WASHINGTON (Reuters) - President George W. Bush will designate nearly 200,000 square miles (518,000 sq km) of the Pacific ocean on Tuesday as a protected region, White House officials said, making the areas hands-off for oil drilling or other extraction procedures.

The US is to establish "the largest area of protected sea in the world", banning fishing and mining, around its Pacific islands.

For anyone who likes to blend a little altruism with their outdoor adventure, few feats of self-inflicted endurance match up to the popularity of the Three Peaks Challenge.

A snowy owl, which has been delighting birdwatchers around the village of Zennor, near St Ives in Cornwall, is about 1,000 miles off course. As inhabitants of the tundra above the Arctic circle for most of the year, snowy owls do wander south in winter, but they usually get no nearer St Ives than the far north of Scotland.

George Bush will designate nearly 200,000 square miles of the Pacific Ocean as conservation areas on Tuesday, recasting his record on the environment just two weeks before leaving the White House.

For a while it seemed that Shell had stopped pretending.

Heaving with heavy goods, the A67 from Eindhoven barrels through the flat, featureless fields of the south-eastern Netherlands on its way to the German border.

We came down from the high ground as the first lights were twinkling in the frosty air over Macclesfield.