Critics of New York City’s mayor-elect have said his pledges of free bus service and universal childcare are unrealistic, but in Europe it’s a given

Analysis of 25 years of evidence shows most schemes are poor quality and fail to lower emissions The failure of carbon offsets to cut planet-heating pollution is “not due to a few bad apples”, a review paper has found, but down to deep-seated systemic problems that incremental change will not solve. Research over two decades has found “intractable” problems that have made carbon credits in most big programmes poor quality, according to the study. While the industry and diplomats have made efforts to improve the system, it found much-awaited rules agreed at a UN climate summit last year “did not substantially address the quality problem”. Continue reading...

Vonnegut hated them and Lincoln thought them ‘useful little chaps’. I, meanwhile, have come round to the charms of this controversial punctuation mark after years on the fence, writes Arwa Mahdawi