The European Union unveiled a new policy roadmap Wednesday designed to slash its emissions 55% over the next decade. The plan calls for a strengthening of the bloc's carbon pricing scheme, increasing renewable energy use and establishing a more stringent standard to reduce emissions from cars. In unveiling a detailed package, the EU is putting its money where its mouth is and, leaders hope, sending a message to the rest of the world that the bloc will lead the world into a low-carbon future.

This article is part of the The DC Brief, TIME’s politics newsletter. Sign up here to get stories like this sent to your inbox every weekday.

As Emmy nominations came out this week, one couldn’t help but note one important absent category: Best Performance By a Politician.

Surely the pantomimed outrage, concern and indignation coming from Congress right now deserves a nod from the Television Academy.

When Anthony Bourdain died by suicide in 2018, the news seemed incomprehensible. The face of this gregarious, appealing world traveler had become familiar to almost everybody, even those who had never seen Parts Unknown or any of his other shows.

Estefani doesn’t know how long she was kept from her daughter. She says that after being kidnapped on the streets of Reynosa, Tamaulipas, in late February, the days started to blur together. Estefani’s 8-year-old daughter Ashly was able to run away while men snatched Estefani off the streets—that much Estefani knew—but while the 27-year-old from El Salvador was held, she didn’t know that Ashly had crossed the border into the U.S.

Russian long jumper Darya Klishina says has been waiting for her Olympic moment since she was 16 years old, when was professionally training in Moscow, some 112 miles from her small hometown of Tver. Even though she will compete in a half-filled stadium due to COVID-19 restrictions, she expects it to feel more celebratory than her experience at the 2016 Rio Olympics, where she was the only Russian track and field athlete granted permission to compete by World Athletics (WA).

By the end of June, 29 Republican-led state legislatures had considered and nine had enacted laws to penalize schools or teachers teaching critical race theory (CRT). Whether or not such laws would stifle anything taught in public schools today is uncertain because existing legislative control over curricula is already extensive.

In late 2019, expeditioners and guides Hilde Falun and Sunniva Sorby went to Norway’s remote Svalbard archipelago to complete a long-term goal of being the first female team to over winter in the Arctic. But the pair’s planned return home to mainland Norway coincided with the start of the COVID-19 pandemic and pretty quickly they found themselves stranded.

All of the things you need to know now from the editors of TIME

All of the things you need to know now from the editors of TIME

Over the past few weeks Team USA hammer thrower Gwen Berry, who will be making her second Olympic appearance in Tokyo, has faced some fervent criticism from conservatives; at the U.S. Olympic Track and Field Trials on June 26, during the playing of the national anthem, she turned away from the American flag while on the medals podium. "So for the record, first, I turned every which way," Berry said during an interview for an Olympic-themed episode of TIME100 Talks that aired Friday.