The guilty verdict against Hunter Biden is the first-ever criminal conviction of a sitting U.S. president’s son. It came on a firearms-purchasing charge that’s unusual for someone not accused of related criminal activity.

• U.S. gas prices: AAA says the average for gas prices in the United States is down about 8 cents from a week ago, more than 19 cents from one month back.
• Baltimore shipping: The main shipping channel into Baltimore’s port fully reopens following the March 26 collapse of the Francis Scott Key Bridge.
• U.N. cease-fire resolution: Hamas accepts a United Nations resolution backing a plan to end the war with Israel in Gaza and is ready to negotiate details.

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Going into European Parliamentary elections, most expected a big result for the far right. It did gain – but not nearly as much as anticipated. Instead, continuity ruled the day.

Pakistan’s army has long pulled the strings of government behind the scenes. But in cases against former Prime Minister Imran Khan, the judiciary is asserting its independence. 

The idea of volunteers organizing to help in a crisis is nothing new in the West. But when it happened amid recent massive flooding in Russia, it was a surprise, bucking against decades of Soviet-induced cynicism.

In an Olympic year, difficult choices are often made about who participates on the U.S. basketball teams. How do officials balance ability and chemistry among players versus popularity?

With her new biography about Joni Mitchell, NPR music critic Ann Powers says she wanted to challenge the idea that there’s only one definitive story of a life. 

In recent years, richer and poorer nations have sought better ways to share the burden of solving climate change. One tool is carbon credits, which enable companies in one part of the world to offset their greenhouse emissions by investing in conservation and renewable energy projects elsewhere.

The market for these investments is growing rapidly, but they contain risks. A recent study published in the journal Science of 18 forest preservation projects in Africa, Asia, and South America, for instance, linked just 6% of the credits bought by foreign corporations to verifiable carbon reductions.

That may now be set to change. Governments and multinational agencies are instituting a raft of new measures to improve the effectiveness of carbon credits through better transparency. So are industry, scientific, and civil society groups. The push for these reforms is coming partly from the companies and investment banks buying them. Long accused of making false environmental claims about their operations – a practice known as greenwashing – many are now demanding greater honesty and accountability in projects they fund.

“I’ve been a regulator in the United States for 21 years, and this is the first time that industry comes in and they ask for more regulation,” Christy Goldsmith Romero, commissioner of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, told Bloomberg.

Carbon credits are financial instruments. They enable large-scale emitters to reduce their carbon footprints by saving forests or funding projects like solar farms. Each credit represents 1 ton of carbon. Companies buy credits from green projects to offset their emissions ton for ton. Most funds flow from the wealthier Global North to the Global South. Uncertainty has undermined demand. Until now, there has been little oversight or consistency in the way credits are valued, issued, or used.

Last month, the Biden administration set new requirements for what U.S. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen called “high-integrity” carbon markets. They follow similar plans in recent months from the European Union, the United Nations, and individual governments.

The new rules and guidelines may encourage more robust investment by giving companies more confidence in the credits they buy. More importantly, they are meant to reduce corruption and greenwashing through public scrutiny.

“Transparency is a prerequisite” for solving climate change, wrote researchers at the French National Research Institute for Agriculture, Food and Environment in a paper published in Nature Sustainability in March. Accurate information on carbon trading, they note, is crucial for scientific research, honest governance, and equality for ordinary citizens.

As the global push toward a postcarbon future gathers momentum, the demand for carbon credits is growing. Morgan Stanley projects the market to increase from $2 billion in 2020 to $100 billion by 2030. That growth coincides with another trend. A report by the financial firm MCSI last month noted that corporations’ voluntary disclosure of their carbon credit trading is “already higher than is often assumed, and transparency is set to improve further.” Tom Montag, CEO of Rubicon Carbon, which is a carbon credit management firm, explained why. To accelerate financing for projects to mitigate climate change, he told Bloomberg, “you need to build trust.”