At 10:40 a.m. on a day in January, two powerful beams of light from the Svalbard governor's boat pierced the complete darkness of the mountain-fringed fjord it was sailing. It was carrying the children's choir from this remote village's church to visit an even more isolated Arctic outpost.

That's polar night in this Norwegian archipelago – so close to the North Pole the sun is at least six degrees below the horizon from mid-November through the end of January.

Long-haul carrier Emirates successfully flew a Boeing 777 on a test flight Monday with one engine entirely powered by so-called sustainable aviation fuel. This comes as carriers worldwide try to lessen their carbon footprint.

Flight No. EK2646 flew for just under an hour over the coastline of the United Arab Emirates, after taking off from Dubai International Airport, the world's busiest for international travel, and heading out into the Persian Gulf before circling back to land. The fuel powered one of the Boeing's two General Electric Co. engines, with the other running on conventional jet fuel for safety.

Vultures scavenge for dead animals along a river turned sewer conduit in Kenya's capital Nairobi. Its waters turn from clear to black as it traverses informal settlements and industrial hubs.

The river and its tributaries cross Kibera, known as Africa's largest slum with close to 200,000 residents, and other informal settlements. It skirts dozens of factories that manufacture textiles, liquor and building materials. Many have been accused by environmentalists of discharging raw sewage and other pollutants like oil, plastic and glass into the water.

On Idit Silman's first day as Israel's new environmental protection minister, she handed out soft drinks in disposable plastic cups to hospital patients.

The gesture held deep symbolic meaning in Israel, where soft drinks and single-use cups, plates and cutlery have become weapons in a culture war between the country's secular Jewish majority and the smaller but politically powerful religious minority.

Hundreds of climate and environmental groups from around the world released a letter that decried the nomination of an oil executive to oversee the United Nations climate negotiations at COP28 this year.

Earlier this month, the United Arab Emirates, host of the U.N. climate talks this year, named Sultan al-Jaber to the presidency of the conference Nov. 30 to Dec. 12. The company he runs as chief executive, the Abu Dhabi National Oil Co., produces 4 million barrels of crude oil per day and hopes to expand to 5 million daily by the end of the decade.

A year after the most destructive wildfire in the state's history scorched nearly 1,100 homes, Colorado lawmakers are considering joining other Western states by adopting artificial intelligence in the hopes of detecting blazes before they burn out of control.

A Colorado Senate committee on Thursday unanimously voted to move forward a bill to create a $2 million pilot program that would station cameras on mountaintops, and use artificial intelligence to monitor the footage and help detect early signs of a wildfire. The bill will move to the state Senate Appropriations Committee next.

Weeks of historic rainfall in California won't be enough to end a severe drought, but it will provide public water agencies serving 27 million people with much more water than the suppliers had been told to expect a month ago, state officials announced.

The Department of Water Resources said public water agencies will now get 30% of what they had asked for, up from the 5% officials had previously announced in December. That's because for the first three weeks of January nine atmospheric rivers dumped an estimated 32 trillion gallons of rain and snow on California. It was enough water to increase storage in the state's two largest reservoirs by a combined 66%.

The warm glow of Svalbard Kirke's lights gleams on the mountain slope from where the church stands over this remote Norwegian Arctic village, cloaked in the polar night's constant darkness.

A century after it was founded to minister to the coal miners who settled Longyearbyen, the Lutheran house of faith is open 24/7, serving as a beacon for the community navigating a drastic change in its identity.

A winter storm that brought severe weather to the Gulf Coast and wintry precipitation to the north was headed east Wednesday, a day after tornadoes caused widespread damage in the Houston area and injured three people in Louisiana.

On Tuesday, forecasters issued a rare tornado emergency for the Houston area as the storm system moved through the heavily populated area. Substantial damage was reported in cities east of Houston, but there were no reports of injuries.

Hundreds of dolphins are washing up on France's Atlantic coast and thousands more are believed killed in fishermen's nets each year, as environmentalists and Brussels pressure the government to protect the marine mammals.

On Wednesday, Allain Bougrain-Dubourg, head of the League for the Protection of Birds (LPO), said he would write to President Emmanuel Macron that "the time has come to do our utmost to save dolphins from mistreatment or even extinction.