Environment | WPN World People News

BEIJING, July 14 (Xinhua) -- Chinese President Hu Jintao and Premier Wen Jiabao have ordered ministries and local governments to ensure the safety of the public and minimize property losses as the country entered the flood season.

BEIJING/MANILA, July 15 (Reuters) - Heavy rains and powerful winds battered East Asia on Thursday, pressing authorities to evacuate hundreds of thousands of people from their homes in Japan and putting China on alert for its worst floods in years.

Despite restoration efforts by some countries, mangroves are being lost at a rate three to four times higher than land-based forests, with one fifth of all of the world’s mangroves thought to have been lost in the past three decades, according to a new United Nations report.

BP has started testing a cap designed to stop the flow of oil into the Gulf of Mexico for the first time in almost three months.

Toxic waste from a copper mine in China has contaminated a river, causing the death of millions of fish, authorities said Monday.

A new halt to deepwater drilling until November 30th has been called by the US government, to ensure oil companies have put into place safety measures following the Gulf of Mexico disaster.

As the oil spill coats Gulf Coast beaches, rescuers are hatching a daring plan to save as many as 70,000 sea turtle eggs from the disaster.

The small group of child beggars walking home from a market in the town of Dera Ismail Khan, 320km west of Lahore on the border of Khyber-Pakhtoonkhwa and Punjab provinces, seem subdued.

Wisnawati used to make three million rupiah (US$325) a month tapping rubber trees, but now, after years of rampant deforestation, she farms rice and coffee and is lucky to bring in half that each month.

More rain has signalled the end of three years of a devastating drought in Syria's north-eastern region but it is not falling consistently enough to benefit this year’s harvests, UN agencies have warned.