UN chief Ban Ki-moon yesterday warned that no country or city was immune from natural or man-made disasters, as a report underlined the soaring, trillion dollar, economic risks the world faces.

Ban told a four-day UN Conference on disaster risk that the devastating earthquake and tsunami in highly-prepared Japan and the ensuing nuclear accident at the Fukushima Daiichi power plant on March 11 gave the world "a grave warning for the future."

"As we have learned again and again no country or city - rich or poor - is immune," the UN Secretary General said.

OSLO — Global sea levels will rise faster than expected this century, partly because of quickening climate change in the Arctic and a thaw of Greenland’s ice, an international report said Tuesday.

The rise would add to threats to coasts from Bangladesh to Florida, low-lying Pacific islands and cities from London to Shanghai. It would also raise the cost of building tsunami barriers in Japan.No

The current energy landscape is rife with contradictions: Gas prices are shooting up, renewables are being implemented at a seemingly rapid pace, natural gas is being simultaneously demonized and hailed as an energy savior, and electric cars are finally starting to roll off production lines. Fortunately, your tax dollars fund a government agency devoted to making sense of energy.

Palaeontologists characterize mass extinctions as times when the Earth loses more than three-quarters of its species in a geologically short interval, as has happened only five times in the past 540 million years or so. Biologists now suggest that a sixth mass extinction may be under way, given the known species losses over the past few centuries and millennia.

Over the past 540 million years, life on Earth has passed through five great mass extinctions. In each of those catastrophes, an estimated 75 percent or more of all species disappeared in a few million years or less.