CHAGRIN FALLS, Ohio (AP) — A significant share of U.S. greenhouse gas emissions comes from heating, cooling and powering homes — about 15%, according to one estimate by the Environmental Protection Agency. So if you want to reduce your carbon footprint, the home is an effective place to start. There are so many factors involved in...

It turns out many Americans aren’t great at identifying which personal decisions contribute most to climate change. A study recently published by the National Academy of Sciences found that when asked to rank actions, such as swapping a car that uses gasoline for an electric one, carpooling or reducing food waste, participants were...

It was six months ago that Selin Celikoyar bought her last tampon and switched to a reusable menstrual disc. “I had already been wary of tampons from an environmental perspective and also from a biological perspective. I felt that they were very wasteful and expensive to consistently keep buying,” she said. Americans go through 19...

Federal incentives for home energy improvements are running out at the end of the year, so it’s decision time for anyone who has been thinking about a heat pump. The right decision can depend on where you live, how much you have to spend and how deeply you want to cut emissions. But the payoff can be significant. Switching to a hea...

One way to be climate-friendly: Shop sustainably. But figuring out which products count as “sustainable” can be hard, especially when buying online. How to shop climate-friendly: Experts explain how to find transparent brands meeting third-party standards and quantifying environmental impact. As ordering with a computer or phone be...

Marissa Loewen first started using artificial intelligence in 2014 as a project management tool. She has autism and ADHD and said it helped immensely with organizing her thoughts. “We try to use it conscientiously though because we do realize that there is an impact on the environment,” she said. Her personal AI use isn’t unique an...

Having air conditioning at home is a luxury that keeps people comfortable during the hottest months of the year, and it’s debated whether the AC should stay blasting or be turned off when people head to work during the day. Some swear that turning off the AC when they’re gone for a few hours is the most energy-efficient, cost-savin...

The lights are off, the house is quiet and nothing seems to be running. But electricity is silently flowing through the plugs in your home. This hidden drain is known as phantom energy. Also called vampire energy, the wasted electricity comes from leaving devices plugged in when they’re not in use. That could range from household i...

This idea of a carbon footprint comes up a lot in news coverage about personal climate impact. The concept is simple: It includes anything that you add to planet-warming emissions, ranging from the gas consumed by your car to the energy required to produce the food you eat. Reducing your carbon footprint means contributing less of...

LITTLETON, Colo. (AP) — When Lena Astilli first bought her home outside of Denver, she had no interest in matching the wall-to-wall green lawns that dominated her block. She wanted native plants — the kind she remembered and loved as a child in New Mexico, that require far less water and have far more to offer insects and birds tha...

Tax incentives that saved U.S. residents thousands of dollars on home efficiency upgrades, clean energy installations and electric vehicles are expiring this year. That means people who want to take advantage of them before they disappear have to act quickly. “There is still time, but the clock is ticking,” said Zach Pierce, head o...

LAS DELICIAS, Colombia (AP) — Adriana Pazu wiped away tears as she remembered a colleague who was shot dead earlier this year by an armed dissident group for defending their land. Pazu, an Indigenous authority from the Nasa territory of San Francisco, Toribío, was attending an Indigenous youth assembly this week in Las Delicias, Ca...

CALOTO, Colombia (AP) — Indigenous Nasa children are gently splashed with water using a leafy branch — a ritual meant to protect them and symbolically “open the path” — before setting off with wooden signs they had painted with messages like “We were born to protect the environment” and “Peace, please.” Wearing protective gloves, t...

CALDONO, Colombia (AP) — When the armed groups that operate in Colombia’s drug trade need new recruits, they are increasingly turning to the children of the regions where they are active. Confronting the problem often falls to Indigenous groups, who blame the government for doing too little to stop it. In Cauca, an impoverished dep...

CALDONO, Colombia (AP) — When Patricia Elago Zetty’s 13-year-old son went missing in Colombia’s conflict-ridden southwest, she didn’t hesitate. Elago and five fellow members of the Indigenous Guard trekked across mountainous terrain to confront the guerrillas they suspected of taking her son and another teenager to bolster their ra...

GALENA, Alaska (AP) — Eric Huntington built his dream cabin nestled in the wilderness of central Alaska, eventually raising two daughters there. But over the years, he learned that living in this quiet, remote village came with a hefty cost. Every year, the Huntington family spent about $7,000 on diesel to heat the cabin during bon...

After the Flint water crisis, Michigan became a national leader on safe drinking water, requiring the removal of lead pipes and the reduction of harmful “forever chemicals” years before the federal government acted. But the state has a blind spot when it comes to the hundreds of thousands of people who live in its mobile home parks...

