Tensions over the treatment of two cattle ranchers in Oregon escalated into an armed standoff over the weekend when members of a rightwing militia occupied a wildlife refuge and threatened a confrontation with federal authorities.

The militia occupying the refuge said they were in for the long haul. “We’re planning on staying here for years, absolutely,” Ammon Bundy said. “This is not a decision we’ve made at the last minute.”

They call it Europe’s Galapagos. Lake Ohrid in Macedonia is the most biodiverse lake of its size in the world, home to more than 350 species found nowhere else and listed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site based on its natural value. It is also Europe’s oldest lake, having survived for more than a million years.

From April, British holidaymakers can take a cheap flight with Wizz Air from Luton to holiday in Ohrid. To meet their needs, the lake’s most critical ecosystem is set to be concreted over to make space for apartments and a marina.

Last year Ohrid’s mayor, Nikola Bakraceski, unveiled plans to drain the entire 75-hectare marsh and replace it with luxury housing and a marina.

The UN says that an agreement at the Paris climate summit will build on the success of the previous treaty, known as the Kyoto Protocol. Others say Kyoto was a failure, and that the same problems will plague any agreement in Paris.

Developing countries were not required to make cuts under the Kyoto Protocol. A number of industrialised countries – including the US, then the biggest polluter – didn’t sign up and Canada withdrew in 2011.

After four separate attempts to rein in the companies over the past two years all failed, an estimated 10,000 people marched on 9 August through Honolulu’s Waikiki tourist district. Some signs like, “We Deserve the Right to Know: Stop Poisoning Paradise” and “Save Hawaii – Stop GMOs” (Genetically Modified Organisms), while others protested different issues.

In Kauai, chemical companies Dow, BASF, Syngenta and DuPont spray 17 times more pesticide per acre (mostly herbicides, along with insecticides and fungicides) than on ordinary cornfields in the US mainland, according to the most detailed study of the sector.

Just in Kauai, 18 tons – mostly atrazine, paraquat (both banned in Europe) and chlorpyrifos – were applied in 2012. The World Health Organization this year announced that glyphosate, sold as Roundup, the most common of the non-restricted herbicides, is “probably carcinogenic in humans”.

Richard Lochhead said the Scottish government was not prepared to "gamble" with the future of the country's £14bn food and drink sector.

Mr Lochhead added: "There is no evidence of significant demand for GM products by Scottish consumers and I am concerned that allowing GM crops to be grown in Scotland would damage our clean and green brand, thereby gambling with the future of our £14bn food and drink sector.

Detachment plays a key part in how it came to be that the biggest oil spill in US history, despite incurring the largest environmental fine on the books—$18.7 billion, handed down last week—has done almost nothing to change the nation’s relationship to oil.

Call it the BP spill paradox: massive in size and cost, all but invisible in its impact beyond the Gulf. It ruined lives, destroyed ecosystems, and cost a fortune, but no new laws were enacted to prevent the same thing from happening again. The White House recently approved further offshore oil exploration in waters far more treacherous than the Gulf.

The worst flooding to hit China in 50 years was happening in Sichuan province, in the same place that had been devastated by a massive earthquake just 5 years earlier. Over the course of 5 days, 73 centimeters of rain pounded the mountains, peaking at 29 centimeters in a single day.

Geography and pollution combined to make the floods intensely severe, Fan says. And she suspects the combination is not unique. Catastrophic floods in Pakistan only a month later, she says, may have involved the same factors: heavy industry plus a mountain backdrop.

Wildlife is rapidly dying out across Europe, as biodiverse habitats are invaded by urban sprawl, intensive agriculture, alien species and commercial forestry.

Butterflies, bees and birds are all in decline. The report reveals, for example, that populations of grassland butterflies halved between 1990 and 2011 and 24 per cent of European bumblebee species are now threatened by extinction.

The same bleak picture is painted for Europe's fish stocks and marine habitats. Only 7 per cent of species and 9 per cent of habitats in the marine environment were rated as "in favourable conservation status".

Almost one in 10 of Europe's native wild bees face extinction, according to the most comprehensive expert assessment so far.

Commenting on the findings, Prof Mark Brown of the School of Biological Sciences at Royal Holloway, University of London, said: "A lot of our bees have been in decline or are at risk of extinction and we need to change how the landscape is managed to deal with that.

The latest in a new generation of genetically engineered crops is poised to enter widespread use—and critics think they’ll cause more problems than they solve.

Weeds may soon become resistant to the new herbicide mixtures, resulting in new generations of ever-more-intractable weeds that will need to be controlled with yet more herbicides.

Over-reliance turned America’s agricultural landscape into an evolutionary crucible of accelerated selection for any genetic mutation that helped weeds survive glyphosate. The resulting plants, often called “superweeds,” proliferated dramatically, and now infest at least 61 million acres of US farmland, an area roughly equivalent to the size of Michigan.