ISLAMABAD, Pakistan – President Pervez Musharraf rebuffed a U.S. envoy pressing him to… ISLAMABAD, Pakistan – President Pervez Musharraf rebuffed a U.S. envoy pressing him to lift his emergency rule, officials here said Sunday, but the Bush administration plans to keep its pressure on – at least as regards most of Musharraf’s crackdown.

Deputy Secretary of State John Negroponte hinted to Gen. Musharraf and other officials that U.S. aid to Pakistan could be endangered unless the general quits his army command, frees political detainees and ends a media crackdown, a diplomat said. At the same time, Negroponte and other officials indicated that Washington is not pushing Musharraf to restore the independent-minded judges who this year challenged his power.

Diplomats said the Bush administration has doubts about Pakistan’s Supreme Court because it believes some court rulings this year were too sympathetic to Islamic militants. But independent analysts say Washington will undermine its own message – and any hopes for a fair election and a shift toward democracy – if it fails to back the restoration of the independent judges.

Negroponte told Pakistani officials more repression here will only prod Congress to crimp aid to the country, and a diplomat said the administration already is reviewing how “all forms of aid, including military” could be restructured or cut.

Before flying home, Negroponte repeated Washington’s urging that Musharraf “lift the state of emergency, and release all political detainees. Emergency rule is not compatible with free, fair, and credible elections, which require the active participation of political parties, civil society and the media,” Negroponte said. -James Rupert, Newsday

AL-SADIYAH, Iraq – Despite the fact that Iraq and U.S. officials have made water projects among their top priorities, the percentage of Iraqis without access to decent water supplies has risen from 50 to 70 percent since the start of the U.S.-led war, according to an analysis by Oxfam International last summer.

The portion of Iraqis lacking decent sanitation was even worse – 80 percent.

Now, though, some U.S. officials think they’re about to make progress.

The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, using more than $1 billion in reconstruction funds, is building massive water treatment plants in urban areas, including one in the slums of Baghdad’s Sadr City.

Construction crews over the last three years, working there under heavy guard, have constructed a treatment plant that will produce an additional 25 million gallons of drinking water daily, enough for nearly 200,000 people. Miles of new water lines are also being installed, allowing 2 million of Sadr City’s residents to tap directly into the new plant and existing water supplies.

The aim is to deliver an additional 290 million gallons of water daily to the Iraqi population, and nearly three-fourths of that goal has been achieved, according to the corps.

“From my travels, I think it’s really getting better,” said U.S. Navy Capt. Tom Brovarone, who is on assignment in Iraq for the corps.

Oxfam officials remain cautious.

“It’s a bit premature to see how these projects will impact the situation,” said Manal Omar, a regional program manager for Oxfam in the Middle East, who questioned whether the security situation will allow the new projects to take hold. -Bobby Caina Calvan, McClatchy Newspapers

NEW DELHI – As concentrations of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere accelerate ahead of scientists’ projections, global warming is unequivocally under way, with potentially “abrupt or irreversible” effects looming, a Nobel-Prize winning U.N. panel on climate change reported Saturday.

The world still has time to avoid the most severe effects of climate change, however, if it can rapidly deploy existing and soon-expected new technology to cut carbon emissions, something that probably would require setting a price on carbon emissions to be effective, the Synthesis Report’s authors said.

The document, a synopsis of three climate reports released earlier this year by the thousands of scientists who make up the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, is intended as a succinct policy guide on the risks of climate change and the possible means to mitigate or adapt to it.

The report paints a grim picture of what the world might look like if policymakers – and in particular major polluters such as the United States, China and India – fail to act quickly to begin cutting greenhouse gas emissions.

Without action, slow rises in sea level will accelerate, forcing millions of people out of low-lying coastal regions. Worsening droughts, severe storms and water shortages will affect many regions of the world, and changing conditions are likely to put at least 20 to 30 percent of the world’s species – including virtually all its coral reefs – on the route to extinction, the report said.

Levels of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere already are the highest they have been in 650,000 years, the report said, and emissions are expected to grow 25 to 90 percent by 2030, even taking into account current efforts to cut them.

That suggests that if accelerating levels of emissions aren’t cut soon, the world could see catastrophic changes, including the complete melting of Greenland’s ice sheet and a worldwide sea level rise of 20 feet, within a few hundred years. Less dramatic effects would be widely noticeable by 2030 or even 2020, the report said. – Laurie Goering, Chicago Tribune

BAGHDAD – Since the last soldiers of the “surge” deployed last May, Baghdad has undergone a remarkable transformation.

No longer do the streets empty at dusk. Liquor stores and cinemas have reopened for business. Some shops stay open until late into the evening. Children play in parks, young women stay out after dark, restaurants are filled with families, and old men sit at sidewalk cafes playing backgammon and smoking sheesha pipes.

To be sure, Baghdad is still a violent and dangerous place. Pockets of territory remain under the control of the al-Qaeda in Iraq organization. Bandits and gangsters roam back alleyways. Explosions still rumble through the air, though far less frequently than they did a few months ago. Many issues remain unresolved and much could still go wrong.

The number of explosions of all kinds has fallen sharply, from 1,641 nationwide in March to 763 in October. That is still a high number but a level not seen since September 2005, according to the U.S. military.

Mortar attacks are also down, from an all-time high of 224 attacks in Baghdad in June to 53 in October. A senior U.S. general said Thursday that the number of bombings in the country since March had dropped by almost half.

Reliable casualty figures are hard to come by since the government stopped publicizing monthly tallies earlier this year, but inevitably the reduction in attacks has also reduced the number of deaths. According to an Associated Press tally, 750 people were killed in Iraq in October, down from 2,172 last December. Iraq’s Interior Ministry gives an even lower figure for the month: 506 civilians killed nationwide.

Though 2007 has been the deadliest year for U.S troops in Iraq since the 2003 invasion, U.S. military casualties also have dropped, from a year’s high of 126 in May to 38 in October, and 23 killed in the first two weeks of November.

U.S. and Iraqi officials attribute the improvement to a variety of factors. The surge of nearly 30,000 extra U.S. troops sent to Iraq has undoubtedly played a part, as have the increased capabilities of the Iraqi security forces.

Far more significant than the increased troop presence, officials say, is the revolt that has taken place within Sunni neighborhoods against al-Qaeda in Iraq. – Liz Sly, Chicago Tribune