we frame these challenges...

Welcome to Carbon Brief’s China Briefing. China Briefing handpicks and explains the most important climate and energy stories from China over the past fortnight. Subscribe for free here. Key developments Trade tensions intensify AUTHORITY TO RETALIATE: China has issued “sweeping” new rules that increase “controls over the overseas transfer of domestic technology”, while also giving the government “explicit” authority to retaliate against governments that restrict Chinese investments, reported finance news outlet Caixin. The rules are a “shield for Chinese enterprises”, argued an editorial in the state-run newspaper China Daily, as well as a way to “protect” China’s “development interests”. Cosimo Ries, an analyst at Trivium China, told Carbon Brief that protecting China’s lead in cleantech manufacturing is one of the aims of the regulations. He said that language around restrictive foreign actions is, in his view, “clearly designed as a response” to the EU’s Industrial Accelerator Act. Ries added that the government is “increasingly working to prevent Chinese IP from being forcefully appropriated or handed away by its own companies seeking market access abroad”. COMMISSIONERS MEET: The rules come as the EU debates plans to “broaden the use of its trade defences” to protect industries from what the EU industry...

Rising seas could turn mangroves from carbon-storing climate allies into unexpected carbon emitters. Mangroves are among the most effective natural systems for capturing and storing carbon, but new research suggests that rising sea levels could significantly reduce that benefit and may even cause these coastal forests to release carbon in the future. Made up of salt-tolerant plants that thrive along coastlines, mangroves occupy less than 1% of Earth’s surface. Despite their relatively small footprint, they hold roughly 15% of all carbon stored in the ocean, with most of that carbon locked away in the soils beneath them. Because of this remarkable capacity, mangroves play an important role in efforts to slow climate change. Earlier studies have suggested that higher sea levels might actually increase carbon storage in mangrove ecosystems. However, new findings indicate the overall picture may be far more complex. New Model Examines Entire Mangrove Forests Researchers led by the University of Exeter, working with collaborators in Colombia and the United States, created a new modeling approach to explore how rising seas could affect carbon storage across whole mangrove forests rather than at individual locations. Their analysis found that while some areas may temporarily accumulate more carbon as sea...

As offshore wind farms expand rapidly in the global renewable energy transition, scientists are studying how these large marine infrastructure projects affect ecosystems beneath the waves. Research from Wageningen University & Research in the Netherlands suggests that offshore wind may bring both risks and benefits for sharks and rays, known collectively as Elasmobranchii, which are highly sensitive to electromagnetic fields (EMFs). A six-year project called “Elasmopower” examined how EMFs from subsea power cables in offshore wind farms affect bottom-dwelling sharks and rays. These species depend on natural electric and magnetic fields for key behaviours such as navigation, prey detection, habitat use and long-distance movement, particularly in low-visibility environments. The studies conducted as part of the Elasmopower project have been published in four papers, with three additional papers currently undergoing peer review. Sharks and rays have specialised electroreceptors called ampullae of Lorenzini. The jelly-filled sensory canals around the head and snout can detect even extremely weak EMFs from prey and predators, water movement, and the Earth’s geomagnetic field, Erwin Winter, a scientist at Wageningen, told Mongabay. This system is central to hunting and orientation, making Elasmobranchii especially relevant for studying EMF exposure from offshore energy infrastructure, Winter added. During a presentation...

The new regulation requires carbon footprint labelling, recycled-content quotas, and other measures that will be phased in gradually, while the Passport itself requires all battery parts and products to feature QR code labelling to denote their origin. The Battery Passport has also been touted as a means to strengthen the supply chain of the European battery energy storage system (BESS) sector by providing a more robust database of material and component origin and performance. Hadi Moztarzadeh, head of technology trends at the Advanced Propulsion Centre UK, who delivered a presentation on the passport in the hours after Pacner’s panel discussion, said that the upcoming introduction of the Battery Passport means “the era of ‘we’ll figure out battery compliance later’ is over”. However, Pacner acknowledged that there have been challenges involved in its implementation. “If everyone calculates the carbon footprint of their battery on a slightly different basis, which is right now the case as there is no standardised basis set, from when they have to go live with their battery passport, we [will] have different kinds of calculations for the carbon footprint,” he explained, using the example of to illustrate a lack of standardisation across the Battery Passport programme. “Then,...