Peter Kent said the protocol “does not represent a way forward for Canada” and the country would face crippling fines for failing to meet its targets.

The move, which is legal and was expected, makes it the first nation to pull out of the global treaty.

The protocol, initially adopted in Kyoto, Japan, in 1997, is aimed at fighting global warming.

“Kyoto, for Canada, is in the past, and as such we are invoking our legal right to withdraw from Kyoto,” Mr Kent said in Toronto.

He said he would be formally advising the United Nations of his country’s intention to pull out.

‘Impediment’

He said meeting Canada’s obligations under Kyoto would cost $13.6bn (10.3bn euros; £8.7bn): “That’s $1,600 from every Canadian family – that’s the Kyoto cost to Canadians, that was the legacy of an incompetent Liberal government”.

He said that despite this cost, greenhouse emissions would continue to rise as two of the world’s largest polluters – the US and China – were not covered by the Kyoto agreement.

“We believe that a new agreement that will allow us to generate jobs and economic growth represents the way forward,” he said.

Mr Kent’s announcement came just hours after a last-minute deal on climate change was agreed in Durban.

“The Kyoto Protocol is a dated document, it is actually considered by many as an impediment to the move forward but there was good will demonstrated in Durban, the agreement that we ended up with provides the basis for an agreement by 2015.”

He said that though the text of the Durban agreement “provides a loophole for China and India”, it represents “the way forward”.

Canada’s previous Liberal government signed the accord but Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s Conservative government never embraced it.

Canada declared four years ago that it did not intend to meet its existing Kyoto Protocol commitments and its annual emissions have risen by about once third since 1990.

The company pulled ads from All-American Muslim after complaints from the Florida Family Association.

The cable TV show portrays the lives of five families in Dearborn, Michigan, a city known for its Muslim and Arab population.

Lowe’s issued an apology, but did not say it would re-advertise on the show.

The North Carolina-based company said in a statement it apologised for having “managed to make some people very unhappy”.

“It appears that we managed to step into a hotly contested debate with strong views from virtually every angle and perspective,” the firm said.

“As a result we did pull our advertising on this program. We believe it is best to respectfully defer to communities, individuals and groups to discuss and consider such issues of importance.”

In a statement on its website, the Florida Family Association called All-American Muslim “propaganda that riskily hides the Islamic agenda’s clear and present danger to American liberties and traditional values”.

The association asked members to send emails to companies that ran advertisements during the show.

According to the association, adverts from many other firms are no longer appearing during the programme. However, while many firms buy adverts to run at any time, Lowe’s is the only firm to confirm it pulled adverts bought specifically for broadcast during All-American Muslim.

The Learning Channel, which broadcasts the programme, features several reality shows focusing on the everyday lives of subjects viewed by many as controversial or outside the mainstream.

They include a polygamist family in Sister Wives, and the Duggars, a conservative Christian family with 19 children on 19 and Counting.

The channel describes All-American Muslim as “a powerful series that goes inside the rarely-seen world of American Muslims to uncover a unique community struggling to balance faith and nationality in a post 9/11 world”.

‘Extreme disappointment’

Keith Ellison, one of only two Muslim congressmen, said withdrawing the advertisements was “disappointing”.

“The success of All-American Muslim shows how ready the country is to learn about Muslims as Americans,” he said in a statement.

“This probably makes hate-mongers uncomfortable – as they should be,” Mr Ellison, a Democrat who site in the House of Representatives for a Minnesota district.

Mr Ellison was among those who signed a petition calling on Lowe’s and other advertisers to resist calls to step aside from opponents of the show.

Suehaila Amen, whose family is featured on All-American Muslim, told the Detroit News on Sunday she was disappointed by the retailer’s decision.

“I’m saddened that any place of business would succumb to bigots and people trying to perpetuate their negative views on an entire community,” she said.

Ted Lieu, a Democratic state senator from California, said he was considering calling for a boycott of Lowe’s, a pledge already made by Twitter users using the hashtag #boycottlowes.

“The show is about what it’s like to be a Muslim in America, and it touches on the discrimination they sometimes face. And that kind of discrimination is exactly what’s happening here with Lowe’s,” Mr Lieu said.

The Michigan director of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, Dawud Walid, said his group felt “extreme disappointment” but was working on resolving the situation with the help of non-Muslim allies.

“I will be picking up the phone tomorrow to some of our friends and allies to explain the situation to them,” Mr Walid said on Sunday.

Police and Virginia Tech named Deriek Crouse’s killer as Ross Truett Ashley, a Radford University student.

Officials said Ashley had stolen a car on Wednesday from a real estate office in Radford, which was found on the Virginia Tech campus after the attack.

Police have managed to piece together his last movements but not his motive.

‘No link’

According to police, Ashley, who was enrolled part-time at Radford, entered a real estate office with a handgun and demanded the keys to an employee’s vehicle.

The vehicle, a Mercedes SUV, was found the next day on Virginia Tech’s campus following the shooting.

Police say Ashley shot Crouse while the officer was sitting in his car at about 12:15 EST (17:15 GMT) on Thursday, before fleeing on foot.

Ashley’s body was found in a nearby car park by a police officer. He had suffered a self-inflicted gunshot wound.

Investigators have so far found no link between the gunman and Crouse, a married father of five and 39-year-old army veteran.

Police spokeswoman Corinne Geller: “The suspect ran to the greenhouses where he apparently changed clothes”

Virginia Tech was the site of the deadliest US school shooting in the country’s history, in 2007, when a gunman killed 32 people and himself.

Pakistan stopped the convoys in protest at US air strikes which killed 24 of its troops at two checkpoints on the Afghan border last month.

Mr Gilani refused to rule out closing Pakistan’s airspace to the US.

He also denied rumours President Asif Ali Zardari had suffered a stroke and the army was trying to oust him.

Mr Gilani said Mr Zardari was making a rapid improvement in hospital in Dubai, but would need two weeks’ rest before returning home.

The tech company acquired the software when it bought the smartphone maker Palm for $1.2bn (£767m) last year.

HP used the code to power its short-lived range Touchpad tablet computers before it abandoned the product line.

The firm said it would continue investing in the project to help third parties add enhancements.

“By contributing this innovation, HP unleashes the creativity of the open source community to advance a new generation of applications and devices,” said the firm’s president and chief executive, Meg Whitman.

A statement from the company said it would make the underlying code behind WebOS available under an open source licence. It said third-party developers, partners and HP’s own engineers could then “deliver ongoing enhancements and new versions into the marketplace”.

The firm added that it intended to be “an active participant and investor in the project”.

As many as 50,000 people gathered on an island near the Kremlin to condemn alleged ballot-rigging in parliamentary elections and demand a re-run.

Other, smaller rallies took place in St Petersburg and other cities.

Communists, nationalists and Western-leaning liberals turned out together despite divisions between them.

The protesters allege there was widespread fraud in Sunday’s polls though the ruling United Russia party did see its share of the vote fall sharply.

The spectacle, which occurs when the Earth casts its shadow over the Moon, has been watched from Australia, Asia and North America.

At some points, indirect sunlight still illuminated the Moon, turning it a dramatic shade of red.

The shadow started to fall at 11:33 GMT and ended after 17:30 GMT. The moon was totally eclipsed for 51 minutes eight seconds.

This was the second total lunar eclipse this year; the first occurred in June.

Stargazers will have to settle for partial eclipses of the Moon until 2014, When the nest full lunar eclipse will happen.