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.

An independent investigation into logging in the Liberian rainforest found illegal operations "on a significant scale," with multiple missteps or breaches of law by the government agency charged with protecting those forests, according to a copy of the report obtained by The Associated Press.

The report was completed in 2020 but has never been made public despite activists' calls to publish its findings, which included a recommendation that President George Weah order a special inquiry into what went wrong.

On the outskirts of a southern Lebanese village, workers in a pickup truck parked at a nature reserve named after a fallen fighter of the militant Hezbollah group. They took two large eucalyptus tree seedlings out of the truck and planted them.

The men are from Green Without Borders, a non-governmental organization that says it aims to protect Lebanon's green areas and plant trees.

A bill that would ban the sale of kangaroo parts has been introduced in the Oregon Legislature, taking aim at sports apparel manufacturers that use leather from the animals to make their products.

Soccer cleats are one of the only products made from kangaroo leather that are routinely sold in Oregon, Oregon Public Broadcasting reported. The measure would impact Nike, which is based in Oregon and the state's largest employer.

A prominent environmental group said Tuesday that it is suing the German government over the failure to meet its own climate targets.

Friends of the Earth Germany, also known as BUND, said in its submission to the Berlin-Brandenburg administrative court that the government should be required to put forward an emergency program for the transport and building sectors.

President Joe Biden persuaded Democrats in Congress to provide hundreds of billions of dollars to fight climate change. Now comes another formidable task: enticing Americans to buy millions of electric cars, heat pumps, solar panels and more efficient appliances.

It's a public relations challenge that could determine whether the country meets Biden's ambitious goal to cut greenhouse gas emissions in half by 2030.

Shaking a traditional rattle, Brazil's incoming head of Indigenous affairs recently walked through every corner of the agency's headquarters — even its coffee room — as she invoked help from ancestors during a ritual cleansing.

The ritual carried extra meaning for Joenia Wapichana, Brazil's first Indigenous woman to command the agency charged with protecting the Amazon rainforest and its people. Once she is sworn in next month under newly inaugurated President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, Wapichana promises to clean house at an agency that critics say has allowed the Amazon's resources to be exploited at the expense of the environment.