• Launch of new Orion spaceship has NASA flying high

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. - With the imminent debut of its Orion spacecraft, NASA is on a high not felt since the space shuttle days.

Shuttle veterans, in fact, are leading the charge in Thursday morning's two-orbit, 4?-hour test flight, meant to shake out the capsule before astronauts climb aboard - eventually, perhaps, to visit Mars.

Orion is set to fly farther than any human-rated spacecraft since the Apollo moon program, aiming for a distance of 3,600 miles, more than 14 times higher than the International Space Station.

That peak altitude will provide the necessary momentum for a 20,000-mph, 4,000-degree entry over the Pacific. Those 11 short minutes to splashdown is what NASA calls the "trial by fire," arguably the most critical part of the entire test flight. The heat shield at Orion's base, at 16.5 feet across, is the largest of its kind ever built.

• Protests erupt after New York decision; feds to investigate

NEW YORK - A grand jury cleared a white police officer Wednesday in the videotaped chokehold death of an unarmed black man stopped for selling loose, untaxed cigarettes, triggering protests in the streets by hundreds of New Yorkers who likened the case to the deadly police shooting in Ferguson, Mo.

As the demonstrations mounted, U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder said federal authorities would conduct a civil rights investigation into the July 17 death of Eric Garner at the hands of Officer Daniel Pantaleo.

Staten Island District Attorney Daniel Donovan said the grand jury found "no reasonable cause" to bring charges, but unlike the chief prosecutor in the Ferguson case, he gave no details on how the panel arrived at its decision. The grand jury could have considered a range of charges, from reckless endangerment to murder.

Protesters gathered in Times Square and converged on the heavily secured area around the annual Rockefeller Center Christmas tree lighting with a combination of professional-looking signs and hand-scrawled placards reading, "Black lives matter" and "Fellow white people, wake up." And in the Staten Island neighborhood where Garner died, people reacted with angry disbelief and chanted, "I can't breathe!" and "Hands up - don't choke!"

Garner's mother, Gwen Carr, said the grand jury decision "just tore me up."

• UN's weather agency: 2014 is on track to being hottest year

LIMA, Peru - With temperature data showing 2014 currently tied for the hottest year on record, the U.N. weather agency on Wednesday rejected claims that global warming has paused.

The World Meteorological Organization said the global average temperature in January-October was 1.03 Fahrenheit above average, the same as in record hot year 2010.

The ocean temperature set a new record in the nine-month period, while land temperatures were the fourth or fifth highest since record-keeping began in the 19th century, the WMO said in a report released at U.N. climate talks in Lima and at its headquarters in Geneva.

"The provisional information for 2014 means that 14 of the 15 warmest years on record have all occurred in the 21st century," WMO Secretary-General Michel Jarraud said in a statement. "There is no standstill in global warming."

Climate skeptics point to a perceived hiatus in the temperature rise since 1998, an exceptionally hot year, to support their claims that man-made warming is not a big problem. Most climate scientists reject that idea. Michael Oppenheimer of Princeton University said the long-term warming trend is combined with natural variations that tend to be cyclical, with a period of lower-than-average warming followed by a period of rapid warming.

• Iran uses old American-made warplanes to strike IS targets

WASHINGTON - Iranian jets have carried out airstrikes against Islamic State militants in Iraq in recent days, Pentagon officials and independent analysts say, underscoring the strange alliances generated by the war against the extremist group that has beheaded Americans and killed and terrorized Iraqi civilians.

Washington and Tehran are locked in tough negotiations over Iran's nuclear program. But the two adversaries have been fighting parallel campaigns on the same side in Iraq to defend the Shiite-dominated government - and the region's Kurds - from IS militants who seized a large section of the country.

It has long been known that Iranian troops and advisers have been fighting alongside Iraqi forces, but until this week there had been no confirmation of Iranian air activity. The timing and nature of the strikes are not clear, but a senior U.S. official said they occurred in Diyala province, which extends from northeast Baghdad to the Iranian border. The official spoke only on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to disclose that information.

The Qatari-based broadcaster Al-Jazeera filmed a jet flying over Iraq on Nov. 30 that was identified by Jane's Defence Weekly as an American-made F-4 Phantom. The Phantom, a twin-engine fighter bomber that was sold to Iran's U.S.-backed shah in the 1970s, was last produced by McDonnell Aircraft Corp. in 1981.

• Supreme Court weighs woman's light duty discrimination

WASHINGTON - Two of the three women on the Supreme Court vigorously questioned a UPS lawyer Wednesday over the company's refusal to give lighter duty to a pregnant worker, a closely watched case with potentially broad impact for female workers and their employers.

Questions from several justices during arguments suggested the court could be searching for a middle ground in the dispute between United Parcel Service and former driver Peggy Young.

UPS declined to give the woman temporary light-duty work so she could avoid lifting heavy packages after she became pregnant in 2006.

Young was in the courtroom Wednesday to hear the justices talk about employers' responsibilities under the 36-year-old Pregnancy Discrimination Act.

With some of their male colleagues unusually quiet, Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Elena Kagan repeatedly pressed UPS lawyer Caitlin Halligan over the Atlanta-based package delivery company's refusal to find a temporary assignment for Young.

- The Associated Press