In her first major foreign policy speech, to a group of experts in Berlin, Beckett will call on the European Union to lead a global push towards new technologies and renewable energy, warning EU countries are already "dangerously behind the curve".

Beckett, according to a text of her speech obtained by Reuters, will cite reduced rainfall in the Middle East as a possible trigger for security problems.

"Look at those things that are highest on the European agenda -- strong borders, poverty reduction, the risks of conflict and international terrorism, energy security, jobs and growth," Beckett will say.

"Get our response right to climate change and our ability to deal with all of these is enhanced. Get it wrong and our efforts across the board will be undermined."

Beckett's speech follows an EU leaders' meeting in Finland last week that focussed on energy policy and urged action on climate change.

She will say climate change, with drastically diminishing resources in some of the most volatile parts of the world, has the potential to create a "potentially catastrophic dynamic" in regions already at breaking point.

Beckett, a former environment minister, will say the Middle East is a case in point as climate models suggest Saudi Arabia, Iran and Iraq will be among those countries to see the biggest rainfall reductions in the world.

Egypt -- a pivotal country for regional stability -- will suffer a double blow, she will say, as loss of flow from the river Nile and rising sea-levels in the north are set to destroy the country's agricultural heartland.

Beckett will urge governments to produce incentives and penalties designed to drive private capital towards a low-carbon world economy.

"The greatest security threat we face as a global community won't be met by guns and tanks," she will say.

"It will be solved by investment in the emerging techniques of soft power -- building avenues of opportunity that will lead to a low-carbon economy."

The pair, which climbed a ladder to reach the ledge, unfurled a banner that read "Bush: Let NOAA Tell the Truth," while a small group of demonstrators handed out fliers on a nearby sidewalk.

Police eventually used a cherry picker from a nearby construction site to reach the demonstrators and lower them to the ground. Both men, Ted Glick, 56, and Paul Burman, 23, were charged with disorderly conduct, reckless endangerment and trespassing.

The men had climbed to the ledge using a ladder and used suction cups to anchor themselves to a window.

NOAA, based in Silver Spring, studies climate, weather and the oceans. Its agencies include the National Weather Service and the National Marine Fisheries Service.

The demonstrators said they were part of the U.S. Climate Emergency Council and the Chesapeake Climate Action Network. The groups claim NOAA denies scientific evidence that recent severe weather, such as powerful hurricanes, is caused by climate change. They also allege NOAA withholds proof of this effect.

"People are seeing that the climate is changing," said Mike Tidwell, head of the Chesapeake Climate Action Network. "A grass roots movement is emerging from that."

In a statement Monday, NOAA spokesman Jordan St. John said: "We're proud of our scientists and the great work they do, and we encourage vigorous peer review and public discussion."

A report in the scientific journal Nature last month claimed NOAA administrators blocked the release of a report that linked hurricane strength and frequency to global warming. In February, a NASA climate scientist said NOAA prevents researchers working on climate change from speaking freely about their work.

NOAA denied both allegations and says its work is not politically motivated.

David Arnold sits on a bench outside a helicopter tour office, waiting for his charter flight. He shuffles through a collection of 1930s photographs showing Alaska glaciers from the air. They were taken by Washburn, a mountain-climber, mapmaker and museum director.

"The most remarkable thing about Brad's pictures is the artistic quality of them," Arnold says. "And actually, what you see today is the loss of art. The forces, the confrontations that so enamored him are gone."

The glaciers Washburn found were massive. But many have since lost much of their mass. Arnold's goal this day is to shoot the Mendenhall Glacier, in Juneau, and learn how it has changed since Washburn flew by in 1937.

A mountain-ringed ice field almost the size of Rhode Island is the Mendenhall Glacier's birthplace. The fractured, twisting river of ice wends its way down a dozen miles of high-walled valley.

Tour buses bring more than 350,000 people a year to gawk at its face, a wall more than 100 feet high and a mile wide.

Washburn found a far calmer scene when he took his photograph of Mendenhall 70 years ago. That image shows the glacier flowing into a tree-spotted valley, largely free of human habitation.

Today, Arnold finds the area cluttered with shopping malls, suburban subdivisions and a modern airport. That makes replicating Washburn's shot difficult.

"Shooting the Mendenhall in Juneau is the first time I've looked at so much change, human change, just buildings and development," he says. "And that turned out to be, for me, very disorienting."

But Arnold is ready to try. He climbs into the helicopter, prepared to juggle his cameras while coping with wind, cold fingers and tearing eyes. But according to biographer Mike Sfraga, it's nothing compared to what Washburn had to handle.

"At 16,000 to 18,000 feet, he would hang out of the plane, and his pilot would do choreography over the mountains," Sfraga says of Washburn's daredevil techniques.

Sfraga says Washburn's passion overcame the challenges of heavy camera gear and cold temperatures.

It took two flights in the helicopter, but Arnold found Washburn's angle. "I was amazed at how much the glacier had retreated," Arnold says.

Arnold's photograph shows a smaller, thinner Mendenhall. Its crumpled, white image is much less of a presence than in Washburn's earlier image.

"I suppose if you're going to be poetic about matching up the development with the demise, or the slowly shrinking glacier, this is the shot," Arnold says.

Arnold is working for the same institution Washburn directed for 40 years, the Boston Museum of Science. Eventually, his shots will be paired with Washburn's for public display.

"WSI expects this period (November-January) to average cooler than normal in major cities of the Northeast and parts of the southern Rockies and Southwest," WSI said in a statement.

