The trouble with mountain biking in Nepal is that you’re surrounded by distractions. Fields of bright orange marigolds and golden mustard flowers look like a sunset splashed across the earth. Chubby-cheeked babies bathing in buckets of water cause my second near tumble. Then there is the sight of the campsites sheltering people still without homes... By Jen Murphy.

Inside Fukushima's nuclear disaster exclusion zone. By Arkadiusz Podniesinski. (Sept.)

An aircraft crashed into a wall and burst into flames in Dwarka area, on the outskirts of New Delhi, on Tuesday, killing all 10 people on board, officials said. The Super King plane, chartered by the Border Security Force, was heading to Ranchi when it crashed shortly after taking off, a spokesman for the security force said. Most of those on board were technicians.

While record-breaking temperatures are blamed on the global effects of climate change, naturally warming waters in the Pacific are adding to the effect. By John Vidal.

At least a third of the population of China breathes air deemed “unhealthy” by U.S. standards -- air that kills as many as 1.6 million people every year.

Some 22 buildings collapse in a landslide at an industrial park in the southern Chinese city of Shenzhen.

And how it got its name.

In April 2010, the Deepwater Horizon oil rig exploded and began spewing oil into the US Gulf Coast. In all, this released some 134 million gallons of crude over a span of almost three months. Eleven workers were killed in the nation's worst offshore oil spill. Today, federal prosecutors moved—and a judge agreed—to drop manslaughter charges against two supervisors aboard the Deepwater Horizon when it exploded.

A mudslide at an iron ore mine in Brazil, in which at least 13 people died, has reignited calls for safer ways to dispose of millions of tonnes of waste as toxic mud leaks into the Atlantic ocean

A new secret archive shows a high level of masonic involvement in the inquiry into the sinking of the Titanic. By John Bingham and Victoria Ward.

A mudflow thick with toxic mining waste, which initially spilled earlier this month from the collapse of two tailings dams into a main river in southeast Brazil, has now reached the Atlantic Ocean, says Brazil's environmental agency, Ibama. Ibama told Al Jazeera on Sunday that thousands of hectares of land and water in the region have been affected by what has been described as the country's "worst environmental catastrophe in history"...

A wave of toxic mud in the Rio Doce river in Brazil from a collapsed dam at an iron ore mine reaches the sea amid concerns of severe pollution.

A high-speed TGV train has derailed near the eastern French city of Strasbourg, killing at least 10 people, officials say. The crash happened during a test run in the town of Eckwersheim, on a new Paris-Strasbourg line. The train was carrying 49 railway technicians when it derailed, caught fire, and plunged into a canal. Eleven people suffered serious injuries.

40 years ago on this day, the SS Edmund Fitzgerald sinks in Lake Superior, killing all 29 crew members on board. It was the worst single accident in Lake Superior’s history. The ship weighed more than 13,000 tons and was 730 feet long. It was launched in 1958 as the biggest carrier in the Great Lakes and became the first ship to carry more than a million tons of iron ore through the Soo Locks.

A dam in the south-eastern Brazilian town of Mariana in the state of Minas Gerais has broken, killing at least 16, according to local media. Witnesses report the town of Bento Rodrigues, near Mariana, has been completely flooded; the town has a population of 620. There was no official word on any victims by early evening (local time). Rescue teams were searching for survivors or bodies, and residents living nearby were told to evacuate to higher ground.

Analysis of ice cores finds two severe events occurred in the last 1,300 years. By Eric Berger.

A malfunction or malice — and at who's hand? By Jeff Wise.

It is perhaps not widely understood (outside the specialized domains of risk modeling and property insurance) that the last twenty years have seen the relatively rapid growth of a new kind of financial instrument: the catastrophe bond... By D. Graham Burnett.

Three years after Superstorm Sandy slammed into New Jersey’s coast, few local communities want to accept that the Shore’s glory days are numbered. By Steven Ashley.

When the 7.8 magnitude earthquake hit Nepal on April 25, the world watched as parts of Kathmandu were reduced to rubble. But just fifty miles north, in a valley called Langtang, the shaking unleashed an avalanche that buried a village and killed hundreds. Here, the survivors speak for the first time. By Anna Callaghan and Rabi Thapa.