More than 50 years after the Safe Drinking Water Act was passed to assure Americans of safe water, millions of people living in mobile home parks can’t always count on those basic protections. The Associated Press examined an Environmental Protection Agency database on violations by water systems across the country, ranging from th...

The worst water Colt Smith has seen in 14 years with Utah’s Division of Drinking Water was at a mobile home park, where residents had been drinking it for years before state officials discovered the contamination. The well water carried cancer-causing arsenic as much as 10 times the federal limit. Smith had to put the rural park un...

BENGALURU, India (AP) — Sunil Kumar rowed his small boat, moving a few feet at a time, while he spread a fishing net across the weeds floating like a green carpet on Doddajala Lake. The ends of the net were then carried ashore and tied to a tractor and an earthmover, which pulled the bundled plants toward laborers ready to drag the...

Pooja Tilvawala knows it’s a gamble to use more than $46,000 of her own savings to help young people get to the United Nations climate summit in Brazil. But she thinks it’s a necessary one. “There’s always a huge number of fossil fuel company representatives there. And who’s going to be there to combat those voices and those negoti...

NEW YORK (AP) — Some countries’ leaders are watching rising seas threaten to swallow their homes. Others are watching their citizens die in floods, hurricanes and heat waves, all exacerbated by climate change. But the world U.S. President Donald Trump described in his speech at the United Nations General Assembly on Tuesday didn’t...

WOODFIN, N.C. (AP) — Bracing himself against the current in waist-deep water, Clancy Loorham wrestles a broken length of PVC pipe from the rocky bottom of the French Broad River and peers inside. “I got a catfish in the pipe,” the 27-year-old with wispy beard and mustache shouted to fellow cleanup workers floating nearby in rafts,...

OLD FORT, N.C. (AP) — Morning mist is still burning off the surrounding mountains when they appear: Small groups of helmeted riders on one-wheeled, skateboard-like contraptions, navigating the pitched streets, past the 30-foot granite Arrowhead Monument on the town square. They are among the 400 or so people converging on this Blue...

AUSTIN, Texas (AP) — Police named a dead man Friday as a new suspect in the 1991 unsolved killings of four teenage girls at an Austin yogurt shop, saying DNA evidence led to a “significant breakthrough” in the brutal crime that has haunted Texas’ capital and stumped investigators for decades. In a statement, Austin police said DNA...

GLOBE, Ariz. (AP) — Four people died after heavy rain caused flooding in Arizona, including three in a rural 19th-century mining town where floodwaters on Friday forced people to seek safety on rooftops and washed out a propane distributorship, scattering about 1,000 tanks downtown. About 2.5 inches (6.4 centimeters) of rain fell i...

AUSTIN, Texas (AP) — For years, the unsolved killings of four teenage girls in an Austin yogurt shop in 1991 haunted investigators in the Texas capital. Two men were charged and convicted, only to have DNA evidence exonerate them, leaving the brutal deaths -- in which the girls were bound, gagged and shot before the building was se...

SALT LAKE CITY (AP) — Russell M. Nelson, the oldest-ever president of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, died Saturday night at the age of 101, church officials announced. Nelson died at his home in Salt Lake City, the church announced. Nelson, a former heart surgeon, spent four decades in the highest levels of church...

FT. LAUDERDALE, Fla. (AP) — Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis has set an execution date for a 65-year-old man who sexually battered and killed his next-door neighbor in 1998. Norman Mearle Grim Jr. was convicted in the death of Cynthia Campbell. She was reported missing, and her body was later found off the Pensacola Bay Bridge by a fisher...

ATLANTA (AP) — A federal appeals court has reversed previous court rulings that found a Georgia county illegally discriminated against a sheriff’s deputy by failing to pay for her gender-affirming surgery. In its ruling Tuesday, the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals found in an 8-5 decision that Houston County’s policy of denying...

Utah Gov. Spencer Cox had consistently called for civility in a polarized country where it feels increasingly rare. And then the political violence came to his own backyard. Hours after conservative influencer Charlie Kirk was gunned down at Utah Valley University, with partisan reflexes kicking into gear, the Republican stood befo...

ORLANDO, Fla. (AP) — An Orlando restaurateur on Monday turned over 49 parking spots outside her eatery for artists to color as a protest against a state mandate removing rainbow-colored crosswalks and other art on Florida streets, including one outside the LGBTQ-friendly nightclub where 49 people were killed in 2016. Se7en Bites ow...

