Laurel Wamsley

It was a lifesaving mission as dramatic as any in the months-long battle against the wildfires that have torn through the Australian bush.

But instead of a race to save humans or animals, a specialized team of Australian firefighters was bent on saving invaluable plant life: hidden groves of the Wollemi pine, a prehistoric tree species that has outlived the dinosaurs.

BlackRock, the world's largest asset manager, says that it will now make climate change central to its investment considerations. And not just for environmental reasons — but because it believes that climate change is reshaping the world's financial system.

That was the message in BlackRock Chairman and CEO Larry Fink's annual letter to CEOs published on Tuesday.

It was billed as the Sandringham Summit: a meeting of Britain's royal family to discuss the desire of Prince Harry and his wife, the former Meghan Markle, to "step back" from the responsibilities of being "senior royals."

The meeting took place at the queen's estate in Norfolk and involved Queen Elizabeth II; Harry; his father, Prince Charles; and his brother, Prince William. Meghan joined by phone from Canada.

The New York Public Library has been loaning books for a long time — the institution turns 125 this year.

To celebrate, the library dug into its records and calculated a list of the 10 books that have been checked out the most in its history.

The most-wanted book? The Snowy Day by Ezra Jack Keats.

The Caldecott Medal-winning tale of a young boy's encounter with snow has been checked out 485,583 times from the NYPL since it was published in 1962.

Facing criticism for his handling of the ferocious wildfires that have swept across Australia, Prime Minister Scott Morrison says he will call for a government inquiry into the response to the blazes.

When Meghan Markle and Prince Harry announced that they will "step back" from their duties as senior members of the British royal family, many members of the public in both the U.S. and the U.K. were supportive of their decision.

Updated at 3:55 p.m. ET

The Duke and Duchess of Sussex — also known as Prince Harry and Meghan Markle — have announced that they will step back from their duties as senior members of the British royal family.

The intrigue may be only beginning, amid reports that Queen Elizabeth II and the rest of the royal family were not given advance notice of the move.

Two people were killed and five were injured in an avalanche at an Idaho ski resort on Tuesday.

Iran's cultural heritage is suddenly a topic of urgent global interest, after President Trump threatened to strike such sites if the country retaliates for the United States' killing of Gen. Qassem Soleimani last week.

Updated at 7:49 p.m. ET

Iran will no longer honor its commitment to limit its enrichment of uranium, stepping away from a key component of the landmark nuclear deal it agreed to with six nations, including the United States, in 2015.

The announcement was reported Sunday in Iranian state media. It marks the latest in the country's retreat from the limitations agreed to in the agreement, known as the JCPOA.

A plane crashed shortly after takeoff near Almaty, Kazakhstan, on Friday, killing at least 12 of the 98 people on board.

Kazakh officials say another 54 people were hospitalized with injuries, The Associated Press reports, 10 of them in critical condition. The captain was among those killed.

The plane was a Dutch-built Fokker 100 aircraft operated by Bek Air, which bills itself as Kazakhstan's first low-cost carrier. The manufacturer went bankrupt in 1996.

Updated Dec. 27 at 10 a.m. ET

About a week after Glenda and Raphi Savitz welcomed their daughter Samantha to the world, they learned that she was deaf.

"She was the first deaf person we had known, so obviously it was a surprise and a challenge," Glenda says. "We knew right away that we had to get involved in the deaf community, learn about the culture, and start getting fully immersed in American Sign Language."

What the new parents didn't know was that their neighbors in Newton, Mass., would decide they needed to start learning sign language, too.

In his annual Christmas Day address, Pope Francis offered a message of hope and a call for kindness to migrants around the world.

"May the Son of God, come down to earth from heaven, protect and sustain all those who, due to these and other injustices, are forced to emigrate in the hope of a secure life," the pontiff said from the balcony of St. Peter's Basilica.

Billionaire presidential candidate Michael Bloomberg has acknowledged that one of his vendors hired a subcontractor that used prison workers to make phone calls for his 2020 campaign.

That prison labor was being used by the Bloomberg campaign was reported Thursday morning by The Intercept. The campaign says it was unaware that inmate workers were making phone calls on its behalf until informed by The Intercept's reporter, and says it immediately cut ties to the vendor.

Japan has been trying to increase its birth rate for years, hoping that a youthful boost could offset an otherwise rapidly aging population. It's not working.

The country's health ministry announced Tuesday that the number of babies born in 2019 fell by an estimated 5.9% this year, to 864,000. It's the first time since 1899, when the government began tracking the data, that the number has dipped below 900,000, according to The Asahi Shimbun.

Six-year-old Florence Widdicombe was writing notes on Christmas cards to her school friends in South London when she discovered that one card had already been written on.

"We are foreign prisoners in Shanghai Qingpu prison China," it said in English, written in all capital letters. "Forced to work against our will. Please help us and notify human rights organization."

