AFP - The World Bank urged global governments Thursday to heed the environment when pursuing prosperity, rejecting what it called a myth that green growth is a luxury most countries cannot afford.

The bank in a report said political considerations, entrenched behaviour and a lack of appropriate financing systems are the chief obstacles to environmentally friendly development.

AFP - Laos has postponed construction of a controversial dam on the Mekong, an official said Thursday, dismissing fears that the work was going ahead despite growing regional opposition.

"There is no construction on the Mekong river," Viraphonh Viravong, director general of the Ministry of Energy and Mines' department of electricity, told AFP by telephone.

Thai company CH Karnchang announced in April that it had signed a contract worth $2.4 billion with the Xayaburi Power Co. "for the engineering, procurement and construction" of the Xayaburi hydroelectric power plant.

Changes in the speed that ice travels in more than 200 outlet glaciers indicates that Greenland's contribution to rising sea level in the 21st century might be significantly less than the upper limits some scientists thought possible, a new study shows.

"So far, on average we're seeing about a 30 percent speedup in 10 years," said Twila Moon, a University of Washington doctoral student in Earth and space sciences and lead author of a paper documenting the observations published May 4 in Science.

The faster the glaciers move, the more ice and meltwater they release into the ocean. In a previous study, scientists trying to understand the contribution of melting ice to rising sea level in a warming world considered a scenario in which the Greenland glaciers would double their velocity between 2000 and 2010 and then stabilize at the higher speed, and another scenario in which the speeds would increase tenfold and then stabilize.

The Peruvian government said Wednesday that 5,000 birds, mostly pelicans, and nearly 900 dolphins have died off the country's northern coast, possibly due to rising temperatures in Pacific waters.

The country's northern beaches were earlier this week declared off-limits as scientists scrambled to pin down what was causing such a massive toll, with non-government organizations blaming oil exploration work.

But Peru's deputy environment minister Gabriel Quijandria, disputed this and said warming waters, which disturbs species' food supplies, was a possible cause.

He said that although tests conducted on 877 dolphins found dead on the coast had not been completed, contamination from heavy metals or the presence of bacterial infections was not responsible.

A network of ultra-conservative groups is ramping up an offensive on multiple fronts to turn the American public against wind farms and Barack Obama's energy agenda.

A number of rightwing organisations, including Americans for Prosperity, which is funded by the billionaire Koch brothers, are attacking Obama for his support for solar and wind power. The American Legislative Exchange Council (Alec), which also has financial links to the Kochs, has drafted bills to overturn state laws promoting wind energy.

Now a confidential strategy memo seen by the Guardian advises using "subversion" to build a national movement of wind farm protesters.

C'est un pas de plus vers la reconnaissance des maladies professionnelles des agriculteurs. Lundi 7 mai, est entré en vigueur un décret qui reconnaît la maladie de Parkinson comme maladie professionnelle et établit explicitement un lien de causalité entre cette pathologie - seconde maladie neurodégénérative en France après Alzheimer - et l'usage des pesticides.