As I was writing a question about how to change lighting on a skybox I finally figured it out... Thought I should share:

skybox.getWorld().setAmbientLight(r, g, b);

The skybox has it's own world. Tidy.

I'm hoping to do some independent but parallel fade transitions on multiple billboards sharing a single texture in GLES 1.0.
Does this sound doable? If so, can someone please point me in the right direction.

This is (not) exactly what I'm trying to do:
http://jsfiddle.net/Ar96M/

Using GLES 1.1, can one stretch one texture across the entire object and repeat another? I've got the two textures blending with TextureInfo, but I can't figure out the next bit. So far I've got this:

TextureManager tm = TextureManager.getInstance();
TextureInfo ti = new TextureInfo(tm.getTextureID("tex_ground")); // repeat me 7 times please
ti.add(tm.getTextureID("tex_ground_shadow"), TextureInfo.MODE_MODULATE);
ground.setTexture(ti);

Even with a 'please', the comment doesn't seem to be enough...