USA - The headlines last week brought us terrifying news: The North Pole will be ice-free this summer "for the first time in human history," wrote Steve Connor in The Independent. Or so the experts at the National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC) in Boulder, Colorado predict.
JAPAN - The G-8 summit in Tokyo, which opens Monday, faces a number of alarming problems, and Germany's chancellor has sent a letter to other leaders of the world's industrialized nations arguing that the sudden rise in the price of food needs urgent attention.
AUSTRALIA - Australia is facing severe drought and heat waves on an unprecedented scale, a "disaster novel" of a government report has warned.
JAPAN - Protesters took to the streets of cities on the northern Japanese island of Hokkaido again on Sunday, but were kept in check by a watchful local police force as the leaders of the Group of Eight industrialised nations arrived for their annual summit.
UK - The cost of Britain's "surveillance society" measures is now running at £20 billion, a new report reveals today. The amount is equivalent to £800 per household and includes £19 billion for the planned ID card system and £500 million for CCTV cameras.
GENEVA - The global financial crisis could lead to losses of 1,600 billion dollars for financial institutes, according a report in the Swiss Sunday newspaper SonntagsZeitung.
ENGLAND - Scrub clearance work on the Downs area of Bristol has been delayed because of complaints from gay men who use the area for sex, the city council said.
JAPAN - Britons must stop wasting food in an effort to help combat rising living costs, Gordon Brown has said as he travelled to the G8 summit in Japan.
ENGLAND - On the eve of the General Synod and the Lambeth Conference, Theo Hobson says that the sleeping giant of evangelical and orthodox Anglicanism has been awoken by liberal agitation and Rowan Williams's failed leadership. The church is damaged beyond repair
ENGLAND - Senior Church of England bishops have held secret talks with Vatican officials to discuss the crisis in the Anglican communion over gays and women bishops.
WASHINGTON - Even folks in the Optimist Club are having a tough time toeing an upbeat line these days.
UK - One in eight homeowners who took out a home loan since the start of last year are already in negative equity, with tens of thousands now exposed to financial trouble from falling house prices.
SAPPORO, JAPAN - Between surging oil prices, food inflation and a credit crunch that's depressed global growth, leaders from the Group of Eight economic powers face the gravest combination of economic woes in at least a decade when they gather next week.
ENGLAND - She wore her first set of false eyelashes at eight, and her beauty treatments cost £300 a month. A sick abuse of an 11-year-old? "No", insists Sasha's mother, "I just want her to be famous..."
CHINA - Beijing Olympic organizers, struggling to clear their algae-choked sailing venue and facing a possible locust invasion, say these latest challenges to next month's games are no "major problem."