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"We are at the low end of the production line for the global economy," he said. "We produce products and these products are consumed by other countries, especially the developed countries. This share of emissions should be taken by the consumers but not the producers," he said.

Mr Li also criticised proposals by the US to place carbon tariffs on goods imported from countries that do not limit those gases blamed for a rises in global temperatures. "If developed countries set a barrier in the name of climate change for trade, I think it is a disaster," Mr Li said.

Working out quite how to put Mr Li's suggestion into practice would be a logistical nightmare, other delegates in Washington said, even if the idea was ever agreed in principle. Asking importers to handle emissions "would mean that we would also like them to have jurisdiction and legislative powers in order to control and limit those," top EU climate negotiator Artur Runge-Metzger said.

Japan's chief negotiator Shinsuke Sugiyama pointed out that whatever deal emerged from Copenhagen, it was vital that it involved the US and China this time around. "Japan will not repeat Kyoto," Mr Sugiyama said. "At Kyoto we were not able to involve the biggest emitters in the world by now - and that means the United States of America and China," he said.

South Korea and the US say Pyongyang may be preparing to test-fire a long-range missile and have warned it against the launch planned for April. The North insists it is preparing to send up a communications satellite. The US, Japan and South Korea have all expressed concerns that the North is actually planning to test-fire a long-range missile. North Korea is banned from firing either device under a UN Security Council resolution prohibiting it from ballistic activity.

North Korean Premier Kim Yong-il - who is not related to leader Kim Jong-il - arrived in Beijing on Tuesday for a five-day trip.

Ayatollah Khatami is not regarded as a high-profile figure, so it was not clear how much weight his words carried.

At Friday prayers at Tehran university, Ayatollah Ahmad Khatami referred to the demonstrators as rioters and declared, “I want the judiciary to punish leading rioters firmly and without showing any mercy to teach everyone a lesson.” Reuters quoted him as saying demonstrators should be tried for waging war against God. The punishment for such offenses under Islamic law is death, Reuters said.

The authorities have repeatedly dismissed the opposition complaints. In remarks quoted on the official IRNA news agency on Friday , Abbas-Ali Kadkhodaei, a spokesman for the 12-member Guardian Council charged with vetting elections, said the panel had “almost finished reviewing defeated candidates’ election complaints” which the council said earlier numbered in excess of 600.“The reviews showed that the election was the healthiest since the revolution,” Mr. Kadkhodaei said. “There were no major violations in the election.”

on Friday, at a meeting of foreign ministers from the Group of Eight in Trieste, Italy, a joint statement said they “deployed post-electoral violence which led to the loss of lives of Iranian civilians” and urged Iran to respect human rights, including freedom of expression.” Along with Japan and Russia, the G-8 includes the United States, Canada, France, Germany, Italy and Britain.It called on Iran to “guarantee that the will of the Iranian people is reflected in the electoral process” but it said the door must remain open to dialogue with Tehran in its contentious nuclear program, news reports said.

The joint statement was a compromise between some European countries seeking a hard line, and Russia, whose foreign minister, Sergey V. Lavrov, was quoted as telling a news conference in Trieste that while Moscow wanted to express its “most serious concern” over use of force in Iran, “we will not interfere in Iran’s internal affairs.”

In another indication of the depth of divisions that remain, a senior cleric, Grand Ayatollah Nasser Makarem-Shirazi, called for “national conciliation.” “Definitively, something must be done to ensure that there are no embers burning under the ashes, and that hostilities, antagonism and rivalries are transformed into amity and cooperation among all parties,” he said in comments posted on the state-run Press TV Web site.

Yesterday, Pyongyang threatened war on any country that dared to stop its ships under the new sanctions approved by the UN security council on Friday.

In yesterday's statement, Pyongyang said it has been enriching uranium to provide fuel for its light-water reactor. It was the first public acknowledgment that the North is running such a programme in addition to its known plutonium one.

The biggest question mark involved China, which has been reluctant to deploy the full weight of its influence on North Korea out of fear of destabilizing it amid a leadership transition. But various analysts suggested that it would not have publicly backed such sanctions unless it was serious about responding to North Korea’s underground nuclear test on May 25.

