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BEIJING – China, the world's largest emitter of greenhouse gases, lauded Sunday the outcome of a historic U.N. climate conference that ended with a nonbinding agreement that urges major polluters to make deeper emissions cuts — but does not require it.
The international climate talks that brought more than 110 leaders together in Copenhagen produced "significant and positive" results, Foreign Minister Yang Jiechi said.
Disputes between rich and poor countries and between the world's biggest carbon polluters — China and the United States — dominated the two-week conference. Tens of thousands of protesters took to the streets to demand action to cool an overheating planet.
The meeting ended Saturday after a 31-hour negotiating marathon, with delegates accepting a U.S.-brokered compromise. The so-called Copenhagen Accord gives billions of dollars in climate aid to poor nations but does not require the world's major polluters to make deeper cuts in their greenhouse gas emissions.
German Chancellor Angela Merkel defended the much-criticized outcome as a first step that paves the way for action. Merkel was quoted Sunday as telling the Bild am Sonntag newspaper that "Copenhagen is a first step toward a new world climate order — no more, but also no less."
Merkel said that "anyone who just badmouths Copenhagen now is engaging in the business of those who are applying the brakes rather than moving forward."
Yang said the positive outcomes of the conference were that it upheld the principle of "common but differentiated responsibilities" recognized by the Kyoto Protocol, and made a step forward in promoting binding emissions cuts for developed countries and voluntary mitigating actions by developing countries.
"Developing and developed countries are very different in their historical emissions responsibilities and current emissions levels, and in their basic national characteristics and development stages," Yang said in a statement. "Therefore, they should shoulder different responsibilities and obligations in fighting climate change."
He said the conference also created a consensus on key issues such as long-term global emissions reduction targets, funding and technology support to developing countries, and transparency. He did not go into details.
"The Copenhagen conference is not a destination but a new beginning," Yang said.
China has said it will rein in its greenhouse gas output, pledging to reduce its carbon intensity — its use of fossil fuels per unit of economic output — by 40 to 45 percent.
The Copenhagen Accord emerged principally from President Barack Obama's meeting with Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao and the leaders of India, Brazil and South Africa. But the agreement was protested by several nations that demanded deeper emissions cuts by the industrialized world.
Its key elements, with no legal obligation, were that richer nations will finance a $10 billion-a-year, three-year program to fund poorer nations' projects to deal with drought and other impacts of climate change, and to develop clean energy.
A goal was also set to mobilize $100 billion a year by 2020 for the same adaptation and mitigation purposes.
In a U.S. concession to China and other developing nations, text was dropped from the declaration that would have set a goal of reducing global emissions by 50 percent by 2050. Developing nations thought that would hamper efforts to raise their people from poverty.

PESHAWAR, Pakistan (AFP) –
Taliban militants on Wednesday dynamited two boys' schools in Pakistan's Khyber district, where troops are pressing an offensive against Islamist insurgents, an official said.

The attacks took place in Bara town, about 20 kilometres (13 miles) south of the regional capital Peshawar, with most of the buildings reduced to rubble but no one injured in the blasts in the early hours of the morning.

Pakistan is currently in the grip of a fierce Taliban insurgency, with 68 people killed in bombs across the country in the past three days alone as militants avenge multiple operations against them in the lawless northwest.

"Both main school buildings were completely destroyed," said Shafeerullah Wazir, the top administrative official of Khyber district, adding that only two classrooms remained standing in the adjacent schools.

Wazir said that militants buried large quantities of dynamite around the outer walls of the government-run high school and primary school.

"Both Taliban and Lashkar-e-Islam people are involved in this act," he said.

Pakistani troops launched an offensive in Khyber district -- which straddles Peshawar and Afghanistan -- in September to try and flush out both the Taliban and homegrown militant group Lashkar-e-Islam (Army of Islam).

Bara is close to Peshawar, the capital of North West Frontier Province, which has been hit by a series of bombings in recent months, with a suicide blast on October 28 killing 125 people in the worst attack in two years.

Islamist militants opposed to co-education have destroyed hundreds of schools, mostly for girls, in the northwest of the country in recent years.

Nearly 200 schools were destroyed in the Swat valley alone during a two-year Taliban uprising to enforce sharia law in a district once favoured by Western tourists for its ski slopes and bracing mountain air.

Pakistan's military is engaged in offensives against Islamist fighters across much of the northwest including the tribal areas bordering Afghanistan, a region branded by Washington as the most dangerous place on earth.

About 30,000 troops poured into South Waziristan in mid October to try and dismantle the strongholds of the Taliban leadership, enraging militants who have responded with a surge in bomb blasts and attacks.

On Monday, blasts in Peshawar and the eastern city of Lahore killed 59 people, then on Tuesday two suicide attackers detonated a car bomb near the offices of Pakistan's main spy agency in eastern Multan, killing nine.

A fierce Islamist insurgency has killed more than 2,670 people in attacks in Pakistan mostly blamed on the Taliban in the last two-and-a-half years.

SEOUL (Reuters) –
North Korea is expected to suffer a serious grain shortage this year, well short of what it needs, a U.N. official who recently returned from the impoverished state said on Wednesday.

"We do estimate that the DPRK (North Korea) may have to import a bit over 1 million tonnes to cover the needs," said Daniele Donati, U.N. Food and Agriculture Organisation's emergency operations chief, who went there on an inspection tour state last week.

The FAO estimates that destitute North Korea needs about 5.1 million tonnes of grain a year for food, animal feed and seed.

The shortfall is about the same as last year's in a country where the United Nations says millions do not have enough to eat.

Donati told Reuters in a telephone call from Bangkok the North Korean food shortage was persistent but more or less stable.

"There is reason for concern," he said. He expects the FAO to release a more detailed assessment early next year.

A North Korean long-range rocket launch, widely seen as a missile test, and a separate nuclear test this year stoked criticism that the country should spend more on its citizens and less on weapons. It also soured the mood for the international food donations that Pyongyang relies on to feed its people.

The North has lost out on about 500,000 tonnes of rice aid and about 300,000 tonnes of fertilizer South Korea used to provide each year due to political wrangling with its neighbor.

Donati said the North's farm sector has been hurt by shortages of fertilizer and that use of fertilizer this year marked lows not seen since about 1990.

There was no indication that flooding the North saw in the middle of the year had caused major harm to the harvest, he said.

Pyongyang has tried to keep its humanitarian needs separate from the sputtering nuclear discussions that received new hope when U.S. President Barack Obama sent his first envoy to the North this week in a bid to revive the talks.

But the North's recent currency revaluation appears to have been met with widespread anger by inflating the price of goods and food for an already impoverished public and slashing the wealth of a burgeoning merchant class.

(Editing by Jonathan Thatcher)