A federal appeals court says a Vermont Christian school can participate in the state’s sports league, overturning a previous ruling that upheld a ban on the school after it forfeited a high school girls basketball game against a team with a transgender athlete. In a Sept. 9 ruling, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit g...

Republican Texas Gov. Greg Abbott has signed a first-of-its-kind law that lets anyone sue prescribers and others responsible for getting abortion pills into the state. Supporters are heralding the law, which Abbott signed Wednesday, as a way to enforce an existing ban. Abortion-rights advocates are bashing the law, saying it has th...

SPRINGFIELD, Ill. (AP) — A Catholic bishop’s opposition to the Archdiocese of Chicago’s plans to honor Sen. Dick Durbin despite the powerful politician’s support of abortion rights has revived a decades-old struggle between church teaching and political reality. Cardinal Blase Cupich of Chicago announced last week that the archdioc...

JEFFERSON CITY, Mo. (AP) — A Missouri judge has struck down a ballot summary for an anti-abortion amendment backed by Republican state lawmakers while concluding that it presented an unfair and insufficient description to voters. Cole County Circuit Judge Daniel Green ruled Friday that the ballot summary must be rewritten, but he r...

MIAMI (AP) — Tropical Storm Humberto formed in the Atlantic Ocean on Wednesday at the same time Hurricane Gabrielle was racing across the ocean toward the Azores islands, forecasters said. A hurricane warning was in effect for the volcanic archipelago which could experience dangerous conditions from Gabrielle as early as Thursday,...

MIAMI (AP) — The former Hurricane Gabrielle was expected to bring hurricane conditions including heavy rain, a storm surge and large, destructive waves to the Azores islands starting Thursday, despite being downgraded to a post-tropical cyclone, forecasters said. The National Hurricane Center declared Gabrielle post-tropical, a cha...

MIAMI (AP) — Dangerous tropical weather brewed Friday in the Atlantic Ocean with Humberto intensifying into a powerful Category 4 hurricane and a system forecasters dubbed “Potential Tropical Cyclone Nine” striking the Caribbean and taking aim at the Southeast United States. Hurricane Humberto had maximum sustained winds of 145 mph...

DES MOINES, Iowa (AP) — Federal immigration agents targeted the well-liked leader of Iowa’s largest school district in a traffic stop Friday and arrested him after he fled into the woods, leaving educators and community members stunned. U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement said Des Moines Public School Superintendent Ian Robert...

WHY THIS MATTERS: With Israel saying it will soon move to seize Gaza City, Palestinian residents are left with an impossible choice. They can leave the city, but they worry that could mean never returning. Or they can stay behind, which they fear could be deadly. DEIR AL-BALAH, Gaza Strip (AP) — As artillery and bombs pound around...

DEIR AL-BALAH, Gaza Strip (AP) — More than 64,000 Palestinians have been killed in the nearly two-year war in the Gaza Strip, local health officials said Thursday, as Hamas and Israel reiterated their incompatible demands for ending the fighting sparked by the militant group’s 2023 attack. Israeli strikes killed 28 people, mostly w...

TEL AVIV, Israel (AP) — Gaza’s Nasser Hospital became a death trap for rescue workers, journalists and others last week when it was targeted by Israeli forces in an attack that has galvanized global anger. Associated Press reporting raises serious questions about Israel’s rationale for the attack and the way it was carried out. Isr...

DUBAI, United Arab Emirates (AP) — A desert-like patch of sand and scrawny trees in the largest cemetery in Iran’s capital has been the final resting place for decades for some of the thousands killed in the mass executions that followed Iran’s 1979 Islamic Revolution. Now, Lot 41 at the sprawling Behesht-e Zahra cemetery in Tehran...

DEIR AL-BALAH, Gaza Strip (AP) — Israel struck and destroyed another high-rise building in Gaza City on Monday after warning residents to evacuate, part of an offensive aimed at taking over the largest Palestinian city. The military said it was targeting Hamas observation posts and bombs placed around the 12-story office building....

DUBAI, United Arab Emirates (AP) — Undersea cable cuts in the Red Sea disrupted internet access in parts of Asia and the Middle East, experts said Sunday, though it wasn’t immediately clear what caused the incident. There has been concern about the cables being targeted in a Red Sea campaign by Yemen’s Houthi rebels, which the rebe...

The tiny, gas-rich Gulf Arab state of Qatar hosts the biggest U.S. military base in the Middle East. It has evacuated tens of thousands of American citizens from Afghanistan. It has been designated a U.S. “major non-NATO ally.” It has even lavished a $400 million jumbo jet on President Donald Trump for use as Air Force One. None of...

