At the end of August, a wisp of flame suddenly appeared in the Arctic twilight over the Barents Sea, bathing the low clouds over the Norwegian port of Hammerfest in a spectral orange glow. With a tremendous roar, the flame bloomed over the windswept ocean and craggy gray rocks, competing for an instant with the Arctic summer's never-setting sun.

Chad, with its very limited supply of natural resources, is being strained due to the deluge of Sudanese refugees into camps along Chad's border with Darfur since 2004.

Record floods and drought are devastating South Asia, but man is as much to blame as nature. The floods, worst in a century according to relief workers, which have killed 1,500 people, disrupted the

Dao Duy Dang remembers the night in 1963 when the lights came on in Uong Bi. "People were so excited," the 70-year-old tea-shop owner says, recalling the cheers that rang through the northern Vietnamese town after one of the country's first coal-fired power plants began operating. "Their whole lives they had wished for electricity." Be careful what you wish for.