Evening Edition

Breaching the 2.0 C (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) threshold sharply increases risk of severe climate impacts, including flooding, storms, rising sea levels and species extinction, scientists have warned.

“Energy-related carbon-dioxide (CO2) emissions in 2010 were the highest in history,” the Paris-based IEA said in a statement posted on its website.

Merkel said the “fundamental” rethink of energy policy in the world’s number four economy, which was prompted by the disaster in March at Japan’s Fukushima plant, opened up new opportunities for business as well as climate protection.

“We believe we as a country can be a trailblazer for a new age of renewable energy sources,” she told reporters.

His lawyer Milos Saljic told AFP he had filed the appeal at a Belgrade post office shortly before the end of a three-day deadline.

“I filed the appeal,” he said, after earlier predicting that it was unlikely it would be upheld.

Minor skirmishes broke out after up to 10,000 people peacefully protested in central Belgrade, with small gangs of mostly young demonstrators throwing stones and flares at riot police.

But police quickly said they had the situation under control.

S&P said in a statement that it lowered Tokyo Electric Power Co.’s long-term corporate credit rating to B+ from BBB and its short-term corporate credit rating to B from A-2.

It said that the move, with a five-notch drop in the long-term rating, was made “reflecting our view that there is an increasing likelihood that lender banks could undertake some form of restructuring of TEPCO’s borrowings, in light of TEPCO’s worsening stand-alone credit profile.”

Security service agents backed by army and Republican Guards stormed the protest against President Ali Abdullah Saleh in the city’s Freedom Square, shooting at demonstrators and setting fire to their tents, protesters said.

“At least 20 protesters have been killed,” one protest organiser said.

A security official said that more than 200 suspected Al-Qaeda gunmen seized control of the southern city of Zinjibar, Abyan’s capital, in fighting that has left 21 dead.

In “Statement Number One,” the generals led by General Ali Mohsen al-Ahmar accused President Ali Abdullah Saleh of “surrendering Abyan to an armed terrorist group” and urged army forces “to join the peaceful popular revolution.”

In Rome, five generals, two colonels and a major announced they had defected from Kadhafi’s forces — and also said the regime’s army was now at 20-percent capacity.

Abdel Rahman Shalgham, a former foreign minister who was Tripoli’s UN representative before switching sides, said: “These officers are among 120 who left Kadhafi and Libya over the last few days.”

After days of widespread claims and counter-claims of corruption that saw two top officials suspended pending a bribery investigation, Blatter broke his silence in a stormy solo press conference at FIFA headquarters.

“Crisis, what is a crisis?” a clearly irritated Blatter said. “We are not in a crisis. We are only in some difficulties and these will be solved.”

Blatter, who was cleared of involvement in an ongoing bribery probe on Sunday, was due to hold a press conference at FIFA headquarters at 6pm local time (1600 GMT) following an executive committee meeting.

It follows a weekend of high drama where Blatter’s rival for the FIFA presidency, Asian football chief Mohamed bin Hammam, withdrew from the election just hours before being barred from football activities pending a graft probe.

The 31-year-old developed differences with Waqar during the team’s 3-2 win against the West Indies earlier this month and his public criticism of the coach ultimately led to him losing the captaincy.

“Yes, I am now retired from all international cricket,” Afridi said by telephone from London. “I am dejected and hurt and whatever I said about the coach it was in the best interest of the team.”

Citing initial reports that 10 children, two women and two men were killed in a strike in the southern province of Helmand on Saturday, Karzai said such operations amounted to the “murdering of Afghanistan’s children and women.”

Local authorities said US Marines called in air support after their base in the Nawzad district of Helmand came under attack from small arms fire.

Wheldon, a 2005 Indy 500 winner now unable to find a full-season ride, was runner-up the past two years and appeared destined for another second-place showing until 23-year-old Hildebrand slammed into the outer wall.

The only lap Wheldon led was the only one that mattered.

“What is reflected in the extended video are crimes of the highest order — definitive war crimes,” said Christof Heyns, UN special rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary executions.

“I believe that the prima facie case of serious international crimes has been made by the video that I’ve examined,” he told the UN Human Rights Council.

Endeavour’s last mission is the penultimate flight for the 30-year-old US shuttle program, which will end for good after the Atlantis mission to the orbiting research lab, scheduled to begin July 8.

The undocking took place at 0355 GMT, when the space station and shuttle was 215 miles (350 kilometers) over La Paz, Bolivia, NASA said.