Several government and private forecasters are now forecasting normal or colder-than-normal weather for the Northeast through January.

States in the Northeast should see warmer-than-normal temperatures in November before cooling down in December and January. The warmer November would help companies build up natural gas inventories ahead of winter, WSI said.

"Warmer weather in November may extend the injection season and put additional pressure on physical gas prices as there is little room for excess gas due to the extremely full storage, expected at 3.5 to 3.6 Tcf (trillion cubic feet) by early November," WSI said.

Other U.S. regions, including the Southeast, were expected to be warmer-than-normal from November to December, WSI forecast.

"Warmer-than-normal temperatures are expected across the rest of the northern United States and the Southeast," WSI said.

The only thing unusual about Sifford's story is that he's not a Latino immigrant. He's a Black man from North Carolina, trying his luck as a day laborer on the street corners of post-flood New Orleans.

On the corners, all the tensions that beset Black and Latino relations throughout the country are played out. Before the levees broke, Latinos made up no more than three percent of New Orleans' population. Today they're 20 percent, as immigrants seeking work in demolition and construction have arrived from other U.S. cities and from south of the border.

At the same time, displaced New Orleanians, mostly African Americans (who were two-thirds of New Orleans' pre-flood population), are struggling to return to the city and to their jobs. Often, they can't come back because schools are gone, homes are gone, and rents for the housing that's left have doubled or tripled.

WORKER JUSTICE COALITION

The New Orleans Worker Justice Coalition, made up of new and old grassroots and advocacy organizations, wants to give such workers a voice in the city's reconstruction. The odds against them are formidable, given the chaotic, anything-goes environment.

"The federal government dismantled every protection, every safety net, every mechanism for accountability," says Saket Soni, an organizer for the coalition. "It created a void in which the only law that governs reconstruction is the contractor food chain."

Contrary to the hopes of many construction workers who've flocked to the city, it's not a seller's market for labor power. In July the city's jobless rate was 7.2 percent, higher than the summer before the flood. In such an atmosphere, resentments and stereotypes flourish.

According to a new report from the Advancement Project, the National Immigration Law Center, and the Worker Justice Coalition, who interviewed more than 800 workers on street corners, on buses, and in parks, "The perception is that workers of color are competing for jobs. The reality is that private contractors are competing for the cheapest labor."

Immigrant workers tell many stories like Juan Sifford's, of unpaid wages, broken promises, and other abuses. The Advancement Project report makes plain that employer theft of wages is one of the commonplaces of day labor. Of 66 workers interviewed in City Park, 60 percent had not been paid for part or all of their work.

BRIDGING THE GULF

Even among those fighting for workers' rights, the divisions between workers of color were exemplified by two large protest marches held last spring. One, on April 1, was led by Jesse Jackson and focused on voting rights. The 4,000 marchers were mostly Black; they demanded the "right of return" and priority for Katrina survivors in jobs and training. A month later, a 5,000-person May Day march for immigrants' rights was, not surprisingly, mostly Latino.

Determined to bridge the gulf, coalition members look for ways to bring the two communities together. When the coalition helped organize the May Day march, it made sure that the slogans included respect for all workers and "multi-racial unity," as well as immigrant rights.

Organizer Colette Tippy says that Latino workers active with the coalition "are trying to tie their destiny to that of African Americans instead of to the history of white immigrants."

UNIONS REBUILD

While grassroots activists look for footing in the ravaged city, the AFL-CIO and two affiliates of the Change to Win federation are taking an indirect, and, they hope, larger-scale approach to organizing workers.

Through a Worker Resource Center founded in July, the Laborers and the Service Employees (SEIU) are offering free classes in job skills for workers ranging from certified nurse's aids to construction workers. The construction jobs available are mostly in the $12-14 range, the health care jobs $7-$8.

The AFL-CIO is coming at the jobs problem from a different angle: three investment trusts sponsored by union pension funds that will pump $700 million into construction of apartments, hotels, and hospitals, and into home mortgages.

Over seven years, the plan is to spend $250 million to build 5,000 to 10,000 housing units and to generate nearly six million hours of union construction work. The federation's Building and Construction Trades Department will offer apprenticeships.

And who will get these jobs? Although both sets of unions say they are open to all, the programs are targeted to former Gulf Coast residents. The Laborers' program, for instance, asks applicants to read at an eighth-grade level, and graduates of their first class were all African Americans.

Rosana Cruz, Gulf Coast field organizer for the National Immigration Law Center, says, "For unions to come in now and just pay attention to Latinos, after decades of ignoring Blacks in the South-'here's where we can increase our market share'-would be awful." And indeed, the unions do seem focused on the population most likely to provide a stable base for future unionization.

How will unions and grassroots coalitions deal with a situation that seems scripted to benefit employers-workers wrangling for jobs and blaming each other?

Kimberley Richards of the People's Institute for Survival and Beyond wants to do her part through education. If the Worker Justice Coalition does its job, she says, it will help both African American and Latino workers "understand how labor abuses in this region have built capital for this country.

"When you see the relationship of labor injustice to the building of wealth, you get a greater understanding that whatever tensions there are between us do not come out of our own tensions with each other."

The quake struck at about 6:18 a.m. (2318 GMT) and was centered near the Ogasawara island group, about 780 kilometers (483 miles) south of Tokyo, the Meteorological Agency said.

The quake was extremely shallow, said agency official Toshiyuki Suzuki. There were no immediate reports of injuries or damage from the quake, he added.

Japan sits atop four tectonic plates and is one of the most earthquake-prone countries in the world.