Updated at 3:30 p.m. ET

Saudi Arabia sentenced five people to death in the killing last year of Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi. The court sentenced three others to prison terms adding up to 24 years, while exonerating two senior aides to Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman.

The trial was conducted in secret, and the defendants' names have not been released. The three people receiving prison sentences were found to have participated in covering up the crime. All the verdicts can be appealed.

When journalist Shiori Ito went public with her account of allegedly being raped by a prominent reporter, she became the public face of the country's #MeToo movement.

Now a judge has ordered the man she accused of the assault, former Tokyo Broadcasting System Washington Bureau Chief Noriyuki Yamaguchi, to pay Ito about $30,000 in damages, for her physical and psychological pain.

"I'm so happy," she said, according to Reuters. "It's not over. Now, I have to deal with how I live with my scars."

Updated at 4:04 p.m. ET

Mississippi man Curtis Flowers was tried for the same crime six times: the murder of four people at a furniture store in 1996. He was convicted four times — but each was overturned. Two others ended in mistrials.

Earlier this year, the conviction in the sixth trial was reversed by the U.S. Supreme Court, which found that prosecutors had shown an unconstitutional pattern of excluding black jurors from Flowers' trials.

The global climate talks in Madrid ended on Sunday – two days after its scheduled closing, and with little to show for the marathon session.

The Madrid-based summit, known as COP25, or generically as the U.N. Climate Change Summit, was intended as a time to hammer out the rules and commitments that would get the world's nations on track to meet the targets of the 2015 Paris climate accord. Instead, the talks showed deep divisions, as small countries highly vulnerable to rising seas and powerful storms were at odds with wealthy, high-emitting countries like the United States.

Updated at 3:20 p.m. ET

Sixteen-year-old activist Greta Thunberg has quickly risen to prominence with her clarion call for climate action and Time's naming her its 2019 Person of the Year this week.

Since her first school strike for action in August 2018, Thunberg has grown her protest into a global youth movement calling on the world leaders of today to take decisive action on climate change and prevent further global warming.

Islamist militants attacked an army camp in Western Niger on Tuesday, killing 71 soldiers, according to an army spokesman. It was the deadliest assault on the country's military in living memory, the spokesman told news outlets on Wednesday.

"The combat [was] of a rare violence, combining artillery shells and the use of kamikaze vehicles by the enemy," army spokesman Col. Boubacar Hassan said, according to Reuters. An additional 12 soldiers were injured in the fighting that stretched over three hours, he said.

Updated at 6:18 p.m. ET

President Trump signed an executive order on Wednesday that will make Title VI of the 1964 Civil Rights Act apply to anti-Semitic acts. The order is generating concern that it will stifle free speech by those who oppose Israel's policy toward the Palestinians.

The executive order takes indirect aim at the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement that has generated intense controversy on college campuses.

Strikes and protests have clogged the streets of Paris and elsewhere in France since last Thursday. Now there's a turning point: the government has unveiled its plan to reform the French retirement system.

The plan calls for a shift from 42 distinct pension plans according to job and region into one universal scheme. The new system will be based on points, on the principle of giving each pensioner the same rights for each euro they pay into it. Those who have worked a full career (about 42 years) will receive a minimum of 1,000 euros a month, or $1,109.

A judge has handed Exxon Mobil a victory in only the second climate change lawsuit to reach trial in the United States. The decision was a blow for the New York Attorney General's Office, which brought the case.

Justice Barry Ostrager of the New York State Supreme Court said that the attorney general failed to prove that the oil giant broke the law.

Russian President Vladimir Putin and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy met for the first time on Monday in Paris, in peace talks meant to resolve the simmering war in eastern Ukraine.

More than 13,000 people have been killed in the Russian insurgency in the region since it began five years ago with Putin's annexation of Crimea.

Among Ukraine's goals are prisoner exchanges, a cease-fire along the front, and Ukrainian control of the eastern border. Russia would like an end to Western sanctions that have led to economic stagnation.

The FBI is investigating the shooting at Naval Air Station Pensacola on Friday as an act of terror.

Rachel Rojas, the special agent in charge of the FBI's Jacksonville Field Office, said in a news briefing Sunday that investigators are working with "the presumption that this was an act of terrorism."

Doing so, she said, "allows us to take advantage of investigative techniques that can help us more quickly identify and then eliminate any additional threats to the rest of our community."

There is currently no evidence of such a threat, she added.

Caroll Spinney, the actor and puppeteer who portrayed Big Bird and Oscar the Grouch on Sesame Street over five decades, died Sunday at age 85.

The Sesame Workshop said Spinney had died at home in Connecticut, and that he had long lived with dystonia, a disorder that causes involuntary muscle contractions.

A fire broke out at a factory in India's capital New Delhi early on Sunday morning. At least 43 people have been reported dead.

Many of the victims were asleep in beds in the factory, resting between shifts, when the fire began.

Investigators say the blaze was sparked by an electrical short circuit. Most of the deaths were caused by people inhaling poisonous gases in the cramped factory, The Associated Press reports.