President Barack Obama blazed a new trail as U.S. leader on Wednesday, becoming the first to head above the Arctic circle, to urge Americans to take swift action against climate change.

"There is one thing no American president had done before and this is travel above the Arctic circle," Obama said at the school gym in Kotzebue, a small Alaskan town of 3,000.

Inadequate national targets for curbing climate-altering greenhouse gases meant emissions would be "far above" the level required to stave off disastrous global warming, analysts warned Wednesday.

Instead of the U.N.-targeted ceiling of two degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) of average warming over pre-Industrial Revolution levels, the world was on track for 2.9-3.1 C by 2100, according to the Climate Action Tracker (CAT), a tool developed by a consortium of four research organisations.

A Soyuz spacecraft with three astronauts successfully launched towards the International Space Station on Wednesday, marking the 500th manned launch in space travel history. 

The trio -- including the first Danish citizen ever to fly into space -- blasted off in the Soyuz TMA 18M rocket on schedule at 0437 GMT from the same launchpad that Yuri Gagarin used for his historic entry into the cosmos in 1961. 

A misguided faith in the complete safety of atomic power was a key factor in Japan's 2011 Fukushima accident, the U.N. nuclear watchdog said in its most comprehensive report on the disaster.

The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) pointed to numerous failings, including unclear responsibilities among regulators along with weaknesses in plant design and in disaster-preparedness.

Natural gas power generation should be prioritized to help tackle South Africa's dire energy crisis that has hobbled growth and led to rolling black-outs, said a report released Tuesday.

Africa's second biggest economy relies on coal for most of its electricity and has plans to expand its nuclear capacity.

Boxing gloves raised, two orangutans enter a ring at a Thai zoo, a spectacle that fascinates locals and foreigners alike but sits increasingly at odds in a nation slowly embracing animal welfare.

Every morning hundreds of tourists visit Safari World, a large zoo on the outskirts of Bangkok, to see apes perform a show parodying human behavior -- in particular our predilection for violence, sex and alcohol.

SpaceX said Monday it has delayed by a couple of months the return to flight of its Falcon 9 rocket, following an explosion on the way to the space station in June.

The company's chief executive, Elon Musk, had said previously that the rocket would launch no earlier than September, after a failed strut was blamed for the rocket's demise just minutes after takeoff on June 28 from Cape Canaveral, Florida. 

Italy's Enel Green Power said Monday it had won the right to sell power supply contracts for 553 MW in Brazil and would be investing $600 million (533 million euros) in three new plants.

"We are extremely pleased about this landmark win, thanks to which we became the number one company in the Brazilian solar industry," said Enel Green Power (EGP) head Francesco Venturini in a statement.

President Barack Obama will change the name of North America's tallest mountain peak from Mount McKinley to Denali, the White House said Sunday, bestowing the traditional Alaska Native name on the eve of a historic presidential visit to Alaska.

By renaming the peak Denali, an Athabascan word meaning "the high one," Obama is wading into a sensitive and decades-old conflict between residents of Alaska and Ohio. Alaskans have informally called the 20,320-foot (6,194-meter) mountain Denali for years, but the federal government recognizes its name evoking the 25th president, William McKinley, who was born in Ohio and assassinated early in his second term.

The National Zoo's panda parents, Mei Xiang and Tian Tian, have another son.

The zoo announced Friday that the surviving panda cub is male and the son of the zoo's male panda Tian Tian. Mei Xiang gave birth to fraternal twins Saturday, but the smaller cub — also a male fathered by Tian Tian — died Wednesday.