Oreo cookies and Gillette shaving cream are among products driving the destruction of Indonesia's forests, Greenpeace said Tuesday, accusing agri giant Wilmar International for supplying "dirty palm oil" to make the grocery items.

In its report "Licence to Kill", Greenpeace said that Singapore-based Wilmar, the world's biggest palm oil processor, was sourcing its oil from illegally cleared land and destroying the habitat of critically endangered Sumatran tigers.

Wildfires are "absolutely" linked to global warming and increasingly intense heatwaves, the U.N. climate chief has said, as bushfires burned out of control in Australia.

The comments come as debate rages in Australia -- whose new Prime Minister Tony Abbott once described the science behind man-made climate change as "absolute crap" -- about whether there is a link between the infernos and global warming.

More than 300 elephants and other animals have died of cyanide poisoning by poachers in Zimbabwe's largest game park, a wildlife conservation group said Monday.

"In July, around 300 elephants had died from cyanide poisoning in Hwange and were discovered by a group of hunters who flew over the area," Johnny Rodrigues, chairman of the Zimbabwe Conservation Task Force told Agence France Presse.

Choking clouds of pollution blanketed a Chinese city famed for its annual ice festival Monday, reports said, cutting visibility to 10 meters (33 feet) and underscoring the nation's environmental challenges.

Footage from Harbin on state broadcaster CCTV showed a screen full of charcoal-brown smog, with faint shapes and colors beneath hinting at roads, cars and traffic signals.

NASA has reversed a decision to ban six Chinese scientists from a space conference, Chinese state media said, after prominent U.S. astronomers vowed to boycott the meeting in a row over academic freedom.

The U.S. space agency had barred them from participating in the meeting on exoplanets -- bodies outside the solar system -- in California in early November, saying it was legally obliged to do so because of their nationality.

Heavy rain at the Fukushima nuclear plant caused a leak of radioactive water containing a cancer-causing isotope, possibly into the sea, its operator said Monday, as a typhoon approaching Japan threatened further downpours.

It is the latest in a long line of setbacks at the site and further undermines agreements between operator Tokyo Electric Power (TEPCO) and the government, which limit the level of radioactive contamination in water that goes outside the plant.

NASA says a big asteroid that whizzed by Earth last month unnoticed is probably nothing to worry about when it returns much closer in 19 years.

NASA Near-Earth Object program manager Donald Yeomans said there is a 1 in 48,000 chance that the 1,300-foot (400-meter) asteroid will hit Earth when it returns on Aug. 26, 2032.

A satellite monitoring Earth's gravity field since 2009 will run out of fuel "in the coming days" and eventually crash, with little risk to humans, the European Space Agency said Friday.

About 40 to 50 fragments with a combined mass of 250 kilograms (550 pounds) are projected to hit our planet within weeks of the GOCE satellite running out of fuel, according to spacecraft operations manager Christoph Steiger.

Policymakers from some 100 nations meet in France next week to bolster efforts to have 10 percent of the world's marine and coastal areas under protection by 2020, conference organizers said Friday.

Today's coverage is less than three percent.

The world's largest tropical forest actually contains a lot of the same kinds of trees, according to research on the Amazon published this week in the U.S. journal Science.

Researchers embarked on an ambitious endeavor to catalog the types of trees seen most often in the vast Amazon basin, which spans parts of Brazil, Peru, Colombia, Guyana, Suriname and French Guiana.