"The U.N.'s climate agency has for the first time detailed contingency options if the world cannot agree a successor to the Kyoto Protocol, whose present round expires in 2012 with no new deal in sight."

"The Obama administration has asked the governments of Scotland and Britain to review the decision last summer to release the Libyan convicted in the Lockerbie airliner bombing." Four U.S. Senators have asked whether BP lobbied for the release in order to get Libyan oil and gas leases.

"Stephen H. Schneider, a Stanford University climate scientist who for decades built the case that global warming, while laden with complexity, justified an aggressive response, has died."

"Curry spices  could hold the key to reducing the enormous greenhouse gas emissions given off by grazing animals such as sheep, cows and goats, scientists have claimed."

"The world is enduring the hottest year on record, according to a U.S. national weather analysis, causing droughts worldwide and a concern for U.S. farmers counting on another bumper year."

"Ruling in a case in which six Nicaraguan men said they were sterilized by a pesticide while working on American-run banana farms, the court finds that the trial had been tainted by 'massive fraud.'"

"Beleaguered BP will find its reputation further tarnished tomorrow when a British criminal court passes sentence on a company it half owns over safety breaches connected with the worst explosion and fire since the second world war."

"Hillary Clinton, the US secretary of state, pledged today to look into demands from a group of senators for an investigation into charges that BP lobbied for the release of the Lockerbie bomber as part of an oil-for-terrorist deal."

"Regulators traditionally react to falling fish stocks by putting additional curbs on fishing - an approach that may not work as larger changes such as global warming alter the seas and their inhabitants."

"The NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies now reports that the first six months of 2010 are the warmest on record, both in terms of atmospheric data and in combined atmospheric/ocean readings."