The French president François Hollande, one of the only major western leaders scheduled to attend the Rio+20 Earth summit this week, will argue that sustainable development and the fight against poverty must be united in one agenda.

In an interview with the Guardian, Pascal Canfin, the new French development minister who will prepare the French negotiations in Rio, said: "We want one single agenda, to integrate sustainable development within the millennium development goals of poverty reduction. It's not about saying we'll replace the millennium goals with sustainable development goals.

"I know there are fears about that. It's about saying that in today's world, where the planet is at the limit of its ecosystem's capacity, the fight against poverty has to take into account environmental issues such as water, energy, urban development. "

While David Cameron and Angela Merkel are sending deputies and Barack Obama has yet to confirm, Hollande will fly to Rio on Wednesday, joining two French cabinet ministers. Asked whether France is seeking to take the lead while other western powers step back, Canfin said: "France is not there to take anyone else's place or speak in their name; we simply want it to be a success. We'll be in Rio because we want it to work."

Hollande, who has already warned against the risk of failure in Rio and "words that aren't met by actions", is under pressure to prove his environmental credentials in France and show the economic crisis has not knocked the environment and development off the agenda.

A European Union court has annulled a Commission decision rejecting two environmental groups' request for an internal review of a pesticide regulation.

The General Court's decision on 14 June called into question the narrow wording of the regulation that obliges the EU's institutions to protect the rights of civil society to participate in environmental decision-making.

The plaintiffs in the case - Stichting Natuur en Milieu, a Dutch environmental foundation, and Pesticide Action Network Europe, a group that campaigns against the use of chemical pesticides - welcomed the outcome. François Veillerette, who heads the Pesticide Action Network, urged the commission to accept the decision and not appeal it to the European Court of Justice.

Jeremy Wates of the European Environmental Bureau (EEB), a Brussels campaign group, said the ruling "vindicates longstanding concerns in the NGO community that the EU has failed to provide sufficient opportunities for NGOs to hold EU institutions to account."

The pesticide regulation at the centre of the case specifies maximum residue levels of pesticides for certain food and feed products.

When the two environmental groups asked the Commission to review the pesticide regulation, they based that request on the Aarhus Regulation. The latter applies to EU institutions the protections provided by the United Nations' Aarhus Convention on access to information.

That convention was introduced to supplement substantive environmental protections with procedural rights to enforce violations of those standards. It was approved on behalf of the European Union by a Council decision in February of 2005.

First came the coffee growers. Then the charcoal makers. And finally, when the last trees had been cleared, there came the cattlemen, who grazed their cows on the denuded hillsides.

Several centuries of human activity have left a deep scar in the Atlantic rainforest north of Rio.

Between patches of primary forest which are a haven to rare birds and mammals, hill after hill has nothing but thin grass and eroded soil.   Reversing this loss would seem like a lost cause, yet another defeat in the long battle to preserve the environment.

But nothing appears to deter Mauricio Ruiz, whose encounter at the age of 15 with a Brazilian poet made him resolved to bring the phantom forest back to life.   He invested every cent in his pocket -- 20 reals, around $10 -- to start a tree-planting initiative.

Fourteen years later, his organisation, the Instituto Terra de Preservacao Ambiental, is beginning to see the rewards of struggle.   Spades and seedlings in hand, its 130 employees and army of seasonal workers are marching across the hills. In their wake, they have left 670,000 young trees, drawn from 55 native species.   "We hope to reach the million mark by the end of 2012. Our goal is to plant 18 million trees covering 18,000 hectares (69.5 square miles)," Ruiz said.

Africa may be about to get a whole lot more power.

For years, nonprofits have worked to make lighting available and affordable to Africans who aren't connected to a power grid. But they've managed to help only a tiny percentage of that population, mainly by selling them inexpensive kerosene lamps.

Now, some of the world's biggest energy companies are thinking on a much grander scale. They're conducting projects to test the viability--and marketability--of solar-powered systems to provide electricity for lighting and other purposes in villages all over Africa.

The companies are aiming to sell the systems to governments and nonprofits, which could use them to provide power to villages at a discount or for no charge. The systems cost less than it would to expand traditional power grids--offering a relatively swift, economical way to boost living standards.

The pilot programs have improved people's lives. And the market potential is enticing to the energy companies: Some 600 million people in Africa live without reliable access to electricity, according to the International Finance Corp., a division of the World Bank. The big question is how willing governments and nonprofits will be to invest in solar systems.

Japan ordered a pair of reactors back online for the first time since last year's nuclear accident, but the chaos and confusion surrounding the decision highlight how unready the country may still be to restart its atomic-energy engine.

A group of cabinet ministers led by Prime Minister Yoshihiko Noda decided Saturday to restart the reactors, in a bid to wrench the economy back on track, 15 months after an earthquake and tsunami caused devastating meltdowns at the Fukushima Daiichi power plant. The government has estimated that if Japan doesn't turn any reactors back on, its economy could shrink as much as 5% by 2030.

Yet the restart decision comes a month ahead of deliberations over a new energy plan, which could call for phasing out nuclear power for good. And the restarts would come a few months before the setup of a new Japanese nuclear regulator, which will craft new safety guidelines and is expected to take a harder line on vetting reactors.

Opinion polls consistently show more than half of Japanese are opposed to nuclear power, though they fret over energy shortages expected as soon as this summer and higher electric bills if the reactors stay off. Even some of those who favor atomic energy worry the government hasn't done enough to ensure nuclear plants will be safe from a Fukushima-type accident.

Many businesses have strongly backed restarts, stating the need for stable power supplies.

A Chinese spacecraft carrying three astronauts has docked with an orbiting module where they will live and work for several days as part of preparations for crewing a permanent space station.

The Shenzhou 9 capsule completed the manoeuvre as scheduled shortly after 7am UK time on Monday as the Tiangong 1 module orbited 213 miles above Earth.

The capsule's crew includes 33-year-old Liu Yang, an air force pilot and China's first female astronaut.

Monday's docking was completed by remote control from a ground base in China. A manual docking carried out by one of the crew members is scheduled for later.

WASHINGTON (AP) -- They live on your skin, up your nose, in your gut - enough bacteria, fungi and other microbes that collected together could weigh, amazingly, a few pounds.

Now scientists have mapped just which critters normally live in or on us and where, calculating that healthy people can share their bodies with more than 10,000 species of microbes.