The plane carrying the Spanish national football team home from the World Cup in Brazil was struck by lightning on Tuesday as it approached its landing in Madrid, adding to the streak of bad luck the team seemed to be on after its World Cup defeat.

The team's flight - Iberia 2907 - was hit as it came into land at Adolfo Suárez-Barajas airport shortly before midday (local time).

However, there were no apparent negative consequences for either the team or the aircraft, a spokeswoman for the airline confirmed to Reuters.

The players, still wearing their black tracksuits with green bands, and their coats, left the airport in vans without talking to the media.

Despite winning 3 - 0 against Australia on Monday, the team was squarely beaten by both the Netherlands and Chile, guaranteeing their elimination from the competition.

Greater exploitation of natural resources has become a major threat to apes in Africa and Asia, UN conference hears

The accelerated and unsustainable exploitation of the Earth's primary natural resources has become a major threat to apes in Africa and Asia, a major United Nations environment conference heard Wednesday.

Speaking on the sidelines of the UN environment assembly, conservationists said infrastructure development and extraction of natural resources - including timber, minerals, oil and gas - have devastated the prime habitat of apes and pushed chimpanzees, gorillas, bonobos, orangutans and gibbons closer to extinction.

"There's absolutely no doubt that extractive industries are severely impacting on apes and their habitats," said Helga Rainer, conservation director of the Great Apes programme at the Arcus Foundation, the world's largest private funder of ape conservation.

"Only five out of 27 ape (habitats) do not have a mining project within their range ... and there is also an indirect impact associated with infrastructure development such as roads and railways," she added.

Thousand flee homes in at least 25 towns and villages in Lofa and Gbarpolu, the second such invasion in five years

A plague of caterpillars has forced thousands of people to flee their homes in northern Liberia, as well destroying crops, contaminating water and forcing schools to close.

Residents of at least 25 villages and towns in Lofa and Gbarpolu counties have joined a mass exodus so far this month to escape the trail of caterpillar excrement, according to the Voice of America (VOA).

It is the second such invasion in five years. A state of emergency was declared in 2009 after tens of millions of caterpillars swept through at least 80 towns and villages in the centre and north of the country.

Dr Sizi Subah, deputy agriculture minister for technical services, told Liberia's The Inquirer that the caterpillars, which travel in huge numbers, have the capacity to destroy large areas since they feed on the leaves of cash crops such as coffee, cocoa and vegetables during the larva stage before developing into butterflies.

The monsoon, which provides 80 per cent of the total rainfall in the subcontinent and on which India is completely dependent for its agriculture, is witnessing disturbing changes.

There has been a decline in the average total seasonal rain during the period 1980-2011, according to a new study.

The study was carried out by Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment, the Stanford University's hub of environment research, and published in the latest issue of Nature Climate Change. It also found changes in the atmosphere like winds and moisture which are likely to be responsible for changes in wet and dry spells.

After studying trends of monsoon rains over 60 years, the researchers have warned of extreme weather conditions in future.

A dead humpback whale was found floating off Ulladulla's North Head on Tuesday afternoon.

The Ulladulla Marine Rescue crew was called at 1.30pm out after an object, thought to be an upturned boat, was reported east of the headland.

It was earlier spotted off Mollymook Beach.

The crew battled rough seas and strong winds and finally located the whale.

Commander Ken Lambert said a member of the public described the object as an upturned vessel. "The duty Skipper and crew were called to locate the reported object," he said.

"The object was located approximately 1 nautical mile east of the North Headland and Marine Rescue confirmed the reported object to be a dead whale."

North Korea's rivers, streams and reservoirs are running dry in a prolonged drought, state media has said, prompting the isolated country to mobilise some of its million-strong army to try to protect precious crops.

The drought is the worst in North Korea for over a decade, state media reports have said, with some areas experiencing low rainfall levels since 1961.

Office workers, farmers and women have been mobilised to direct water into the dry floors of fields and rice paddies, the official KCNA news agency said.

In the 1990s, food shortages led to a devastating famine which killed an estimated million people but gave rise to a fledgling black market that in some areas now provides the food the government can no longer supply.

Neurotoxic pesticides blamed for the decline of honeybees is also harming butterflies, worms, fish, and birds, and contaminating habitats worldwide which are crucial for food production and wildlife, scientists have concluded after a four-year assessment.

