Washington  - US stocks plummeted again Monday by more than 3 per cent across major indices, while oil prices soared amidst uncertainty on Wall Street over the US government's proposed mammoth bailout and whether it will rescue the economy.

The drop wiped out most of the gains made on Friday, when US and world markets rebounded on news of the rescue plan.

Washington  - The price of crude oil climbed by 25 dollars per barrel on Monday, the largest jump ever over worries of a weakened dollar prompted by US government plans to buy failing mortgages from the troubled finance industry, Bloomberg news reported.

The Bush administration is proposing a massive 700-billion to 800- billion-dollar plan to bailout the finance industry, which has been at the heart of the flailing US economy. The buyout has increased concerns about the federal government's growing budget deficit.

Washington  - The United States is consulting with China and other nations to persuade North Korea to reverse its effort to restart work at its nuclear reactor facility, the US State Department said Monday.

North Korea resumed activities in August at the Yongbyon site and on Monday moved to have international seals and monitoring camera's removed so it could re-establish the facility that was to be disabled under a disarmament agreement with Washington and four other countries.

Washington, September 22: The Sahara desert’s strangest Stone Age graveyard, which was uncovered in the year 2000 by a small team of paleontologists, had excavated 20 tons of dinosaur bones and other prehistoric animals.

According to a report in National Geographic News, the team, which was led by Paul Sereno of the University of Chicago, scattered on foot across the toffee-colored sands of the Tenere desert in northern Niger.

Referred to as a “desert within a desert”, the Tenere desert is a California-size ocean of sand and rock, where a single massive dune might stretch a hundred miles, and the combination of 120-degree heat and inexorable winds can wick the water from a human body in less than a day.

Washington, September 22: A new study of the last 2,000 years of charcoal evidence has suggested that human impacts have curtailed fires in most areas in the 20th century.

Though climate has been implicated by the study as a major driver of wildfires in the last 2,000 years, human activities, such as land clearance and fire suppression during the industrial era (since 1750) have created large swings in burning, first increasing fires until the late 1800s, and then dramatically reducing burning in the 20th century.

The study, by a nine-member team from seven institutions, led by Jennifer R. Marlon, a doctoral student in geography at the University of Oregon, analyzed 406 sedimentary charcoal records from lake beds on six continents.

Washington, September 22: The senior management of the world’s largest corporations have called for greater visibility on climate change related policy in order to better anticipate the impact of regulation driven carbon markets and carbon prices.

Global corporations view climate change as a driver of risk and opportunity and have cited clear regulation as key to managing the impacts, in this year’s findings from the Carbon Disclosure Project (CDP), which includes exclusive data from 1550 of the world’s major companies on greenhouse gas emissions and climate change related strategies.

Despite the uncertainty with regard to regulation the majority of global companies are acting to reduce their emissions.