Deborah Zabarenko

Reggae immortal Bob Marley has joined Barack Obama and Elvis Presley in the elite club of those who have biological species named in their honour.

A gunman has ambushed and killed a campus cop and was later found dead at Virginia Tech, the site of one of the worst shooting rampages in US history.

BP could start plugging its oil well on Monday night, more than three months after its rupture led to the worst offshore oil spill in US history.

Diplomats from the world's biggest greenhouse polluters meet in the US on Monday in a forum aimed at getting a UN agreement to curb global warming.

If water is the new oil, is blue the new green? Translation: if water is now the kind of precious commodity that oil became in the 20th century, shoul

Climate change is harder on women in poor countries, where mothers stay in areas hit by drought, deforestation or crop failure as men move to literally greener pastures, a Nobel Peace laureate said on Tuesday. ''Women are very immediately affected, and usually women and children can't run away,'' said Wangari Maathai.

Eat an orange. Wear a face mask. Train elsewhere and fly in at the last possible moment to compete. These are some of the strategies suggested for Olympic athletes planning to compete in Beijing, where a thick cloud of smog often blankets one of the world's most polluted cities.

If the people of the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) save the mountain gorilla, might the gorilla return the favour? That is the hope of environmental activists, who realise that wildlife conservation and tourism could be the key to survival for people as well as animals in a part of Africa where conflict has been the norm.

The United States local food movement has gone mainstream, with a boost from environmentalists who reckon that eating what grows nearby cuts down on global warming. But do food miles -- the distance edibles travel from farm to plate -- give an accurate gauge of environmental impact?

United States President George Bush on Friday called for a ''strong and transparent'' way for nations to measure progress on fighting climate change, but said each country should set its own approach. In a speech to a US-sponsored conference of major emitting countries, Bush also called for the creation of a global fund to promote clean technology.

The United States-sponsored meeting of major emitting countries is aimed at supporting and accelerating the United Nations process on climate change, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice insisted on Thursday. Sceptics have expressed concern that the climate meeting might be an attempt to circumvent the UN process.

The Bush administration played down the United States contribution to world climate change on Friday and called for a ''global discussion'' after a United Nations report blamed humans for much of the warming over the past 50 years. ''We are a small contributor when you look at the rest of the world,'' US Energy Secretary Sam Bodman said of greenhouse gas emissions.