Our daily adventure around the world

🇸🇪 Sweden announced plans to build the world’s largest wooden city. The project, known as Stockholm Wood City, is a $1.4 billion development set to break ground in 2025. Spanning over 60 acres near the country's capital, it’ll encompass 2,000 residential units and 7,000 office spaces. By swapping out steel and concrete for wood, developers hope to reduce the amount of carbon emitted during the building process by around 25%. And while some skeptics point to the obvious fire safety risks associated with wooden buildings, proponents say those fears are misinformed and wood buildings aren’t inherently unsafe.

🇨🇳 A Chinese hacking group recently gained access to US government email accounts. The breach was first reported late Tuesday by Microsoft, with the US State and Commerce Departments each confirming yesterday that they were targeted by the hack, but declining to provide any further details. According to Microsoft, the hackers’ level of sophistication, combined with the specific email accounts they targeted, indicates they either belong to Beijing’s intelligence service or were hired to work for it. US officials say the hack appears to be far smaller in scale than other recent major intrusions like Russia’s 2020 SolarWinds hack.

🇪🇺 EU lawmakers narrowly approved the bloc’s first major piece of legislation protecting biodiversity in three decades. The bill, which passed by a 336-300 margin in the European Parliament, requires each of the EU’s 27 member-countries to restore at least 20% of all degraded nature areas within their respective borders. The measure was opposed by the European People’s Party, the EU’s largest parliamentary group, which argued it would harm farmers and endanger food security.