Hard day of work at Space Station

Spacewalking astronauts Heidemarie Stefanyshyn-Piper and Stephen Bowen completed almost all of the greasy repairs on a gummed-up joint at the international space station on Saturday, leaving just a few chores behind for another day.

As spacewalk No. 3 was getting under way, a new recycling system for converting urine into drinking water broke down again.

It was the third day in a row that the urine processor inexplicably shut down, and it appeared to be the same kind of sluggish motor trouble seen before. Engineers on the ground scrambled to figure out what might be wrong. The problem could jeopardize NASA's plan to return recycled water to Earth aboard space shuttle Endeavour next weekend.

The $154 million water recycling system, delivered a week ago by the space shuttle, is essential for allowing more astronauts to live on the space station next year.

Saturday's spacewalk was considered the most grueling of the mission and had been expected to last the longest, focusing entirely on the clogged solar wing-rotating joint. The joint stopped working properly more than a year ago, after it became jammed with metal grit from grinding parts, and cannot keep the solar wings on the right side of the space station pointed toward the sun.

Stefanyshyn-Piper -- a St. Paul native who lost a $100,000 tool kit during Tuesday's spacewalk -- had to share grease guns again with Bowen. To make up for the grease gun shortage, they took out a caulking gun normally reserved for repairs to the shuttle's heat shield, but didn't need it.

They carefully guarded all their tethers so nothing would get loose.

"OK. Tether, tether, tether," Stefanyshyn-Piper counted before moving on to another task. "Three tethers, and they're all closed."

The White House said quite emphatically that President Bush's weekend appearance at a summit of Pacific Rim nations -- his last scheduled foreign trip -- was no farewell tour.

Sure sounds like it, though. And a lot of the sentiment is coming from Bush himself.

At a meeting with Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper, Bush reflected fondly on their time working together, and joked that his "forced retirement" begins on Jan. 20.

Bush has never been one for introspection; his aides often say he detests "navel-gazing." He arrived in Washington eight years ago with a kind of Texas swagger and quickly earned a reputation for a go-it-alone style of "cowboy diplomacy" that infuriated much of the rest of the world. Now, as he leaves office, amid two wars, a grave economic crisis and historically low job approval ratings, Bush seems a changed man, offering occasional hints he is reflecting about the world he leaves behind.

"I've worked hard on a lot of fronts," he told America TV, a Peruvian news outlet, in an interview in the White House Map Room before leaving Washington. "I have given it my all. And now I am very hopeful that the man who succeeds me as president of the United States succeeds in his job."

After an intense debate on whether to begin a formal independence movement, the majority of delegates attending a conference of Tibetan exiles in northern India recommended Saturday that the Tibetan government in exile continue to adopt the Dalai Lama's conciliatory approach to China.

But in a sign of mounting frustration with fruitless negotiations with China, most delegates also advised the Tibetan government to end the dialogue until China shows real willingness to negotiate, spokesman Thubten Samphel said.

The delegates made their recommendations at the end of a six-day conference called by the Dalai Lama, the 73-year-old spiritual leader of Tibetans worldwide, who has pursued a "middle way" approach in which he has called for China to grant autonomy to its 6 million Tibetans. The Dalai Lama has not called for Tibetan independence and prefers to deal with China without confrontation.

"The majority view is that the middle way approach is the best approach for now," Samphel said of the results of the conference.

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