The pandemic has helped expose an urgent problem—the widespread lack of public washrooms. Rose Hendrie on where we can and cannot go.

Sticking closer to home because of COVID-19 has shown many people what cities can be like with less traffic, noise, congestion and pollution. Roads and parking lots devoted to cars take up a lot of land. For example, in Phoenix, Los Angeles and New York City these spaces account for over one-third of each city’s total area.

Bridges built after World War II are susceptible to temperature variations, making them more likely to fail because of climate change, two civil engineers have found. Drastic fluctuations in climate, often blamed on humans, could cause significant deterioration to tens of thousands of steel-girder bridges across the United States, a study from Colorado State University civil engineers Susan Palu and Hussam N. Mahmoud concluded.

By the end of the century, the manifold consequences of unchecked climate change will cost the U.S. hundreds of billions of dollars per year, according to a new study by scientists at the Environmental Protection Agency. Those costs will come in multiple forms, including water shortages, crippled infrastructure and polluted air that shortens lives, according to the study in Monday’s edition of Nature Climate Change. No part of the country will be untouched, the EPA researchers warned.

The collapse of a bridge earlier this week in Tennessee is raising new alarms about the delicate state of infrastructure across the U.S. Tennessee Department of Transportation engineers say that a concrete overpass spanning an interstate highway in Chattanooga fell when a truck carrying an oversize load hit the bottom of the bridge and sliced through steel beams underneath. One person driving underneath the bridge was injured, police say.

Improvements to our nation’s highway infrastructure can help conserve fuel and reduce emissions, according to a case study released by the American Transportation Research Institute this week. Nationally, congestion is estimated to have increased the trucking industry’s fuel consumption by 6.87 billion gallons in 2016; adding an additional $15.74 billion to its fuel bill.

Britain’s favourite monument is stuck in the middle of a bad-tempered row over road traffic

Kristi Haynes knew she had a problem when her eyes turned the color of traffic paint. Haynes had been feeling strangely tired, but she didn’t have many opportunities to look at herself in a mirror because she’d been homeless for a few months. Her fiance noticed her yellow eyes and freaked out. And that’s how Haynes knew she had caught the disease so many of her friends already had: hepatitis A.

Alibaba founder Jack Ma fired a shot at the United States in an interview at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. Ma was asked by CNBC's Andrew Ross Sorkin about the U.S. economy in relation to China, since President-elect Donald Trump has been talking about imposing new tariffs on Chinese imports. Ma says blaming China for any economic issues in the U.S. is misguided. If America is looking to blame anyone, Ma said, it should blame itself.

In his years-long career developing software for power grids, Stan McHann had never before heard the ominous noise that rang out last Wednesday. Standing in the middle of a utility command center, he flinched as a cyberattack tripped the breakers in all seven of the grid's low voltage substations, plunging the system into darkness. "I heard all the substations trip off and it was just like bam bam bam bam bam bam bam bam," McHann says. "The power’s out. All you can do is say, OK, we have to start from scratch bringing the power back up. You just take a deep breath and dig in."

The United States space industry is booming, and not everyone is excited about it. The Europeans, who dominated commercial spaceflight before the rise of American upstarts like SpaceX, are suddenly worried that the America's effort “now represents a further strong challenge to European competitiveness and freedom to act in space.”

The transportation options in urban America leave much to be desired. There are crumbling metro systems, roads packed to the brim with car traffic, and around 1,000 bicycle deaths and 467,000 bicycle accidents per year. Silicon Valley and various tech enterprises have sought to “disrupt” this status quo with convenience-first solutions. First it was ride-hailing apps like Uber and Lyft, which created various labor issues, and additional car traffic. Then dockless bikes, which cities fought against because they can be messy and threaten public bikeshare systems.

The Venezuelan government is intentionally using lethal force against the most vulnerable in society, according to Amnesty International. Over 8,000 extrajudicial executions took place between 2015 ...

Police in Kolkata warned that the Majerhat bridge was in bad shape months ago, before it collapsed on several vehicles during rush hour in India on Tuesday.

More than 800 road bridges in France are at risk of collapsing within a few years, according to a survey carried out for the Transport Ministry that has raised alarm following the Genoa tragedy.

A protest over infrastructure and insecurity turned into violent clashes with police Tuesday in Panama's second biggest city, which is home to a strategic port at the northern end of the Panama Canal. Preliminary reports from national police said four officers and one protester were...

President Trump promised that his tax cut would encourage companies to invest in factories, workers and wages, setting off a spending spree that would reinvigorate the American economy. Companies have announced plans for some of those investments. But so far, companies are using much of the money for something with a more narrow benefit: buying their own shares.

The United States is "vulnerable" to cybersecurity attacks and need to step up their defense mechanisms, the co-founder of the computer security firm CrowdStrike told CNBC Saturday. Recent cyberattacks, including NotPetya last June, have been devastating to American companies, causing them hundreds of millions of dollars in losses. Other attacks, such as the cybersecurity breach at the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) in 2015, have reportedly given key information to governments like China's that can be used to blackmail American citizens working with sensitive intelligence.

Decades of underinvestment have left America with aging airports, buckling bridges, stalled subways — a veritable plague of inadequate infrastructure. On this, President Trump and his Democratic opponents in Congress actually agree. Which is why there is some hope for Trump’s appeal, during the State of the Union address, asking “both parties to come together to give us the safe, fast, reliable and modern infrastructure our economy needs and our people deserve.”

President Trump will soon make a major announcement of his plans to rebuild America’s infrastructure. As he considers his proposal, he should know that Americans oppose any infrastructure plan that would sacrifice the environment and health to build bridges and roads.