Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen's three-mast ship Maud, long abandoned in the Canadian Arctic ice, will be salvaged and repatriated mid-2013, a Norwegian group announced Sunday.

The group, which plans to return the old polarship to Norway to be the centerpiece of a new museum, is this week in Cambridge Bay in Canada's far north filming and photographing the shipwreck trapped in ice.

Nearly 200 nations launched a fresh round of United Nations climate talks in Doha on Monday faced with appeals for urgency in their efforts to reduce Earth-warming greenhouse gas emissions.

The 18th U.N. climate conference comes amid a welter of scientific warnings that extreme weather events like super-storm Sandy will become commonplace if mitigation efforts fail.

During a year with a monster storm and scorching heat waves, Americans have experienced the kind of freakish weather that many scientists say will occur more often on a warming planet.

And as a re-elected president talks about global warming again, climate activists are cautiously optimistic that the U.S. will be more than a disinterested bystander when the U.N. climate talks resume Monday with a two-week conference in Qatar.

Environmentalists and nationalists held opposing rallies over the issue of Japan's dolphin and whale hunts in a rare showdown in central Tokyo on Saturday, leading to angry scenes.

About 50 anti-whaling activists gathered at a park in the Shibuya shopping district with banners bearing slogans such as "Stop the cruel dolphin hunt!" while across the street about 30 nationalists shouted "Get out of Japan!"

Nearly 200 nations gather in Doha from Monday for a new round of climate talks as a rush of reports warn extreme weather events like superstorm Sandy may become commonplace if mitigation efforts fail.

Negotiators will converge in the Qatari capital for two weeks under the U.N. banner to review commitments to cutting climate-altering greenhouse gas emissions.

Estonia's thriving brown bear population has spread nationwide after hunters eased up in their traditional territory, an expert in the Baltic state said Friday.

"Bears have been able to expand their living range from central Estonia through to the western regions on the Baltic Sea, mainly because hunters have been avoiding killing mother bears in central Estonia," Peep Mannil, head of wildlife monitoring at the Estonian Environment Information Center, told the daily newspaper Eesti Paevaleht.

The Delhi government imposed a blanket ban on the use of all plastic bags on Friday in an attempt to tackle the city's mounting rubbish problems, an official said.

Thin plastic bags -- measuring less than 40 microns thick -- were banned in India's capital in 2009, but the new rules will cover all plastic packaging for items such as magazines and greeting cards as well as garbage bags.

Lonesome George, the late reptile prince of the Galapagos Islands, may be dead, but scientists now say he may not be the last giant tortoise of his species after all.

Researchers say they may be able to resurrect the Pinta Island subspecies by launching a cross-breeding program with 17 other tortoises found to contain genetic material similar to that of Lonesome George, who died June 24 at the Pacific Ocean archipelago off Ecuador's coast after repeated failed efforts to reproduce.

When the tiny desert nation ofQatar was chosen to host the latest round of United Nations climate change negotiations, environmentalists were stunned.

Talks were already in trouble, and now the high-level discussions were moving to a member of OPEC that had shown little interest in climate change and appointed a former oil minister to lead the negotiations, which start Monday. The country's economic boom, driven by vast oil and gas reserves, has led to free electricity for citizens and an abundance of gas-guzzling SUVs in the capital, Doha. It has also made Qatar the world's highest per capita carbon dioxide emitter.

A reactor at a Swiss nuclear plant shut down automatically Wednesday due to a defect, the operator said, stressing that the procedure had been completely safe.

"Block 2 of the Beznau nuclear power plant shut down automatically," operator Axpo said in a statement.