Evening Edition

The deal includes setting up a Green Climate Fund to give $100 billion a year in aid for poor nations by 2020, measures to protect tropical forests and ways to share clean energy technologies.

Ending a marathon session of talks in the Mexican beach resort of Cancun, almost 200 countries also set a target of limiting a rise in average world temperatures to below 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 F) over pre-industrial times.

Asked by reporters in Quito what price range Saudi favored, Naimi said: “$70-$80 is a good price.”

Naimi was speaking at a meeting of the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries that agreed to keep production restraints in place, despite a recent surge in crude prices to $90 a barrel.

The 69-year-old veteran U.S. diplomat, who brokered the 1995 accord ending the Balkans war, has been a key player in Obama’s efforts to turn around the faltering 9-year-old war in Afghanistan, where violence has surged and at least 477 U.S. soldiers have been killed this year alone.

Holbrooke fell ill at the State Department on Friday and was admitted to nearby George Washington University hospital.

As Democrats in the House of Representatives sought to toughen provisions targeted at the wealthiest, Clinton urged them to pass the plan in its current form before they hand over control of the chamber to Republicans next month.

“This is a much, much better agreement than would be reached were we to wait until January,” Clinton said at a White House news conference with Obama by his side.

Lagarde told a meeting of some of France’s top economic policymakers and thinkers that the 2008-09 crisis had shown the need to rethink a monetary framework based on 40-year-old ideas that are increasingly outdated.

France wants to focus on ways to control the huge and erratic shifts in capital that buffet emerging economies and on moving away from the dollar as a reserve currency to a diversified system that would reduce imbalances.

Cables sent from the U.S. embassy to the Vatican to the State Department depict Pope Benedict as sometimes isolated as aides try to protect him from bad news, and say his number two is seen as a “yes man” with little credibility among diplomats.

The cables were published by the Guardian newspaper, one of several news organizations with have been given access to the leaked cables from U.S. embassies around the world.

A number of the traders and analysts drawing scrutiny in the more than two-year-old probe into improper trading in mainly technology stocks either work in Boston, or have long-standing ties to New England’s largest city.

The series of Boston connections that keep cropping up in the probe is no mere coincidence, said people familiar with the inquiry.

The latest string of attacks comes near the end of the deadliest year since the 2001 overthrow of the Taliban, with the escalating insurgency costing the lives of a record number of both ordinary Afghans and foreign troops.

Obama said on a visit to Afghanistan last week that troops are making “important progress” and Defense Secretary Robert Gates said in Kabul soon after that he was convinced the war was on the right track.

The activists also tried to block the website of online payment firm Moneybookers, but denied their attacks were intended to create business turmoil or badly disrupt online Christmas shopping.

Several companies have ended services to WikiLeaks after it published thousands of secret U.S. diplomatic reports that have caused tension between Washington and several of its allies.

China called the award in Oslo a “political farce.”

President Barack Obama, a Peace Prize laureate last year, called for the prompt release of 54-year-old Liu, who was jailed last year for 11 years for subversion.

That the Holy See used its diplomatic-immunity status as a tiny city-state to try to thwart the Irish fact-finding probe has long been known. But the WikiLeaks cables, published by Britain’s The Guardian newspaper on Saturday, contain delicate, behind-the-scenes diplomatic assessments of the highly charged situation.

The Vatican press office declined to comment on the content of the cables Saturday, but decried the leaks as a matter of “extreme seriousness.”

That would be the U.S. Republican Party, and nobody at the Cancun meetings wanted to talk about the impending Republican takeover of the U.S. House of Representatives. It essentially rules out any new, legally binding pact requiring the U.S. and other major emitters of global warming gases to reduce their emissions.

In endless hours of speeches at the annual U.N. climate conference, the U.S. political situation was hardly mentioned, despite its crucial role in how the world will confront what the Cancun final documents called “one of the greatest challenges of our time.”

An Associated Press-Stanford University Poll on education found that 68 percent of adults believe parents deserve heavy blame for what’s wrong with the U.S. education system – more than teachers, school administrators, the government or teachers unions.

Only 35 percent of those surveyed agreed that teachers deserve a great deal or a lot of the blame. Moms were more likely than dads – 72 percent versus 61 percent – to say parents are at fault. Conservatives were more likely than moderates or liberals to blame parents.

Though the accords were limited, it was the first time in three years the 193-nation conference adopted any climate action, restoring faith in the unwieldy U.N. process after the letdown a year ago at a much-anticipated summit in Copenhagen.

The Cancun Agreements created institutions for delivering technology and funding to poorer countries, though they did not say where the funding would come from.

While Republicans sat back quietly, mostly pleased, Democrats and other liberals were going at each other ever so publicly. As Clinton lectured on Obama’s behalf, Vermont independent Bernie Sanders castigated the agreement for the TV cameras in the mostly empty Senate chamber.