Mrs. Clinton at first said the charges against the women were “baseless,” while the administration pressed for them to be freed on humanitarian grounds.

Her comments on Friday appear to reflect a changing picture that has been complicated by the North’s test of a nuclear missile in May and its decision to fire seven ballistic missiles into the Sea of Japan on the Fourth of July.

A scholar who visited the North said in an interview published Friday in a South Korean daily that the two women were not in a prison camp, but rather in a guest house in Pyongyang, a development that seemed to suggest that the North still wanted talks with Washington on the women’s release.

Experts said that Mrs. Clinton appeared to be trying to keep the issue of the journalists separate from the conflict over the North’s nuclear ambitions. “It’s clear to me they don’t want this tail to wag the nuclear dog,” said Michael Green, a top Asia expert for former President George W. Bush. “They are trying to keep it in a separate lane.”

The government-controlled North Korean news agency said the action was in response to a UN statement condemning the recent rocket launch and agreeing to tighten existing sanctions.

China, Pyongyang's closest ally, called for "calm and restraint" from all sides, while Russia and Japan urged North Korea to return to the negotiating table.

The move comes hours after the 15-member Security Council unanimously condemned the long-range rocket launch on 5 April.

The council also ordered the UN Sanctions Committee to begin enforcing both financial sanctions and an existing arms embargo imposed after the 2006 tests.

“It’s a setback,” Jonathan McDowell, a Harvard astronomer who tracks satellites and rocket launchings, said of the North Korean launching. He added that the North Koreans must now find and fix the problem. “The missile doesn’t represent any kind of near-term threat.”

The United States Northern Command, based in Colorado Springs, issued a statement on Sunday that portrayed the launching as a major failure. It based its information on a maze of federal radars, spy ships and satellites that monitor global missile firings.

The command emphasized that “no object entered orbit,” apparently a reference to both the rocket’s third stage as well as the supposed satellite.

North Korea’s public portrayal of the event as a complete success was similar in its celebratory tone to the happy note it struck in 1998 after having failed to loft a satellite into orbit.

A general rule of engineering is that failures reveal more than successes. If so, North Korea — which has now test-fired three long-range rockets, each time unsuccessfully — is learning a lot about limitations.

“It’s not unusual to have a series of failures at the beginning of a missile program,” Jeffrey G. Lewis, an arms control specialist at the New America Foundation, a research group in Washington, said in an interview. “But they don’t test enough to develop confidence that they’re getting over the problems.”Dr. Lewis added that an influential 1998 report by Donald H. Rumsfeld, before he became secretary of defense in the Bush administration, argued that the North Korean rockets might be good enough to pose a threat to the United States, even without flight testing. “But given that both versions of the Taepodong-2 have failed now,” he said, “we have very little confidence in the reliability of the system.”

In August 1998, North Korea’s first attempt at launching a long-range rocket, the Taepodong-1, managed to scare Japan but failed to deliver a satellite to orbit. The troubles continued in July 2006 when its second test of a long-range missile, the Taepodong-2, ended in an explosion just seconds after liftoff.

The bad news for Bush’s successor, Barack Obama, is that he now faces a much larger and potentially more troubling axis—an axis of upheaval. This axis has at least nine members, and quite possibly more. What unites them is not so much their wicked intentions as their instability, which the global financial crisis only makes worse every day. Unfortunately, that same crisis is making it far from easy for the United States to respond to this new “grave and growing danger.”

In at least one of the world’s regions—the greater Middle East—two of these three factors have been present for some time: Ethnic conflict has been rife there for decades, and following the difficulties and disappointments in Iraq and Afghanistan, the United States already seems likely to begin winding down its quasi-imperial presence in the region. It likely still will.

no matter how low interest rates go or how high deficits rise, there will be a substantial increase in unemployment in most economies this year and a painful decline in incomes. Such economic pain nearly always has geopolitical consequences. Indeed, we can already see the first symptoms of the coming upheaval.

In the essays that follow, Jeffrey Gettleman describes Somalia’s endless anarchy, Arkady Ostrovsky analyzes Russia’s new brand of aggression, and Sam Quinones explores Mexico’s drug-war-fueled misery. These, however, are just three case studies out of a possible nine or more.