Diplomats say de-escalation talks continue as Trump vows retaliation over US soldier deaths

• Middle East crisis live – latest updates

The US military said it has launched its 10th consecutive round of strikes on Iran to force the reopening of the strait of Hormuz.

Earlier on Monday, Iran’s president said the country is in a “full-scale war” after the US expanded its aerial campaign and Tehran struck Washington’s Gulf allies, even as diplomats said talks to de-escalate were continuing.

From Nevada to Manchester, developers are trialling innovative solutions to clean energy’s biggest challenge

In the deserts of the United Arab Emirates a sprawling clean energy project, stretching across an area roughly the size of 12,600 football fields, will play host to a breakthrough allowing solar energy to power the equivalent of half a million homes through the night.

The Gulf state has been steadily combining 5.2GW of solar power capacity with 19GWh of battery storage to create the largest battery scheme in the world.

Designers say that as well as offering a degree of protection from surveillance, their clothes make a powerful fashion statement about the importance of privacy

As facial recognition technology is rolled out across Britain’s public spaces, a new generation of designers say privacy could be the next big fashion trend.

Companies have started incorporating “adversarial patterns” in their garments – carefully designed arrangements of shapes, colours and repeated motifs said to exploit weaknesses in some computer vision systems.

Since 2017, Iason Gabriel has worked at the tech giant, trying to anticipate – and think through – the impact of AI. But as commercial and geopolitical pressures escalate, can ethicists make any difference?

By Robert P Baird. Read by Simon Darwen

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Psychologist Candice Odgers has studied adolescent mental health for 25 years. She fears the current debate around smartphones obscures some of the biggest issues facing teenagers – from the impact of Covid to the health of their adult caregivers

The quickest way to make being online safer for children and teens would be to kick all adult men off the internet, the Canadian psychologist Candice Odgers believes. Men are the biggest perpetrators of sextortion and most likely to spread misinformation, she says.

Odgers is not recommending this as a policy for governments to adopt: “That would be crazy, right? It would be unfair.” But she is on a drive to puncture the prevailing narrative that the best way to address online harms is a social media ban for teenagers.

Whistleblower suggests internal security services deployed spyware from 2017 against key domestic and foreign targets

A former member of Morocco’s domestic intelligence service has helped to provide an unprecedented insight into how the north African state used hacking software – including Pegasus spyware – to target journalists, human rights defenders, French politicians and Spanish cabinet ministers and police officers.

Pegasus, which is manufactured by the Israel-based NSO Group, allows its operator to access everything on a target’s mobile phone, including emails, text messages and photographs. It can also activate the phone’s recorder and camera, turning it into a listening device.

Star Wars director calls AI technology ‘the future’ of film-making and says ‘there’s nothing you can do about it’

The Star Wars director, George Lucas, has added his voice to the growing chorus of film-makers receptive to the rising use of AI tools in moviemaking.

Speaking in an interview with A Rabbit’s Foot, Lucas, 82, said: “Artificial intelligence means it’s much easier for us to make movies.”

Researchers on Beaver Island, in Lake Michigan, are trying to find a more reliable form of power using local resources

Beaver Island sits in the middle of the northernmost end of Lake Michigan, about 70 miles from the maritime border with Canada. The forested island, just a little bigger than San Francisco in size, is a popular summer destination for tourists and home to about 600 permanent residents. Getting there requires a boat or plane ride.

Getting electricity to the island is not as easy. Power comes from mainland Michigan through cables that cross roughly 30 miles of lake bed. Outages are common during extreme weather, or when there are problems with the sensitive wires. The devastating ice storm that walloped the state last year knocked out power to the island for weeks.

Report finds widespread overbidding as rapid AI growth generates increased wealth in city where housing is scarce

San Francisco’s AI boom has buyers spending unprecedented amounts of money on homes – much more than sellers are asking for.

A new analysis from real-estate brokerage Compass, found that in the first half of 2026, more than 140 homes in the city sold for at least $1m above their asking price, 44 of them in June alone.

Experts say cuts have hindered the response to DRC’s Ebola outbreak and resulted in ‘significant numbers’ of deaths

Elon Musk has an Ebola problem. SpaceX stock dropped precipitously after its initial public offering, and Tesla faces a wave of lawsuits. But instead of focusing on his companies, Musk has posted frequently on X about the US Agency for International Development (USAID), which he helped dismantle – or, in his words, feed into the woodchipper – last year.

“Elon’s USAID crash-out over the past week has been a thing to behold,” said Jeremy Konyndyk, a former top USAID official who oversaw the agency’s Ebola response in 2014-2015 and the president of Refugees International. “In a way, it’s helpful that Elon is doing this, because it’s putting attention back on the issue of what he did last year.”

Large-scale datacentre projects around the world are being challenged or cancelled, as infrastructure’s energy demands ramp up

Datacentre planning proposals face all kinds of hurdles, from securing energy supply to high construction costs. But the 2,000 acre Prince William Digital Gateway site in the US state of Virginia had another problem: its proximity to a Civil War battlefield.

“If the development is allowed to proceed, the solemn nature of this historic site would become marred by sitting in the shadow of the monstrous datacentres, along with their associated electrical infrastructure,” said one legal brief against the plans.

