AFP – It floats on a sea of oil in a country that has the largest ecological footprint, yet Abu Dhabi aims to convince the world of its environmental credentials through its futuristic Masdar initiative.
Reuters – Tree-killing bark beetles decimated 550,000 acres of forests in Colorado and Wyoming last year, bringing the total area ravaged by the insects in both states to 4 million acres since 1996, the U.S. Forest Service said on Sunday.
AP – An arctic blast from Canada is responsible for some of the frigid temperatures in the northern U.S. and some of the coldest air to hit the Northeast in two years.
Reuters – The death toll from floods and landslides that devastated a mountainous region near Rio de Janeiro has reached 806, state authorities said on Sunday, as rescue teams scoured the mud for the hundreds still missing.
Reuters – Tony Hayward, the former head of BP who was reviled in the United States for his handling of the Gulf of Mexico oil spill, is in talks to join the board of commodities group Glencore, the Sunday Times reported.
AP – A large, low pressure system will produce active weather across the central U.S. on Sunday. Snow showers from the Central Plains will drop into the lower and middle Mississippi Valley into Sunday morning. High pressure along the Gulf Coast will limit snowfall over the region by blocking moisture from the Gulf of Mexico. Scattered rain showers are expected around the South with a little wet snow possible in some areas.
AFP – An injured wild tiger that strayed into a tourist resort in Nepal has been moved to a new home in the jungle and fitted with a satellite collar so its progress can be tracked, the government said.
AFP – From being a marginal and even mocked issue, climate-change litigation is fast emerging as a new frontier of law where some believe hundreds of billions of dollars are at stake.
AP – Rural Australian towns braced for another week of flooding Sunday as a vast lake continued to spread across the country’s southeast and a potential tropical storm threatened the northeast.
ContributorNetwork – According to the Space Daily page, NASA is conducting a study into a variation of an old concept that might one day replace conventional rockets as a means of launching payloads into space, using ground based lasers or microwaves.
