World News

UNITED NATIONS, July 16 (PNA/Xinhua) -- Industrialized and developing countries must rectify their "formidable differences" if the climate talks in Copenhagen are to bear substantive results, said the director of the UN climate change support team here on Wednesday.

LOS ANGELES, July 11 - The investigation into Michael Jackson's death continued on Friday, with the focus on painkillers the King of Pop may have used, and the doctors who gave them to him, the Los Angeles Times said on its website.

WASHINGTON, June 19 -- The United States will, in accordance with its agreement with Iraq, withdraw combat troops from all Iraqi urban areas, U.S. Ambassador to Baghdad Christopher Hill said here on Thursday. "We signed that (security) agreement and we will absolutely comply fully with it. And that means pulling all combat forces out of the ... cities," Hill told reporters.

SEOUL, June 19 -- South and North Korea failed to reach an agreement at Friday's talks over Pyongyang's demands for wage and rent hikes at a joint industrial venture, but agreed to meet again next month, a Seoul official said. The two sides will hold a follow-up meeting on July 2, Unification Ministry spokesman Chun Hae-sung said in a briefing.

GENEVA, June 6 -- The World Health Organization (WHO) concluded an emergency expert meeting on Friday without making a decision to raise its pandemic alert level to the highest phase of 6. At the Emergency Committee meeting, WHO Director-General Margaret Chan noted that the world remains in pandemic alert phase 5 and reaffirmed that WHO will continue to monitor the situation closely in all countries reporting cases of the A/H1N1 influenza, the WHO said in a statement.

RIO DE JANEIRO, June 6 -- The Brazilian Air Force informed on Friday that bad weather conditions on the Air France Flight 445's crash site are making the search for the aircraft's parts more difficult.

SEOUL, May 19 (PNA/Yonhap) -- Leaders of the world's 80 largest cities that produce a majority of the earth's harmful greenhouse gases opened an international forum in Seoul Tuesday, calling on governments to swiftly chart strategies to fight global warming.

NEW DELHI, May 15 (PNA/Bernama) -- India has revealed that it has destroyed its chemical weapons stockpile, keeping its promise to the international community to completely eliminate its weapons by March this year. The IANS (Indo-Asian News Service) reported that India informed the Hague-based Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) that it had destroyed its stockpile on March 26, fulfilling its obligation to the arms control agreement.

UNITED NATIONS, May 15  -- A new global agreement on climate change will be difficult to reach, but still achievable at the upcoming UN climate change conference in Copenhagen in December, the head of the UN's climate change body said on Thursday. "Things really are becoming very urgent," with only 200 days left before the meeting, Yvo de Boer, executive secretary of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, told reporters at the UN Headquarters in New York.

NEW YORK, May 16 -- Crude prices retreated on Friday on the weak outlook for global energy demand. The International Energy Agency forecast the global oil demand would hit a 28-year low this year, saying optimism about an economic recovery was not reviving appetite for energy.