"Houston plans to spend millions of dollars to relocate residents from neighborhoods located near a rail yard polluted by a cancer-linked wood preservative that has been blamed for an increase in cancer cases, the city’s mayor announced Thursday."

"The World Health Organization’s cancer agency has deemed the sweetener aspartame — found in diet soda and countless other foods — as a “possible” cause of cancer, while a separate expert group looking at the same evidence said it still considers the sugar substitute safe in limited quantities.

The differing results of the coordinated reviews were released early Friday. One came from the International Agency for Research on Cancer, a special branch of the WHO. The other report was from an expert panel selected by WHO and another U.N. group, the Food and Agriculture Organization.

"Natural gas, long seen as a cleaner alternative to coal and an important tool in the fight to slow global warming, can be just as harmful to the climate, a new study has concluded, unless companies can all but eliminate the leaks that plague its use."

"An expansive heatwave that's been baking the southern United States for nearly two weeks is only expected to intensify as the weekend approaches, forecasters say. Heat advisories and warnings are still in place from Florida to Arizona, impacting more than 111 million people, according to a count from the Associated Press."

"House Republicans would take a budgetary buzzsaw to energy and environmental agencies the Biden administration and Democrats had buttressed after years of stagnant funding."

"The Biden administration on Wednesday proposed to strengthen requirements for the removal of lead-based paint dust in homes and child care facilities built before 1978, an effort to eliminate exposure to lead that could require millions of property owners to pay for abatement."

"Natural disasters can be dramatic — barreling hurricanes, building-toppling tornadoes — but heat is more deadly. Chicago learned that the hard way in 1995. That July, a weeklong heat wave that hit 106 degrees Fahrenheit (41 degrees Celsius) killed more than 700 people."

"The Interior Department announced Monday more than $650 million in Bipartisan Infrastructure Law funding to plug abandoned oil and gas wells."

"Environmental concerns are raised anew about potential contamination from Canadian open-pit mines flowing through the waterways into Montana’s lakes, harming fish."