The tax deal, reached behind the scenes and still informal, now includes ethanol subsidies for rural folks, commuter tax breaks for their cousins in the cities and suburbs and wind and solar grants for the environmentalists – all aimed at winning votes, particularly from reluctant Democrats.

Miller has until Tuesday to appeal to the Alaska Supreme Court Friday’s decision by Judge William Carey to throw out Miller’s lawsuit. Carey cited past decisions by the high court in his ruling, which takes effect Tuesday.

“Nowhere does Miller provide facts showing a genuine issue of fraud or election official malfeasance,” the judge wrote. “Instead, the majority of the problematic statements included in the affidavits are inadmissible hearsay, speculation and occasional complaints of sarcasm expressed by DOE (Division of Elections) workers.”

Judge William Carey’s ruling all but ends Miller’s hopes of getting relief in state court. Miller can appeal to the state Supreme Court, and his spokesman said he was mulling the option, but Carey cited past decisions by the high court in his ruling.

The judge said his decision to throw out Miller’s lawsuit wouldn’t take effect until Tuesday to allow time for an appeal.

The measure that passed in the House on Wednesday is unlikely go anywhere in the Senate, and the House is unlikely to revisit the issue once the new Republican leadership takes over.

Groups like The National Council of La Raza and other Hispanic and immigrant advocacy groups know the prospects for comprehensive immigration reform are dim for the time being. So they’ve turned their attention to a measure that they believe will spark more sympathy from most Americans, bringing with them a coalition of labor groups, the Conference of Catholic Bishops and even Defense Secretary Robert Gates. And come 2012, advocates say, Spanish-language media will be filled with ads slamming lawmakers who voted against the Dream Act.

Then Natasha Singh issues a blunt announcement to the unsuspecting audience: She suffers from depression.

It’s a taboo subject in Native communities across a state with a startlingly high rate of suicides, particularly among Alaska Natives. Singh believes many suicides among her peers are the result of this silence of young people denying their pain or numbing it with alcohol and drugs only to take the only way out they know.

Students at Stanford Law School’s novel Three Strikes Project, which has successfully overturned 14 life prison terms handed down for non-violent crimes under California’s unforgiving sentencing law, are joined by an unusual coalition in their latest bid. The county judge and prosecutor who sent Shane Taylor behind bars for 25-years-to-life in 1996 now want to help set him free.

His public defender at trial is also supporting Taylor’s plea for a reduced sentence by conceding he failed to mount an adequate defense.

Sgt. Edward Matayka, a 33-year-old Vermont National Guard medic, had been mortally wounded. Specialist David Schwerer was among those who gave him first aid, applying tourniquets that saved his life but couldn’t save his legs.

On Saturday, Matayka got to say thank you, welcoming Schwerer home from a yearlong deployment in an emotional reunion at a ceremony for returning troops.

That land, fenced off and marked by warning signs, once had a collection of homes and businesses. Each was bought up and systematically cleared by the owner of the lead smelter blamed for tainting the area with the toxic metal.

Letting the property sit empty is the kind of adjustment residents have made in the Mississippi River community of 3,600, where the nation’s biggest smelter and worries about the pollution that the century-old facility emits mean people sometimes wash their hands more often and leave their shoes outside.

Somberly, his Sufi Muslim brethren carried his coffin up the hill, their colorful turbans and baggy tunics a striking contrast to the rolling hills all around. Beneath a vibrant green headstone – the color of the Osmanli Naksibendi Hakkani order, which runs a 50-acre farm and mosque here – the shrouded body of Amir Celoski was lowered into the ground. Mourners bowed their heads and prayed: May he rest in peace.

But that was not to be.

Mykola Lebed led an underground movement to undermine the Kremlin and conduct guerrilla operations for the CIA during the Cold War, says the report, prepared by two scholars under the supervision of the National Archives. It was given to Congress on Thursday and posted online.

During World War II, the report says, Lebed helped lead a Ukrainian nationalist organization that collaborated with the Nazis in the destruction of the Jews of the western Ukraine and also killed thousands of Poles. The new report details postwar efforts by U.S. intelligence officials to throw the federal government’s Nazi hunters off his trail and to ignore or obscure his past.

Eight former students have been killed in the two wars, including a Marine sergeant who will be laid to rest Saturday after dying Dec. 2 of a head wound in Afghanistan.

The community in the heart of California’s farm country has become all-too-familiar with the rituals of grief that have followed each death – tearful remembrances, flag-draped coffins, candlelight vigils. The school even built a memorial garden where the names of the fallen soldiers are cast in bronze to remember their service.

Many months before delivering the farewell address in which he famously warned about the strength of the American “military-industrial complex,” Eisenhower weighed various ideas for the speech, but concerns about the military were always central to his remarks.

The Eisenhower Presidential Library on Friday unveiled previously unseen drafts of the speech that were found recently in a cabin owned by Eisenhower speechwriter Malcolm Moos.