Societal regulations have not stopped habitats from being poisoned, said the analysis, despite neurotoxic pesticides already being held responsible for the global collapse in the bee population.

"Undertaking a full analysis of all the available literature (800 peer reviewed reports) the Task Force on Systemic Pesticides - a group of global, independent scientists has found that there is "clear evidence of harm sufficient to trigger regulatory action," a press release accompanying the report noted.

Twenty-nine scientists from four different continents conducted the study, which found the unmistakable evidence of the link.

Colorado oil and gas regulators have halted work at a Greeley wastewater injection site after a second small earthquake was detected in area on Monday.

The Colorado Oil and Gas Conservation Commission, which regulates the oil and gas industry, ordered High Sierra Water Services to stop injecting wastewater into the site for 20 days while researchers try to determine if the site is the epicenter of recent seismic activity in the area.

Preliminary reports indicate the magnitude 2.6 earthquake, recorded at 12:27 p.m. Monday, struck approximately 5 miles northeast of Greeley, or 15 miles due east of Windsor, the United States Geological Survey said. It struck at a depth of approximately 5,000 meters.

A May 31 earthquake registered at 3.4 on the Richter scale and was felt across that same area of Weld County. That shaker, at nearly 8,000 meters below the surface, rekindled a debate over oil and gas activity's impact on earthquakes. Earthquakes are relatively rare along the plains and areas of Northern Colorado.

Wastewater injection sites dispose of water used in the hydraulic fracturing process, a oil and gas extraction technique that also injects chemicals into shale formations. Some water used in this process is later returned to the Earth, and is typically injected into depths well below aquifer levels.

Colorado has some history of wastewater injection sites triggering quakes. In 2011, Trinidad was shaken by a flurry of unusual earthquakes later connected to a nearby wastewater injection project, according to USGS studies.

In wake of that earthquake, a group of Boulder scientists planned to dispatch study groups to the Greeley area to further study the incident.

There are approximately 30,000 earthquakes with a magnitude between 2.5 and 5.4 across Earth every year. There are more than 900,000 reports of seismic activity worldwide with a magnitude of 2.5 or less.

An early freeze in the Great Plains may cut corn production by 8%, according to Simon Atkins, CEO of Advanced Forecasting Corporation, who presented his long-range forecast in a webinar on Monday.

The cause: above-average volcanic eruptions around the world for the last nine months, including three in the last month - in Eastern Russia, Alaska and Indonesia. The release of sulfur into the atmosphere from volcanic eruptions reflects sunlight back out to space.

The meteorologist predicted cooler-than-normal summer temperatures "because of well-above-normal volcanic eruptions going back to the fall of 2013. We are not going to see many hot periods. Sure, there will be a few days here and there where temperatures reach 100 degrees in Oklahoma, but it's not going to be very common."

"What's going to be more common is more moisture coming in off the Eastern seaboard of the U.S., and it will be pushing frontal boundaries from east to west, cooling down even parts of the Midwest in July and August," he continued. "We think the first two weeks of September will be warmer. But then it will be getting quite a bit colder toward the end of September, and even into October."

These cooler temperatures could damage the corn crop, Atkins explained.

"We think there's going to be an early frost [in the Plains west of Kansas], which could reduce the number of bushels per acre of corn - maybe by around 8%, our current rate of prediction," he said. "It will be a killing freeze, at least 10 to 15 days earlier than normal."

Meanwhile, Atkins expects flash flooding in the Midwest this week, from Nebraska down to Arkansas, even reaching into parts of the Tennessee River Valley. "Some of these winds will reach 80 miles per hour with hail, producing lots of flash flooding. Some fields in the Midwest will suffer from too much rain," he said.

A succession of rare 'mini tornadoes' have drawn crowds in the city of Arendal as they circled dramatically above the Skagerrak strait between Norway and Denmark.

"It looked like the sort of thing you'd see on an American documentary or something," Espen Bierud from Norway's Institute of Marine Research, which faces onto the sea, told The Local. "Many people standing around me said they'd never seen anything like it in Norway."

He said that work at the Institute had ground to a halt as the researchers made their way outside to enjoy the spectacle.

"It didn't take too many seconds before everyone at the Institute was down at the balcony or on the dock taking pictures," he said. "It lasted for about 20 or 30 minutes, and there were at least four different tornadoes."