World Briefs

POZNAN, Poland – Negotiators at a U.N. climate conference broke through red tape and freed up millions of dollars Friday to help poor countries adapt to increasingly severe droughts, floods and other effects of global warming.

"This could be the one thing to come out of Poznan," said Kit Vaughan of WWF-Britain.

The decision in the final hours of the two-week conference could begin to release some $60 million within months, according to delegates and environmentalists following the closed-door talks.

VATICAN CITY – The Vatican hardened its opposition Friday to using embryos for stem cell research, cloning and in-vitro fertilization. But it showed flexibility on some forms of gene therapy and using vaccines prepared with cell lines derived from aborted fetuses.

In a major new document on bioethics, the Vatican also criticized "embryo adoption," whereby infertile couples adopt embryos frozen during in vitro techniques and subsequently abandoned. It said that while the intent was "praiseworthy" the result posed legal, medical and psychological problems.

The Vatican's Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith issued "The Dignity of a Person" to help answer bioethical questions that have emerged in the two decades since its last such document was published.

ROME – Officials put Rome on a state of alert for the Tiber breaking its banks Friday, after days of unrelenting rain and thunderstorms that the mayor likened to an "earthquake" striking the Italian capital.

Rome's mayor has already declared a state of emergency after severe storms early Thursday flooded underpasses, disrupted train and flight services and led to the death of one person.

"We've been hit by a wave of exceptionally bad weather that has affected all of Italy," Mayor Gianni Alemanno told La Repubblica newspaper when asked why a torrential downpour was enough to bring the Italian capital to its knees.

BOGOTA, Colombia – Colombia extradited one of its most notorious reputed drug kingpins to the United States on Friday, sending Diego Montoya to face trial on drug trafficking, money laundering and murder charges.

When elite commandos captured him in September 2007 at a remote farmhouse, the man known as "Don Diego" was on the FBI's list of 10 most wanted fugitives, the last at-large "capo" of a major Colombian cartel.

Montoya's departure for Miami in a DEA plane "closes the chapter of the government's offensive to dismantle the Norte del Valle cartel," national police chief Gen. Oscar Naranjo said of the successor to the Medellin and Cali cartels.