“I am quite optimistic,” the chairman of euro zone finance ministers, Jean-Claude Juncker, said after discussing further aid for Athens with French President Nicolas Sarkozy in Paris.

A total restructuring of Greece’s massive debt was not an option, he said, leaving the door open to some tweaking of Greece’s debt profile that might involve the private sector, as Sarkozy advocated last week.

Conservative leader Antonis Samaras called for a flat 15 percent corporate tax and rejected government plans for hiking taxes to tackle Greece’s budget deficit and please fiscal inspectors mulling the next, key tranche of a 110 billion euro bailout.

“You want to raise taxes and reach consensus with us, who have set reducing taxes as a priority? Don’t even think about it,” Samaras said in remarks addressed to the government.

Security agents tracked the fugitive general to a messy Serbian farmhouse belonging to his cousin on Thursday. In so doing they removed a big obstacle to Serbia’ bid to join the European Union.

The arrest angered nationalists in Serbia and the Bosnian Serb half of Bosnia.

The deaths brought to 14 the number of civilians killed in the area around the city of Homs, north of Damascus, since troops and tanks surrounded towns and villages in the region on Sunday, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said.

Homs has seen some of the biggest demonstrations against Assad since protests broke out in southern Syria in March and spread across the country, posing the most serious threat to his 11-year rule.

In Rome, the eight officers, including five generals, appeared at an Italian government-arranged news conference, saying they were part of a group of up to 120 military officials and soldiers who defected from Gaddafi in recent days.

The defections come two months after that of Libyan foreign minister and former espionage chief Moussa Koussa and the resignation of senior diplomat Ali Abdussalm Treki.

Dumas, who served as foreign minister under socialist President Francois Mitterrand, said he had seen several civilian victims of NATO bombing in a hospital and had been told by a doctor there that there were as many as 20,000 more.

NATO says it has struck only military targets. Despite repeated promises by Gaddafi’s media officials, Western journalists based in Tripoli have been shown no evidence of large numbers of civilians killed or injured by NATO bombing.

In the latest sign Saudi Arabia’s neighbor was moving toward civil war, six soldiers were killed in what appeared to be an ambush near Zinjibar, a coastal city taken over a few days ago by Islamist and al Qaeda militants.

Residents said jet fighters later strafed militant positions with bombs.

Dempsey, whose pick requires Senate confirmation, would replace Admiral Mike Mullen as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff when he steps down on October 1.

At a White House ceremony, Obama hailed Dempsey as “one of our nation’s respected and combat-tested generals.”

The coalition, sensitive to accusations it may increase dependence on highly polluting brown coal, said it planned to cut power use by 10 percent by 2020 and further expand the use of renewables such as wind and solar power.

Merkel’s bid to outflank the opposition smacks of opportunism to many Germans but could ease an alliance with the anti-nuclear Greens that may be her best bet to stay in power. Polls clearly show that most Germans dislike nuclear energy.

FIFA general secretary Jerome Valcke issued a statement on Monday denying he meant to suggest anything corrupt about the Qatar bid for 2022, while Blatter gave the Gulf nation his public backing and took time out to berate the media for a lack of manners.

While all the talk outside FIFA House has been of a drip-feed of corruption allegations creating the worst crisis the game has faced, Blatter said his organization was merely experiencing local difficulties they could solve internally.

For once, a region which has not produced a World Cup semi-finalist in the past 80 years, now finds itself at the heart of the game’s affairs — but for all the wrong reasons.

The Gold Cup, the continental championship for CONCACAF’s North and Central America and Caribbean, begins on Sunday in Dallas with Trinidadian Warner, who has been at the organization’s helm for over 20 years, ‘barred from all football activities’ pending an investigation into bribery allegations.

The email was made public by an angry Warner soon after he was banned from all football related activity by FIFA’s ethics committee on Sunday.

At the time the email was sent on May 18, Mohamed Bin Hammam of Qatar, the president of the Asian Football Confederation (AFC) was still standing against Sepp Blatter for president — but he was also banned by the ethics committee on Sunday on alleged bribery charges along with Warner.

The bombings claimed by the Taliban were the second major attack in three days as insurgents expand their targets outside the southern and eastern theaters that were the focus of American offensives last winter. In other violence around Afghanistan, four NATO service members were killed Monday.

Taliban attacks inside Herat are rare, though there are violence-prone districts on the city’s outskirts. But insurgents have been increasing attacks around the country since the group announced its spring offensive in late April and reaching into areas that had been fairly quiet until now.

