Pakistan on Tuesday inaugurated a 100 megawatt Chinese-built solar power plant, part of its efforts to battle its ever-increasing energy deficit.

The plant is the first stage of a project that will eventually cover over 10,000 acres (4,000 hectares) of the central Cholistan desert and add 1,000 megawatts to the nation's electric grid, making it one of the biggest solar parks in the world.

A pilot said Sunday that he is anxious but excited about flying a solar plane solo from China to Hawaii on the longest leg of the first attempt to fly around the world without a drop of fuel.

André Borschberg, 62, is due to fly over the Pacific Ocean for five days and five nights in the plane that has more than 17,000 solar cells on its wings to power its motors and recharge its batteries for nighttime flying.

Surveying her destroyed cornfield in northern Botswana, Minsozie Kasaira wishes for a return to the days of elephant hunting.

Until last year, villagers like Minsozie benefited from local communities being given a quota of elephants that could be shot.

An unmanned NASA spacecraft has crashed on the surface of the planet Mercury, after it ran out of fuel following a successful 11-year mission, the U.S. space agency said Thursday.

The MESSENGER probe -- short for MErcury Surface, Space ENvironment, GEochemistry, and Ranging -- was the first spacecraft to orbit Mercury, and issued a final farewell on Twitter shortly before its demise at 3:26 pm (1926 GMT).

One out of six species faces extinction as a result of climate change and urgent action must be taken to save large numbers of animals from being wiped out, an analysis said Thursday.

The study, published in the U.S. journal Science, found that a global temperature rise of four degrees Celsius could spell disaster for a huge number of species around the world. 

Japan is planning to pledge a 26 percent cut in its greenhouse gas emissions from 2013 levels, ahead of a global summit on climate change this year, officials said Friday.

The figure, using 2013 as the base year, was proposed at a government panel this week and will go out for at least a month's public consultation before being set in stone by the cabinet, an environment ministry official told Agence France Presse.

Morrissey, the singer known for his strident defense of animal rights, has demanded that upcoming Live Earth concerts aimed at fighting climate change go vegan.

In a characteristically intense letter addressed to former U.S. vice president Al Gore, who is spearheading the shows, Morrissey highlighted the lower carbon footprint of a plant-based diet.

A McDonald's joint venture in China supplying its outlets with French fries has been slapped with a record 3.9 million yuan ($630,000) fine for water pollution, state media reported.

The fine levied against Beijing Simplot Food Processing is the largest ever meted out by the city of Beijing for pollution, the official Xinhua news agency said, citing the municipal environmental watchdog.

An unmanned Russian cargo spacecraft ferrying supplies to the International Space Station is plunging back to Earth and apparently out of control, an official said on Wednesday.

"It has started descending. It has nowhere else to go," an official familiar with the situation told Agence France Presse on condition of anonymity, speaking ahead of an official Russian space agency statement expected later in the day. 

Global warming since the Industrial Revolution is responsible for about three-quarters of certain heat extremes today, and nearly a fifth of unusually heavy downpours, according to a new study.

Erich Fischer and Reto Knutti from the Institute for Atmospheric and Climate Science in Zurich, used simulations and modelling to compare weather extremes from the pre-industrial and modern eras in a bid to determine the risk attributable to warming caused by mankind.