  Minijet production in ultra-relativistic heavy-ion collisions is discussed by
taking semi-hard parton rescatterings explicitly into account. At both RHIC and
LHC energies we find sizable effects on global characteristics of the nuclear
collision like the initial multiplicity and transverse energy of the minijets.
The dependence of these quantities on the cutoff that separates soft and hard
interactions becomes much smoother after the inclusion of the rescatterings.
This allows to define an energy and centrality dependent saturation cutoff and
to push perturbative computations to rather low values of the cutoff. As an
application we compute the charged multiplicity at mid rapidity and compare it
to the recent RHIC data.
