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The United States and China on Tuesday signed eight partnership pacts to cut greenhouse gases that will bring the world's two biggest carbon emitters closer together on climate policy, but fundamental differences between the two sides remain. Consensus between the United States and China will be a crucial part of any new global climate pact to replace the 1997 Kyoto Protocol, but they have long struggled to come to an agreement on how the costs of cutting greenhouse gases should be distributed among rich and poor nations. Speaking in Beijing during the latest round of the U.S.-China Strategic and Economic Dialogue, U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry said on Wednesday that the two sides remained committed to "close dialogue" on climate change negotiations. "The significance of these two nations coming together can't be understated.  We are working hard to find a solution together that can have an impact on the rest of the world." The deals, which involv

Torrential rains from a weakened but still dangerous typhoon battered Japan's Okinawa islands on Wednesday, leaving two dead and threatening widespread flooding as the storm headed for the nation's main islands. _0"> Typhoon Neoguri, a super typhoon as it bore down on Okinawa this week, had winds gusting up to 162 kph (100 mph) on Wednesday, but weather forecasters said the major concern now was rain, especially as parts of the westernmost main island of Kyushu have already been hit by heavy rain over the last week. Authorities warned of record rainfall in Okinawa as rivers in some areas overflowed. More than 200,000 residents were told to leave their homes, down from over 500,000 on Tuesday. "Given the situation, there is still potential for some serious damage," an official from the Japanese Meteorological Agency (JMA) told a news conference. Some 30 people were injured, mainly from falls, but none of the injuries was life-threatening. Television foota

Floods, storms and other natural disasters claimed more than 2,700 lives and caused around $42 billion in damage worldwide in the first half of 2014, but this was well below the first half of last year and a 10-year average, reinsurer Munich Re said on Wednesday. _0"> The world's biggest reinsurer said landslides and flash floods in Afghanistan were the deadliest disasters, claiming more than 650 lives, while snow storms in Japan were the costliest, with insured losses of more than $2.5 billion. Storm "Ela", which hit parts of western Europe in early June, is expected to cost insurers about 1.8 billion euros ($2.5 billion), Munich Re said. In Germany alone, insured losses from the storm came to 650 million euros. But the $42 billion bill in the first half and the $17 billion in claims paid by insurers were below the average of the last 10 years of $95 billion and $25 billion, respectively, Munich Re said in its six-monthly review of natural disasters. The nu

Thousands of people in U.S. East Coast states woke up to power cuts and a major clean-up operation on Wednesday after severe storms and high winds killed five people. One of the hardest hit spots was the Syracuse-area community of Smithfield, New York, where four of the deaths were reported and at least four homes destroyed on Tuesday, Madison County Undersheriff John Ball said in a statement. In Maryland, one boy was killed and eight others, aged 15 and under, were injured when they tried to shelter from tree branches and other debris being whipped around by the wind. The storms uprooted trees and tore down power lines across several counties in central New York, as the extreme weather raged from the Ohio Valley and parts of New England through the mid-Atlantic region, police and weather officials said. Roughly 174,000 people were without power in the Philadelphia region, Pennsylvania utility PECO spokeswoman Jackie Thompson said. CNN reported nearly 500,000 homes and businesse

The baseline for "normal" weather used by everyone from farmers to governments to plan ahead needs to be updated more frequently to account for the big shifts caused by global warming, the U.N.'s World Meteorological Organization said on Wednesday. _0"> The WMO's Commission for Climatology believes rising temperatures and more heatwaves and heavy rains mean the existing baseline, based on the climate averages of 1961-90, is out of date as a guide, the WMO said in a statement. "For water resources, agriculture and energy, the old averages no longer reflect the current realities," Omar Baddour, head of the data management applications at the WMO, told Reuters. A government trying to decide where to build river flood defenses or a hydroelectric dam based on average rainfall could be misled by the 1961-90 data, for example, while a farmer studying average temperatures might plant crops that wilt in warmer conditions, he said. Under current rules, t

Over 244,000 homes and businesses in the U.S. Mid-Atlantic and Northeast states remained without power on Wednesday after severe thunderstorms rolled through the region overnight. _0"> Buckeye Partners LP, a U.S. petroleum pipeline operator, said in a notice to shippers that its Laurel refined products pipeline from Boothwyn, Pennsylvania, near Philadelphia, was shut due to a power failure. Officials at Buckeye were not immediately available for comment. Exelon Corp's PECO utility in the Philadelphia area said it expected to restore power to the Buckeye pipeline in about three hours. Exelon said the storm affected about 260,000 customers and the company expects to restore power to most of the 43,000 still without service on Wednesday and Thursday. PECO, however, said that some customers in the hardest-hit areas may have to wait until Friday for power to be restored. The following lists outages by utility: Power Company State Out Now

At least one tornado touched down in an upstate New York town during a violent spate of weather that killed five people on the East Coast, officials said on Wednesday. New York Governor Andrew Cuomo toured the hard-hit town of Smithfield, outside Syracuse, where four people were killed and at least four homes were destroyed in storms on Tuesday. "It looks like literally a bomb went off in a house," Cuomo said. "We just see devastation everywhere." New York victims included a 35-year-old mother and her 4-month-old daughter who died when their double-wide mobile home was leveled by the tornado, and a man who died with his dog in a house around the corner, Madison County Sheriff Allen Riley told reporters. Barbara Watson, a National Weather Service meteorologist who inspected the Smithfield site, said the tornado that hit was at least an EF2, the second level of severity on the five-step Enhanced Fujita scale, with wind speeds well over 100 mph. In Carroll Co