DUBAI, United Arab Emirates (AP) — A ship likely cut cables in the Red Sea that disrupted internet access in Africa, Asia and the Middle East, experts said Tuesday, showing the lines’ vulnerability over a year after another incident severed them. The International Cable Protection Committee told The Associated Press that 15 submari...

DOHA, Qatar (AP) — Qatari security forces deployed Wednesday around the site of an Israeli attack the previous day on Hamas’ political leaders who had gathered in the capital of the energy-rich Middle East country to consider a U.S. proposal for a ceasefire in the Gaza Strip. Tuesday’s strike on a building in Doha killed at least s...

TUNIS, Tunisia (AP) — An international activist flotilla seeking to break the Israeli blockade of Gaza said Wednesday it was attacked for a second night in a row when a drone targeted one of its boats that was docked in Tunisian waters. No one was harmed. The Global Sumud Flotilla shared CCTV footage showing people on board the gro...

TEL AVIV, Israel (AP) — As Israel calls up tens of thousands of reservists for its invasion of Gaza City, a growing number of soldiers — and their mothers — are saying no. There are no official figures, but newly formed groups are broadcasting their refusal to serve despite the risk of imprisonment. It’s a new phenomenon in the nea...

NICOSIA, Cyprus (AP) — The European Commission will propose setting up a regional firefighting hub based in Cyprus that could also assist Middle East countries in battling major wildfires, the head of the bloc’s executive arm said Wednesday. European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen said in her annual address to the Europe...

WASHINGTON (AP) — Secretary of State Marco Rubio met Qatar’s prime minister Friday ahead of a visit to Israel this weekend, showing how the Trump administration is trying to balance relations between key Middle East allies days after Israel targeted Hamas leaders in a strike on Doha. Despite tensions between President Donald Trump...

TULKAREM, West Bank (AP) — As Israeli strikes in far-off Qatar and Yemen sparked regional tensions this week, violence surged in the Israeli-occupied West Bank and east Jerusalem. A shooting attack at a Jerusalem bus stop killed six Israelis, and another two were stabbed and wounded in a separate incident. Israeli forces in the Wes...

▶ Follow live updates on Israel’s ground offensive in Gaza JERUSALEM (AP) — Israel launched its offensive in Gaza City on Tuesday, vowing to overwhelm a city already in ruins from nearly two years of war as thousands of Palestinians fled in vehicles strapped with mattresses and other belongings that clogged a coastal road. The oper...

BARCELONA, Spain (AP) — As an alderperson in northwestern Spain, Rosana Prieto tends to the running of her tiny village and is far removed from major cities, often rocked by protests over geopolitical issues. But with one of the world’s biggest cycling races coursing through the bucolic hills nearby, she and hundreds of like-minded...

JERUSALEM (AP) — Israeli troops and tanks pushed deeper into Gaza City on Wednesday as more people fled the devastated area, and strikes cut off phone and internet services, making it harder for Palestinians to summon ambulances during the military’s new offensive. Meanwhile, the Palestinian death toll in the Israel-Hamas war surpa...

KHAN YOUNIS, Gaza Strip (AP) — Exhaustion, despair and anger are grinding away at Ne’man Abu Jarad. Once again, for the 11th time, he and his family have been forced to uproot and move across the Gaza Strip. “It’s a renewal of the torture. We’re not being displaced, we’re dying,” Ne’man said last week as the family packed up their...

PARIS (AP) — A moment of truth: that’s how French President Emmanuel Macron sees the recognition of a Palestinian state by France and other Western nations, with the hope to make it a landmark step in his push for peace in the Middle East as the devastating war in Gaza continues. Weakened and unpopular at home, Macron is more than...

DUBAI, United Arab Emirates (AP) — Pakistan’s defense minister says his nation’s nuclear program “will be made available” to Saudi Arabia if needed under the countries’ new defense pact, marking the first specific acknowledgment that Islamabad had put the kingdom under its nuclear umbrella. Defense Minister Khawaja Mohammad Asif’s...

CAIRO (AP) — Scores of Palestinians, many pushing carts of belongings or carrying their possessions on their backs, fled Gaza City on Saturday as Israel ramped up its offensive, including with strikes that health officials said killed at least 14 people overnight. Later in Israel, thousands joined the families of hostages still bei...

CAIRO (AP) — Israeli strikes in Gaza City and at a refugee camp killed more than 40 people, including 19 women and children, health officials said Sunday, as several European countries and leading U.S. allies moved to recognize a Palestinian state. Health officials at Shifa Hospital, where most of the bodies were brought, said the...

