Asia

"The lab assistant reached into the freezer and lifted out a football-size object in a tattered plastic grocery bag, unwrapping its muddy covering and placing it on a wooden table. It was the severed head of a wolf."

"More than half a million Russians have demanded the authorities do more to tackle vast wildfires in Siberia that environmentalists have dubbed an ecological catastrophe, but which officials have said would be “pointless” to put out."

"Welcome to the coldest capital city on earth — Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia — where the temperature can drop to minus 20 degrees Fahrenheit at night. The city's population has nearly tripled since 1989. Without infrastructure to service all 1.4 million people, residents off the electric grid are burning raw coal to stay warm. The result? Winters with extreme air pollution."

"NEW DELHI - In this teeming capital city of more than 20 million people, a worsening drought is amplifying the vast inequality between India’s rich and poor."

"Nobody knows exactly when the truck will arrive. Its schedule varies. But when it pulls up — sometime in the morning and then again after dusk — it's often the neighborhood children, playing cricket in the street, who are first to sound the alarm."

"Japanese whaling ships prepared on Sunday to set to sea, with crews gathering on decks in a northern port a day ahead of Japan’s first commercial whaling hunt in more than 30 years."

"India’s monsoon rains were below average for the fourth straight week, with rainfall scanty over central and western parts of the country in the week ended on Wednesday, raising concerns about major crop production and the impact on the nation’s economy."

"The water is almost gone. Satellite photographs reveal the stark shrinking of one of the main rain-fed reservoirs that serves Chennai, one of the biggest cities in India."

"Climate change is “eating” the glaciers of the Himalayas, posing a grave threat to hundreds of millions of people who live downstream, a study based on 40 years of satellite data has shown."

"When the temperature topped 120 degrees (49 Celsius), residents of the northern Indian city of Churu stopped going outside and authorities started hosing down the baking streets with water."