By JOHN M. BRODER

WASHINGTON

The goal of the new incentives, which involve changes in how much fleet owners can charge drivers for the use of cars, was to make it more expensive for the owners to use the Ford Crown Victoria, the most common cab today, and more profitable to use hybrids like the Ford Escape and other fuel-efficient vehicles that cause less pollution.

The Environmental Protection Agency on Thursday set stringent new standards for airborne lead particles, following the recommendations of its science advisers and cutting the maximum allowable concentrations to a tenth of the previous standard. It was the first change in federal lead standards in three decades.

Fears of a sharp worldwide economic slowdown are threatening a hard-won European plan on climate change that European leaders hoped would set an example for the rest of the world.

Fierce wildfires erupted in Southern California on Monday, leaving two people dead and heralding the start of the most intense period of the fire season here.

During the seven somnolent years of the Bush administration, nearly every important initiative to deal with climate change has occurred at the state or local level

A program that helps poor countries reduce their vulnerability to floods, drought and other climate-related hazards will move to the University of Colorado, Boulder, under a grant from the Rockefeller Foundation, foundation and university officials said Wednesday.

A pitiable harvest this year has left small farmers all over central and northern Afghanistan facing hunger, and aid officials are warning of an acute food shortage this winter for nine million Afghan

Mayor Richard M. Daley of Chicago on Thursday unveiled perhaps the most aggressive plan of any major American city to reduce heat-trapping gases.

Sumatra's endangered elephants and tigers should get a boost from a move by Indonesia's government to expand one of their last havens, a national park on the island of Sumatra, the conservation group WWF said Thursday.
The area of the park, Tesso Nilo in Riau Province, is to be more than doubled to 212,500 acres. But the group warned that increased efforts would be vital to ensure that poaching and illegal logging did not continue.
WWF, whose headquarters are outside Geneva, said 60 to 80 elephants and about 50 tigers were believed to live in the area to be covered by the park.