Event

Insurgents launched what seemed to be a coordinated wave of attacks on police forces across Iraq on Wednesday, intensifying their onslaught as the American military prepares to switch from combat operations to a training and assistance role at the end of the month.

Security members gathered at the site of a bomb attack in Basra, Iraq, on Wednesday.
In northern Baghdad's Qahira district, a car bomb killed 15 people and wounded more than 50 in an assault on a police station, according to an official at Iraq's Interior Ministry. The blast flattened the building and other houses nearby, spread rubble in the street and shattered glass more than half a mile away, according to reporters who visited the scene...

The United States has offered to help major economies such as China and India develop shale gas, a rapidly growing sector in North America which US officials bill as a clean alternative.

Twenty nations held two days of talks in Washington in first-of-a-kind shale gas talks initiated by the United States, where some forecast that shale -- a miniscule presence a decade ago -- could dominate the gas market by 2030...

Natural gas for January delivery is trading at the smallest premium to September futures in seven years as traders speculate that economic growth will slow.

January futures, covering the period when North American heating demand typically peaks, were 69.6 cents higher today than gas for September delivery. That compares with an average spread of $1.58 over the past 10 years. The difference is the narrowest for the day since the summer of 2003, when stockpiles indicated ample winter inventories...

The Nabucco pipeline project has taken another step forward by ordering engineering work for two feeder lines from Turkey to Iraq and Georgia. However, a third planned feeder line from Turkey to Iran has been put on the back-burner due to political considerations, the consortium announced.

At a recent Steering Committee meeting in Ankara, Nabucco shareholders agreed to modify the feeder line concept, a press release says. Due to the current political situation, they decided to put on hold the third feeder line to the Turkish-Iran border...

Chancellor Angela Merkel challenged German atomic-power plant operators E.ON AG and RWE AG to come up with alternatives to a planned tax on nuclear fuel that they oppose, sharpening her conflict with utilities and industry.

Merkel, in her first television interview since returning from summer vacation, refused to budge on the tax on utility profits announced in June, saying the government needs the 2.3 billion euros ($2.9 billion) in annual revenue...

It is increasingly unlikely that the UK's first nuclear reactors will get full regulatory approval by mid-2011, according to the Health and Safety Executive.

Areva, the French atomic specialist, and Westinghouse, its Japanese rival, had been hoping to gain full permission for their designs by next June, after a lengthy and meticulous assessment process...

Rosatom plans to use its proposed majority stake in Canada's Uranium One as the starting point for global diversification, according to Sergei Kiriyenko, the Russian atomic agency's chief executive.

"The acquisition of Uranium One is not the end of the line for us in developing our uranium strategy", Mr Kiriyenko told the Financial Times on Tuesday...

Iran's ambitions to become a nuclear superpower edged closer to realisation yesterday, with the opening of the country's first energy-producing nuclear reactor.

The long-awaited project, dogged by opposition from the US since plans were first drawn up in the 1970s, is now complete...

A record number of homeowners installed solar panels this month, in a sign of Britons' enthusiasm for domestic renewable energy generation.

But some householders are in danger of signing up for solar panel deals for which they will gain only a limited benefit, experts warned on Tuesday...

The utility firm takes advantage of the UK Government's recent feed-in-tariff (FITs) to encourage people to generate their own low-carbon energy including solar photovoltaic (PV) panels.

British Gas is the latest company in a host of firms offering to install electricity-generating systems on homes in order to take advantage of a UK Government scheme that will pay the owners of solar PV panels for the electricity they generate...

Government stimulus spending has put the country on track to double renewable energy production capacity by 2012 and halve solar power costs by 2015, Vice President Joseph Biden said on Tuesday.

President Barack Obama's stimulus spending poured $814 billion into the U.S. economy, including more than $100 billion for science, technology and innovation projects...

Plans to harness tidal power off the coast of Anglesey are going on public display.

Marine Current Turbines and RWE npower renewables hope to generate a fifth of the island's electricity needs from the £70m project...

Mining giant BHP Billiton has made its bid for Canadian group PotashCorp of Saskatchewan because it sees a bright future for agricultural commodities. It looks like a very sensible move — providing the price is right.