The scientific consensus is that burning fossil fuels drives the climate crisis, yet the world’s biggest oil companies are planning to increase production

As the world swelters in ever more dangerous heat, why are oil companies being allowed to turn up the gas instead of paying for the consequences of their greed?

That ought to be the question on everyone’s minds amid baking heat domes over much of the northern hemisphere, temperature records being smashed day after day, children dying in locked cars, hospitals filling with heatstroke victims and emergency services tackling wildfires.

Villagers in Awoye in the Niger Delta say the ongoing pollution is causing sickness and environmental destruction, while pleas for help go unanswered

Perched on a narrow hospital cot across from her son, Bodunwa Orugbemi can hear the distant Atlantic Ocean and smell the stench of crude oil on the air drifting in from the shore. For days, her 21-year-old son has been lying in this hospital in the Niger Delta, swallowing small spoonfuls of food without being able to speak.

Seventy‑year‑old Orugbemi says Ijadopin started coughing one evening in May, inside their small wooden home in Awoye on Nigeria’s Atlantic coastline. After a few days his cough intensified, then he developed a skin irritation, followed by difficulty breathing.

Workers proud of their efforts to grow renewable energy say US president pursuing ‘personal vendetta’ at their expense

Donald Trump has blamed everything – from “national security” issues, the deaths of birds and whales, and cancer – in his decades-long campaign against windfarms. But as the Trump administration continues to undermine the industry, what worries workers most are their jobs.

Since taking office for a second term, Trump has issued an executive order aiming to halt all wind-energy leases and permits, attempted to issue stop-work orders on wind projects under construction, and paid more than $2.6bn in settlements to buy out wind energy leases. And hundreds of workers have been affected.

Port expansion and protections for whales part of BC and Alberta plan to expand country’s presence overseas

The governments of Canada and the province of Alberta will move forward on a major new oil pipeline after the pair announced a plan to ease concerns of British Columbia and First Nations on the Pacific coast.

Canada’s prime minister, Mark Carney, shuttled between British Columbia and Alberta on Thursday to announce more than C$150bn in new investments in both provinces, part of a broader project of reducing trade with the United States and expanding his country’s presence in overseas markets.

Readers respond to an article about Erin Brockovich’s battle against datacentres and voice their fears for the environment

What are the benefits obtained from AI’s massive use of electricity and water (‘We’re up against forces that have all the money in the world’: Erin Brockovich on her battle against AI datacentres, 29 June)? Analysis shows that the top four uses of AI are “therapy/companionship”, “technical assistance and troubleshooting”, “fun and nonsense”, and “fan fiction and storytelling”.

AI use for therapy, and due to loneliness, appears not to reduce loneliness. AI provides affirmation, but at the expense of reducing the social skills needed to interact in the real world. Teachers report that students’ use of AI reduces their capacity for critical thinking.

Photographer Shane Hynan explores the tension between the central role peat bogs play in Irish life and their wider environmental impact

“You can read Ireland’s history in the boglands. They hold millennia in their layers,” says photographer Shane Hynan of his project, Beofhód (meaning Beneath in English).

The boglands, known as portachs in Irish, cover roughly 1.2m to 1.5m hectares or about 14% to 17% of the country’s total land area. The raised bogs of the Irish Midlands are made of peat that forms at a rate of 1mm a year (0.04in) in low-lying, poorly drained basins or former lakes. As the historical geographer Kevin Whelan observes in the Atlas of the Irish Rural Landscape, “the bog has been etched as deeply into the human as into the physical record in Ireland – to an extent unrivalled elsewhere.”

Eddie and Con footing turf for domestic use, Knockirr Bog, County Kildare, 2022.

Apart from effort to electrify, there were geopolitical tensions around climate science and the 1.5C goal at pre-Cop31 climate talks

Electrifying the world – with electric vehicles, electric heating and cooling, and modernised heavy industry – could be the next biggest step towards phasing out fossil fuels, replacing the 80% of global energy that still comes from hydrocarbons. As using electrical energy is much more efficient than combustion, the move would save billions of dollars for consumers and businesses – global energy demand could be halved, according to one estimate.

For decades, electrification has been a nerdish backwater of global climate action. But in the last two weeks, at preparatory talks in Bonn before the forthcoming UN Cop31 climate summit, the subject finally took centre stage.

Thinktank says decoupling electricity from gas prices has also helped shield Spain from hikes caused by Iran war

Spanish households save €10 a month on electricity bills because of wind turbines and solar panels installed in the last five years, a report has found.

Typical energy bills would be 19% more expensive if electricity costs were still as tightly coupled to gas prices as in 2021, according to Ember, a climate thinktank. It found Spain’s “strategic” expansion of renewables since Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022 has shielded Spanish households from the latest rises in fossil fuel prices caused by the Iran war.

Climate minister Chris Bowen says country must prepare for changing world and can play bigger role in reducing emissions

Australia will find exporting fossil fuels increasingly difficult but can switch to exporting clean energy products, the president of the next UN climate negotiations has declared.

Speaking at a climate conference in Bonn, Germany, Chris Bowen, Australia’s minister for climate change and energy, argued his country had led the global push to “transition away from fossil fuels” – based on the rapid growth of renewable energy and batteries in its domestic power grids – and that its economy could manage the switch.