France and Saudi Arabia hope to use this year’s gathering of world leaders at the United Nations General Assembly and the increasingly horrific war in the Gaza Strip to inject new urgency into the quest for a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Those efforts include a new road map for eventual Palestinian stateh...

Israeli forces showed no signs of relenting on their new ground offensive in Gaza City on Monday as world leaders gathered in New York for the United Nations General Assembly and more countries prepared to join the surge of nations recognizing a Palestinian state. Hundreds of thousands have remained in the city, the territory’s lar...

DEIR AL-BALAH, Gaza Strip (AP) — Palestinians across the Gaza Strip and the Israeli-occupied West Bank welcomed news that a flurry of Western countries have recognized a Palestinian state, while expressing doubt the move will improve their dire circumstances. On Monday, France, Andorra, Belgium, Luxembourg, Malta, and Monaco announ...

Explosions shake the walls of the dim basement in Gaza City where Noor Abu Hassira and her three daughters are sheltering. They can’t see much through a small, raised window. But if the sounds of buzzing drones and booming airstrikes are any indication, Israeli forces are getting closer. Abu Hassira is staying behind despite Israel...

UNITED NATIONS (AP) — A day after France led other nations in recognizing Palestinian statehood, the U.N. Security Council once again aired a deep divide between the veto-wielding United States and most of the rest of the world over how to end the war in the Gaza Strip and resolve the Mideast conflict. At a special session to discu...

JERUSALEM (AP) — A drone launched by Yemen’s Houthi rebels wounded 22 people in the southern Israeli city of Eilat on Wednesday, according to medics. It was a rare breach of Israel’s sophisticated missile defenses, which have greatly limited casualties from such attacks. In the Gaza Strip, at least 41 Palestinians were killed by Is...

DEIR AL-BALAH, Gaza Strip (AP) — Israel struck houses and tents in central and southern Gaza Thursday, crushing families inside and killing at least 17 people, including 10 children and three women, local health officials said, as international pressure for a ceasefire continued to grow. On the sidelines of the United Nations Gener...

BEIRUT (AP) — A top Iranian security official called on regional countries Saturday to put their differences aside and cooperate closely as they face what he called “Israel’s conspiracies.” Ali Larijani, head of Iran’s Supreme National Security Council, spoke in Beirut where he arrived earlier Saturday to attend the anniversary of...

BERLIN (AP) — Tens of thousands of protesters took to the streets of the German capital on Saturday in solidarity with Palestinians in Gaza. The demonstrators called for a conclusion to the Israel-Hamas war, shouting slogans like “free, free Palestine,” and they demanded an end to the worsening humanitarian crisis in Gaza. Around 5...

BEIRUT (AP) — Hezbollah suffered one blow after another during its most recent war with Israel, culminating in the killing of the militant group’s longtime leader, Hassan Nasrallah, in massive Israeli airstrikes on a Beirut suburb. The group was weakened militarily and politically. Many of its opponents declared that its days as a...

DEIR AL-BALAH, Gaza Strip (AP) — As Israeli troops bear down, the health care system in Gaza City is coming under fire and being pushed toward collapse. Nearly two weeks into Israel’s latest ground offensive on Gaza’s largest city, two clinics were destroyed by airstrikes, two hospitals shut down after being damaged and others are...

The United Nations reimposed nuclear sanctions on Iran Sunday, putting new pressure on Tehran’s ailing economy as tensions remain high in the wider Mideast over the Israel-Hamas war in the Gaza Strip. Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian and Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi offered a last-ditch effort to try to halt the sanctions at...

DUBAI, United Arab Emirates (AP) — United Nations sanctions on Iran over its nuclear program were reimposed Sunday, putting Tehran under new pressure as tensions remain high in the wider Mideast over the Israel-Hamas war in Gaza. At the U.N. General Assembly this week in New York, Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian and Foreign Min...

UNITED NATIONS (AP) — Saudi Arabia, Egypt, the United Arab Emirates and Oman — all nations in the thick of the unrest that has pervaded the Middle East — confronted the crisis in the region at the annual U.N. gathering of world leaders, with Egypt’s top diplomat warning that the Mideast “is at a point of implosion.” All four countr...

TEL AVIV, Israel (AP) — On the eve of meeting with U.S. President Donald Trump, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Sunday that Israel is working on a new ceasefire plan with the White House, but details are still being sorted out. Netanyahu has come under heavy international pressure to end the war, especially during th...