Evening Edition

Prime Minister Julia Gillard said there would be a fixed price on carbon pollution, blamed for global warming, from next year before an emissions trading scheme was introduced in 2015.

“We have had a long debate about climate change in this country,” Gillard said in a rare televised address to the nation.

Republicans are refusing to raise America’s $14.29 trillion debt limit unless Obama agrees to curb the budget deficit, including cuts to government-funded programs to help the poor and the elderly.

Democrats are agreeing to try and save some $4 trillion over the next decade as part of the deal but say the Republicans are not meeting them half way by allowing tax reforms to spread the burden off the middle-class.

Murdoch’s News Corp. media empire is set to take full control of satellite broadcaster BSkyB but Labour leader Ed Miliband on Sunday led fresh calls for the proposed deal to be delayed until an ongoing police investigation is completed.

Reading a copy of the last edition of Britain’s biggest-selling weekly, Murdoch was whisked into the headquarters of publisher News International, which produced News of the World, in a chauffeur driven car.

Panetta, who took office 10 days ago, flew in after visiting Afghanistan and was also to urge Iraqi leaders to decide soon on whether they want US troops beyond the scheduled pullout at the end of this year, a senior US defence official said.

About 46,000 US troops remain in Iraq, down from a high of 170,000 after the 2003 US-led invasion. They are scheduled to leave in less than six months unless a deal is reached between Baghdad and Washington.

The shuttle docked at 11:07 am (1507 GMT), just over an hour after the spacecraft performed its habitual slow backflip so that the ISS crew could take pictures of Atlantis’s heat shield before clasping onto the lab, NASA said.

Hatches opened between the two spacecraft at 12:47 pm (1647 GMT), and the four Atlantis astronauts floated across to greet their ISS crewmates with hugs and smiles.

The United States needed a tense 5-3 penalty shootout to get past Brazil in Dresden after the match ended 2-2 after extra-time, and will next meet France for a place in the final.

Earlier Sweden, the only unbeaten team left in the tournament, outclassed Australia 3-1 in Augsburg and next play Japan, who eliminated two-time winners Germany on Saturday.

US defender Alex Krieger hit the winning penalty after her goalkeeper Hope Solo had earlier saved from Brazil’s Daiane to give her side the advantage in the shoot-out.

On the final whistle, American striker Abby Wambach had kept her side in the quarter-final with a dramatic header in the 122nd minute to level the scores after Brazil play-maker Marta had scored in the 92nd minute.

Obama and the top U.S. Republican, House of Representatives Speaker John Boehner, are to meet with other congressional leaders at 6 p.m. EDT (2200 GMT) at the White House for high-stakes deliberations with an August 2 deadline looming larger.

Failure to seal a deal by August 2 could mean the first-ever default on the nation’s financial obligations, which the White House and private economists warn could push the United States back into recession and trigger global financial chaos.

“Despite good-faith efforts to find common ground, the White House will not pursue a bigger debt-reduction agreement without tax hikes,” Boehner, the speaker of the House of Representatives and the top Republican in Congress, said in a statement.

“I believe the best approach may be to focus on producing a smaller measure.”

Murdoch, 80, swept into his London headquarters in the front passenger seat of a car, holding up the final edition of the best-selling News of the World, the newspaper he bought in 1969 that became the foundation stone of his international media empire, which he closed last week in a bid to stem the crisis.

Murdoch later travelled across the city to his London home where he was joined by his embattled newspaper group chief executive Rebekah Brooks, and then crossed the road to a hotel

The United States is scheduled to withdraw all its remaining 46,000 troops from Iraq by the end of this year, under the terms of a bilateral security pact — despite U.S. and Iraqi military concerns about expected gaps in security.

Panetta, fresh from a trip to Afghanistan, made hopeful remarks to Congress last month that Iraq’s government might eventually ask some U.S. forces to remain beyond 2011. But he was cautious in his comments to reporters in Afghanistan just before departing for Iraq.

Pakistani authorities have “taken some steps that have given us reason to pause on some of the aid which we’re giving to the military,” White House Chief of Staff William Daley said on ABC television’s “This Week with Christiane Amanpour.”

As a result, “We’ll hold back some of the money that the American taxpayers have committed to give,” he said, adding this amounted to about $800 million, or more than a third of the $2 billion given to Pakistan for security assistance.

European Central Bank President Jean-Claude Trichet will attend the meeting along with Jean-Claude Juncker, chairman of the region’s finance ministers, European Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso and Olli Rehn, the economic and monetary affairs commissioner, three official sources told Reuters.

Van Rompuy’s spokesman Dirk De Backer said: “It’s a coordination, not a crisis meeting.” He added that Italy would not be on the agenda and declined to say what would be discussed.

Bartenders, librarians, dental hygienists and other service workers in Connecticut are poised to earn paid sick time at the start of 2012.

While San Francisco and Washington, D.C. currently guarantee paid sick days for workers, with some minor variations in the laws, Connecticut is the first state to follow their lead.

Commander Chris Ferguson gently eased Atlantis into its parking slip on the station’s Harmony node at 11:07 a.m. EDT as the spacecraft soared 230 miles over the Pacific Ocean.

“Welcome to the International Space Station for the last time,” station flight engineer Ron Garan radioed to the crew.

The scrapping of the News of the World has not tempered British anger over improprieties by journalists working for Murdoch, and his $19 billion deal to take full control of satellite broadcaster British Sky Broadcasting remains in jeopardy.

The 80-year-old News Corp. CEO was seen reading the paper’s last issue in a red Range Rover as he was driven to the east London offices of his U.K. newspaper division, News International. Later, at his London apartment, he met with News International’s chief executive, Rebekah Brooks, who led News of the World when its reporters committed some of the most egregrious ethical lapses.

Yet they left room for negotiations on a more modest approach.

“He’s not someone to walk away from a tough fight,” White House chief of staff William Daley said. “Everyone agrees that a number around $4 trillion is the number that will … make a serious dent in our deficit.” But embedded among the tough words was rhetoric that acknowledged the “big deal’s” prospects had become uncertain at best.

President Barack Obama’s chief of staff, William Daley, said in a broadcast interview Sunday that the estranged relationship between the United States and Pakistan must be made “to work over time,” but until it does, “we’ll hold back some of the money that the American taxpayers are committed to give” to the country’s powerful military forces.

The suspension of U.S. aid, first reported by the New York Times, followed a statement last week by Adm. Mike Mullen, chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, that Pakistan’s security services may have sanctioned the killing of Pakistani journalist Saleem Shahzad who wrote about infiltration of the military by extremists. His battered body was found in June.

He refused to say whether the Obama administration wants the extension, but he expressed concern at a spike in U.S. deaths caused by what American officials believe are sophisticated explosive devices made in Iran.

Panetta prepared for talks Monday with Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki and other senior members of a government politically divided more than a year after national elections. Iraq has gone that long without defense or interior ministers, whose departments are responsible for the military and police.

At Mission Control on Sunday, lead flight director Kwatsi Alibaruho declared “this is it” as he gave the OK for the final docking in space shuttle history. Flashbacks to the shuttle’s very first space station docking – with Russia’s Mir in 1995 – flooded his mind as he viewed the shuttle on the screens. He was a NASA trainee back then.

About 240 miles (386 kilometers) above the Pacific, the station’s naval bell chimed a salute – one of many landmarks, or rather spacemarks, of this final two-week shuttle mission that are being savored one by one.