The battle against wildfires sweeping across the drought-stricken western United States, mobilizing 30,000 firefighters, could be the costliest on record with $1.23 billion spent so far, officials say.

Last week alone, a record $243 million was spent fighting more than 40 massive wildfires, said Jennifer Jones, spokeswoman for the U.S. Forest Service, most of them in Washington state, which along with Alaska has borne the brunt of the disaster.

Japan's government on Saturday lifted a 4 1/2-year-old evacuation order for the northeastern town of Naraha that had sent all of the town's 7,400 residents away following the disaster at the nearby Fukushima nuclear plant.

Naraha became the first to get the order lifted among seven municipalities forced to empty entirely due to radiation contamination following the massive earthquake and tsunami that sent the plant's reactors into triple meltdowns in March 2011.

Frustrated negotiators enter the final day Friday of a halting round of crunch U.N. talks to forge a workable draft for a climate rescue pact to be inked by the year's end.

Diplomats have lamented the "snail's pace" of this week's haggle in Bonn, accusing one another of rehashing well-rehearsed positions and holding up the real work of line-by-line text bartering.

A NASA satellite launched just seven months ago has lost the use of one of two science instruments, but the space agency said Wednesday that the mission to map global soil moisture will continue.

The radar instrument aboard the Soil Moisture Active Passive satellite stopped transmitting on July 7 due to a problem with a high-power amplifier. An anomaly team was formed at Jet Propulsion Laboratory to determine if normal operation could be restored, NASA said.

Indonesia has unveiled an ambitious new target for reducing carbon emissions, promising to slash its greenhouse gas output by 29 percent by 2030, the government said Wednesday.

The increased commitment by one of the world's largest greenhouse gas emitters will be officially submitted to the United Nations later this month ahead of a major climate change summit in December.

President Barack Obama blazed a new trail as U.S. leader on Wednesday, becoming the first to head above the Arctic circle, to urge Americans to take swift action against climate change.

"There is one thing no American president had done before and this is travel above the Arctic circle," Obama said at the school gym in Kotzebue, a small Alaskan town of 3,000.

Inadequate national targets for curbing climate-altering greenhouse gases meant emissions would be "far above" the level required to stave off disastrous global warming, analysts warned Wednesday.

Instead of the U.N.-targeted ceiling of two degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) of average warming over pre-Industrial Revolution levels, the world was on track for 2.9-3.1 C by 2100, according to the Climate Action Tracker (CAT), a tool developed by a consortium of four research organisations.

A Soyuz spacecraft with three astronauts successfully launched towards the International Space Station on Wednesday, marking the 500th manned launch in space travel history. 

The trio -- including the first Danish citizen ever to fly into space -- blasted off in the Soyuz TMA 18M rocket on schedule at 0437 GMT from the same launchpad that Yuri Gagarin used for his historic entry into the cosmos in 1961. 

A misguided faith in the complete safety of atomic power was a key factor in Japan's 2011 Fukushima accident, the U.N. nuclear watchdog said in its most comprehensive report on the disaster.

The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) pointed to numerous failings, including unclear responsibilities among regulators along with weaknesses in plant design and in disaster-preparedness.

Natural gas power generation should be prioritized to help tackle South Africa's dire energy crisis that has hobbled growth and led to rolling black-outs, said a report released Tuesday.

Africa's second biggest economy relies on coal for most of its electricity and has plans to expand its nuclear capacity.