He could hear bursts of incoming fire above the thumping rotor blades. Somewhere in the billowing red smoke that marked the landing zone and the choking dust whipped up by the medevac chopper was a cluster of Marines pinned down by heavy fire, and one of them was bleeding badly.

The problem for Adame was that he did not know where.

The escalation raised fears the popular uprising may be moving toward a Libya-style armed conflict.

Until now, the opposition against Assad has taken the form of peaceful protests by unarmed demonstrators, though authorities have claimed, without offering solid proof, that it was being led by armed gangs and propelled by foreign conspiracies.

The new attempts to suppress the uprising against President Ali Abdullah Saleh with overwhelming force, following a weekend when high-level military defectors formed a united front in support of the protesters, all pointed to the longtime leader’s increasingly tenuous grip on power.

More than three months of mass street protests have posed an unprecedented threat to Saleh’s 33-year rule, splintering his security forces and battering the country’s already frail economy. The U.S. has moved away from it former ally despite fears that his fall could leave room in this rugged corner of the Arabian Peninsula for an active al-Qaida franchise or other militant Islamist groups to take power.

Chancellor Angela Merkel said she hopes the transformation to more solar, wind and hydroelectric power serves as a roadmap for other countries.

“We believe that we can show those countries who decide to abandon nuclear power – or not to start using it – how it is possible to achieve growth, creating jobs and economic prosperity while shifting the energy supply toward renewable energies,” Merkel said.

Tadic also rejected speculation that authorities had known of Mladic’s hiding place, but delayed his arrest to coincide with a visit by EU foreign policy chief Catherine Ashton. The rumors have persisted because Mladic was found living not far from the capital, Belgrade, with relatives who share his last name.

“Any such comment makes no sense,” Tadic said. “The truth is that we arrested Ratko Mladic the moment we discovered him.”

“This chain of command originated with Mladic,” argued Radislav Krstic, the corps commander of the forces that controlled this part of eastern Bosnia, where the slaughter unfolded.

Through much of the 16 years Mladic was in hiding, evidence has been accumulating in the case files of the Yugoslav war crimes tribunal of his key role in genocidal crimes in Bosnia, as one after another of his subordinates were sent to prison.

Obama announced a new lineup of his top military leadership group in the Rose Garden of the White House just before venturing across the Potomac to pay tribute to the nation’s war dead at Arlington National Cemetery. The Memorial Day announcements had been expected, although there was no immediate indication what the military leadership moves might imply for possible changes in military strategy.

Already, the president had turned, in late April, to CIA Director Leon Panetta to succeed Robert Gates as secretary of defense and chose to move Army Gen. David Petraeus from his command of the Afghanistan war effort to the United States to replace Panetta at the CIA.

And he has one catchy hobby: singing. He’ll belt out Frank Sinatra’s “New York, New York” at the drop of a hat.

Crooning is not among the qualities that pushed Dempsey to the top of Obama’s list in searching for a successor to Adm. Mike Mullen, whose term as Joint Chiefs chairman began under President George W. Bush and ends Sept. 30. But Dempsey’s singing singles him out in a field of Army generals who are usually less publicly playful, and more rigidly aligned with a military culture of caution.

The report, a copy of which was obtained Monday by The Associated Press, estimates that the death toll was between 46,000 and 85,000, far below the Haitian government’s official figure of 316,000. The report was prepared for the U.S. Agency for International Development but has not yet been publicly released.

The report has inconsistencies, however, and won’t be released publicly until they are resolved, U.S. State Department spokeswoman Preeti Shah told the AP.

On energy, taxes, health care and other topics, the top candidates hold positions that are more conservative than those they espoused a few years ago.

The shifts reflect the evolving views of conservative voters, who will play a major role in choosing the Republican nominee. In that sense, the candidates’ repositioning seems savvy or even essential.

“After meeting with university officials, we agreed that it is in the best interest of Ohio State that I resign as head football coach,” Tressel wrote in the resignation letter he submitted on Monday morning. “The recent situation has been a distraction for our great university and I make this decision for the greater good of the school.”

Luke Fickell will be the coach for the 2011 season. He already had been selected to be the interim coach while Tressel served a five-game suspension.

At street level, the walled Old City is an energetic and fractious enclave with a physical landscape that is predominantly Islamic and a population that is mainly Arab.

