Bangladesh's high court has banned the lease of coastal land to ship-breaking yards, a lawyer said Friday, in a ruling welcomed by environmentalists who say the industry destroys fragile eco-systems. About a third of the world's condemned ships are dismantled at about 100 sprawling shipyards on beaches leased from local authorities along Bangladesh's southeastern coastline. "The court ...

Toyota will build a 300 million Australian dollars ($277 million) plant in Melbourne that will produce greener engines that deliver reduced carbon emissions, the company said Friday. The plant will begin operations in the second half of 2012, said Toyota Australia chief executive Max Yasuda. It will ...

The federal government is considering giving Central California farmers some massive water infrastructure to settle a lawsuit over drainage problems that killed birds and left farmland too salty for crops, according to a draft proposal obtained by The Associated Press. Shifting the cleanup cost to the ...

HONG KONG (Reuters) - Roadside air pollution in Hong Kong hit record highs in the first six months of the year, hurting public health and economic competitiveness compared with Asian rivals, activists and lawmakers said on Tuesday. The city's air quality hit "unhealthy" levels about 10 percent of the time between January and June, the highest level in five years ...

Russia's 2014 Winter Olympics host Sochi is facing an apparently insurmountable problem over how to dispose of millions of tonnes of garbage with nowhere to put the waste, a report said Tuesday. Not a single landfill in the Black Sea resort town is legal, and most sewage is dumped untreated into the sea, in some places only 50 meters ...

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A new, highly detailed map of part of Peru's Amazon shows how much climate-warming carbon is stored there, and where cutting down vegetation has sent this greenhouse gas into the atmosphere, scientists said on Monday. The three-dimensional map could help clear the way for an international agreement to curb deforestation and forest degradation, which account for up ...