"The first eight months of 2012 have been the warmest of any year on record in the contiguous United States, and this has been the third-hottest summer since record-keeping began in 1895, the U.S. National Climate Data Center said on Monday."

"A rugged stretch of coastline known as Japan's Nuclear Alley is dotted with 14 nuclear reactors and now there are warnings that several of these ageing nuclear plants sit near, or on, active faultlines."

"MIAMI -- The chief executive of the century-old company from America's heartland shifted nervously on the witness stand here as he tried to explain how a trusted senior vice president had been caught on a wiretap buying half a million dollars in smuggled merchandise, much of it from China."

"The government forecaster has issued its most definitive report since first raising the El Niño alert three months ago, forecasting a weak phenomenon that will last until the Northern Hemisphere spring."

"Bottom trawling by fishermen, long believed to harm marine life, may be even more damaging than previously thought, affecting the seabed as seriously as intensive ploughing of farmland erodes the soil, according to a new Spanish study."

"Increasing misuse of chemicals is causing health and environmental damage especially in emerging economies and governments must do more to carry out a promised clean-up by 2020, a United Nations report said on Wednesday."

"Ice fields in southern South America are rapidly losing volume and in most cases thinning at even the highest elevations, contributing to sea-level rise at 'substantially higher' rates than observed from the 1970s through the 1990s, according to a study published Wednesday."

"BAGHDAD -- Iraq's Oil Ministry says crude oil exports have averaged 2.565 million barrels a day in August, the highest level in more than three decades."

"With the worst drought in half a century withering corn across the Midwest, agricultural experts on Tuesday urged international action to prevent the global spike in food prices from causing global hunger."

Tony Hayward, the BP America CEO during the catastrophic 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill of 2012, after being pilloried by environmentalists and pounded by the press, made it worse by saying he wanted his life back. Now he does -- working to produce more oil from the promising fields of northern Iraq.