Underground Jerusalem is different: Here the noise recedes, the fierce Middle Eastern sun disappears, and light comes from fluorescent bulbs. There is a smell of earth and mildew, and the geography recalls a Jewish city that existed 2,000 years ago.

Belgium’s bishops and religious leaders said in a statement Monday they are “deeply touched and distraught” by revelations over the past year, when over 500 witnesses have come forward with harrowing accounts of molestation in the country by Catholic clergy spanning decades.

But the leader of a group of survivors said she would put her faith only in actions, not in anything the bishops said.

“It’s just a matter of time now before we call for a drug that we need to save a patient’s life and we find out there isn’t any,” says Dr. Eric Lavonas of the American College of Emergency Physicians.

The problem of scarce supplies or even completely unavailable medications isn’t a new one but it’s getting markedly worse. The number listed in short supply has tripled over the past five years, to a record 211 medications last year. While some of those have been resolved, another 89 drug shortages have occurred in the first three months of this year, according to the University of Utah’s Drug Information Service. It tracks shortages for the American Society of Health-System Pharmacists.

Then he came upon JR Hildebrand’s crumpled car, all smashed up and sliding along the wall.

The rookie had made the ultimate mistake with his very last turn of the wheel, and Wheldon, not Hildebrand, made an improbable turn into Victory Lane.

“Endeavour looks real nice out there,” space station resident Ronald Garan Jr. called out.

The space station crew beamed down video of the departing shuttle, the last ever shot of Endeavour in orbit. It was a dark, solitary image against the blue, cloud-covered Earth and grew increasingly smaller.

On one side are residents trying to return the La Jolla beach known as Children’s Pool to the days when it was a kids’ swimming hole. On the other side are the advocates for the plump seals that go there to sunbathe with their young pups.

Now a judge is expected to decide whether the cove where a seawall was built in the 1930s to calm the Pacific waters so children could play there needs to be cordoned off year round to protect harbor seals.

Instead, starting Wednesday, deputies will treat those eligible for release just like U.S. citizens: They will be cited to appear in court.

City officials, however, aren’t so sure about Sheriff Mike Hennessey’s plan.

But as the Great Recession has drained city budgets across the country, it also has drained public pools for good. From New York City to Sacramento, Calif., pools now considered costly extravagances are being shuttered, taking away a rite of summer for millions. It’s especially hard for families that can’t afford a membership to private pool or fitness club and don’t live in a neighborhood where they can befriend with someone with a backyard pool.

Hard times haven’t always meant cutbacks. An author who studied the role swimming pools played in 20th century America found more than 1,000 municipal pools were built as public works projects during the Great Depression. But this time, most governments only see decades-old pools burning holes in already tight budgets.

In 1857, one man even counted his steps to the top (16,925). It’s been traveled via sled dog team and a camel. In September, motorsports competitor Travis Pastrana zoomed up at 72 mph.

For 150 years, the steep, narrow eight-mile road to the 6,288-foot summit of Mount Washington has been delighting and scaring the living daylights out of visitors, with its lack of guardrails and harrowing sheer-cliff drop-offs.

The list has at least 4,000 names, each one targeting Chiquita Brands International in U.S. lawsuits, claiming the produce giant’s payments and other assistance to the paramilitary groups amounted to supporting terrorists.

Cincinnati-based Chiquita in 2007 pleaded guilty to similar criminal charges brought by the Justice Department and paid a $25 million fine. But if the lawsuits succeed, plaintiffs’ lawyers estimate the damages against Chiquita could reach into the billions. The cases filed around the country are being consolidated before a South Florida federal judge who must decide whether to dismiss them or let them proceed.

Elite Navy SEALs storm a walled compound in Pakistan and take out the world’s most wanted terrorist.

Footnote: They were all men.

It turned out to be a wise decision. He now has more than 50 goats, and with growing demand for goat cheese, he gets a steady price for their milk from a nearby cheesemaker.

While the big dairy states of Wisconsin and California have the most dairy goats, according to the USDA’s National Agricultural Statistics Service, the industry is growing in New England as well.

Swimming pools are being closed. Recreation centers are locking their doors. Library summer reading programs are suffering. Openings for short-term jobs have evaporated.

Port Lau’s vacations of boredom ended the summer he was 14, when a city-funded program got him his first job – doing filing and clerical work at the state Supreme Court in Brooklyn. Now 18, the college freshman credits the experience with landing him a string of jobs and internships – including one for which he’ll be traveling to Germany this summer.