It all began at a high school volleyball tournament here on May 2

As schools shut down because of the flu

An assistant principal at a New York City public school died of complications from swine flu in an intensive care unit of a Queens hospital on Sunday night, the first death in New York State of the flu strain that has swept across much of the world since it was first identified in April.

Mitchell Wiener, the assistant principal of Intermediate School 238 in Hollis, Queens, died Sunday.

The number of swine flu cases in Japan soared over the weekend, raising the likelihood that the World Health Organization will soon have to raise its pandemic alert level to 6, the highest level.

On Sunday, the assistant principal of a school in Queens died after being hospitalized with swine flu. It was the sixth flu-related death in the United States and the first in New York State.

The number of public schools in New York City reporting children with flulike symptoms continued to rise Friday, as three more schools in Queens and Brooklyn were closed, bringing the total to six this week, and parents and city officials wrestled with how to handle the growing spread of the disease.

Twenty-five years after the federal government declared a long stretch of the Hudson River to be a contaminated Superfund site, the cleanup of its chief remaining source of pollution began here Friday with a single scoop of mud extracted by a computer-guided dredge.

Poor countries already suffering from the impact of climate change urgently need up to $2 billion to help adjust and cope, a new report submitted to the United Nations said on Thursday.

The funds are needed to help the most vulnerable countries, mostly in Africa and small island states, the Stockholm-based Commission on Climate Change and Development (CCCD) said.

The World Health Organization said Thursday that 2,371 people in 24 countries now had confirmed cases of swine flu.

A bus stop in Mexico City on Wednesday as some people began returning to work.

Only 46 people are known to have died of the virus, all but 2 of them in Mexico.

Scientists have come up with a scenario that suggests a huge tsunami crashed into the New York City region 2,300 years ago, dumping sediment and shells across Long Island and New Jersey and casting wood debris far up the Hudson river.

Six in 10 U.S. residents -- more than 186 million people -- live in areas with dangerous levels of air pollution, the American Lung Association reported on Wednesday.

The air in many U.S. cities became dirtier last year, the association said in its annual "State of the Air" report.