Debris

While countries and organisations around the world continue to compete to conquer space, Poland has taken the lead in a slightly different sphere: cleaning the skies of space debris, reported Emerging-Europe.

The remains of six more victims were found on Tuesday in and around a northern California town overrun by flames last week, raising the death toll to 48 in a wildfire disaster already ranked as California's most lethal and destructive in state history, Reuters reports.

Volunteer divers involved in the Aegean Rebreath initiative conducted a cleanup operation at the port of the Saronic island of Poros on Monday, bringing up tons of waste, including sail cloths, rubber tires, fishing nets and glass bottles.

Debris orbiting the Earth at more than 17,000 mph has been snared by a prototype "junk hunting" satellite for the first time.

The experimental RemoveDebris satellite first released the metal object and then fired a five metre wide net to capture it from a distance of six metres.

Spanish volunteer Fran Vargas digs the sand to pull out a buried bag as others hold bags with garbage during a trash collection at Kolovrechtis wetland near Halkida, Evia island. Greece has the European Union's longest coastline, poor waste management and an addiction to single-use plastic that littering the country's seabed.

At least 170 million pieces of rapidly-moving space junk are now circulating in Earth's orbit and this debris may even lead to a "catastrophic avalanche of collisions" and destroy all working satellites and even threaten economies, scientists said.

Rescuers scrabbling through the debris of a huge three-day-old landslide Dec. 23 discovered a young man alive in the mud, as China's cabinet announced a probe into the nation's latest industrial accident.

Severe violations were committed by the firm tasked with demolishing a hotel that unexpectedly collapsed near the Bulgarian city of Varna, a official with the labor inspectorate has announced.

The teams searching for the bodies and debris of AirAsia flight QZ8501 found "two large objects" in the Java Sea.

...