Ski racers settling into the start gate for Alpine World Cup events in the Rocky Mountains in early December squinted through sunshine that carried the temperature toward 50 degrees and glanced down at a course covered with pristine — and manufactured — snow.

If they looked up and across the way, beyond the finish line, they saw adjacent hills that were brown and barren as can be, with nary a trace of powder or any indication that this was a setting for athletes who would be heading to the Beijing Olympics that begin Feb. 4.

Regular citizens have taken the fight against illegal logging into their own hands in the pine-covered mountains of western Mexico, where loggers clear entire hillsides for avocado plantations that drain local water supplies and draw drug cartels hungry for extortion money.

In some places, like the Indigenous township of Cheran in Michoacan state , the fight against illegal logging and planting has been so successful it's as if a line had been drawn across the mountains: avocados and cleared land on one side, pine forest on the other. But it has required a decade-long political revolt in which Cheran's townspeople declared themselves autonomous and formed their own government.

Divers, vets and the coast guard were mounting a rescue operation Friday to help a whale calf that had become trapped in shallow water in a seaside area of the Greek capital.

The animal was an injured young Cuvier's beaked whale, or Ziphius cavirostris, according to Arion, a research organization that provides veterinary care for stranded cetaceans. The species usually inhabits deep waters, and it was unclear how it had been injured and why it became stranded in the Alimos area of southern Athens.

Top diplomats of the United States and the world's other worst climate-polluting nations talked global warming together Thursday for the first time since November's U.N. summit, with U.S. climate envoy John Kerry urging tougher commitments by the end of the year from governments falling short on emissions cuts.

The urging came after the U.N. climate summit in Glasgow, Scotland ended with the world still on track to heat up well above the level that the world's nations have agreed to strive for.

The Australian government on Friday pledged to spend another 1 billion Australian dollars ($704 million) over nine years on improving the health of the Great Barrier Reef after stalling a UNESCO decision on downgrading the natural wonder's World Heritage status.

Critics argue the investment is a bid to improve the ruling conservative coalition's green credentials ahead of looming elections while doing nothing to change the greatest threat to the coral: rising ocean temperatures.

A long-abandoned fuel tanker off the coast of war-torn Yemen poses a "grave threat" to millions of the impoverished country's residents, potentially exacerbating its humanitarian crisis, Greenpeace warned on Thursday. 

Mitsubishi Heavy Industries said Thursday it will work with Japan's atomic energy agency to provide technical assistance to a U.S. start-up run by Bill Gates that is building a next-generation nuclear reactor in Wyoming.

The aviation industry looks at hydrogen-fueled planes as a solution to decarbonize the sector, but a report by an environmental group released Wednesday found that they will only help limit CO2 emissions.

A fresh oil leak has occurred off the coast of Peru -- already cleaning up after a major crude spill 10 days earlier -- during work on an underwater refinery pipeline, the government said Wednesday.

Climate change is threatening the future of the Winter Olympics, reducing the number of suitable venues for the event around the globe, a report warned ahead of the Beijing Games.