The World Health Organization approves a vaccine for malaria, by GlaxoSmithKline. The mosquito-borne disease kills half a million people every year, most of them children in sub-Saharan Africa.

Mosquitoes in Connecticut test positive for the dangerous virus that causes eastern equine encephalitis. 

The US death toll from COVID-19 passes 700,000. More than 100,000 people have died since the COVID vaccines became widely available.  

President Biden restores Bears Ears and Grand Staircase–Escalante National Monuments to their original size before they were drastically reduced by Donald Trump.

Denmark repurposes old wind-turbine blades as bike shelters. 

Michigan is sending water filters and bottled water to another city plagued by lead-contaminated water, this time Benton Harbor, 200 miles from Flint.

A monarch butterfly crosses the Atlantic to land in Shetland. 

A Wyoming bear finds a GoPro and films an elaborate selfie. 

A proposed lithium mine in northern Nevada, which would be the world’s largest, is at the site of a massacre of 31 Paiute men, women, and children by federal soldiers in 1865. 

Patrick’s Point State Park in California, named after a 19th-century settler accused of murdering many Indigenous people, is renamed Sue-meg, the Yurok term for the area. 

Stephen Donziger, the lawyer who won a (later invalidated) $9.5 billion judgment against Chevron for polluting the Ecuadorian Amazon region, is sentenced to six months in prison for contempt of court.

The price of oil jumps to a seven-year high. Methane gas prices are also surging. 

Enbridge’s long-delayed Line 3 oil sands pipeline begins operation. 

A leaking pipeline spills 144,000 gallons of oil into the waters off Huntington Beach, California.

For the first time, sales of fully electric vehicles in Europe surpass those powered by diesel. 

The National Park Service will fly the rainbow flag permanently at New York’s Stonewall National Monument.

The gray wolf sighted in California’s Ventura County may be OR-73, a male from the White River Pack in northern Oregon.  

Wisconsin’s Department of Natural Resources reduces the quota for the state’s fall wolf hunt to 130 from the 300 recommended by the agency’s policy board. Last year’s limit was 119, but hunters exceeded it in four days, killing 218 wolves. 

A beluga whale is sighted in Puget Sound.

California’s giant sequoias continue to burn in the southern Sierra Nevada. In Giant Sequoia National Monument, 29 large trees are listed as dead, with many more to follow.

Yosemite National Park recognizes the contributions of the 19th-century Chinese laborers who built Tioga and Wawona Roads, which made the park accessible to the public. 

Solar companies that use Chinese-made components try to prove that they are not made with forced labor. 

The South Pole records its coldest austral winter ever, with an average temperature from April to September of -78°F. 

A drunken Turkish man, reported by his wife as missing in the woods, joins the search party looking for himself.