The dollar has climbed back to a six-month high against the euro, as continuing fears about the European economy hit the single currency.

With a key German business sentiment survey posting its worst reading in three years, the euro fell as low as $1.4571 in Tuesday trading.

In another large-scale workplace immigration crackdown, U.S. officials raided a factory here on Monday, detaining at least 350 workers they said were in the country illegally.

The raid follows a similar large-scale immigration operation at a meatpacking plant in Postville, Iowa, in May when nearly 400 workers were detained. That raid was a significant escalation of the Bush administration’s enforcement practices because those detained were not simply deported, as in previous raids, but were imprisoned for months on criminal charges of using false documents.

North Korea said Tuesday that it had stopped disabling its main nuclear complex and threatened to restore facilities that the country has used to produce plutonium for nuclear weapons.

North Korea often issues strident warnings as a negotiating tactic. But its declaration Tuesday further complicated Bush’s hopes of achieving a major breakthrough in North Korean nuclear disarmament before he steps down early next year.

Thousands of anti-government demonstrators besieged government offices on Tuesday and briefly shut down a television station in some of the most aggressive actions in months of street protests.

An estimated 30,000 protesters gathered outside several government ministries and entered the grounds of the prime minister’s office. To avoid them, he moved a scheduled cabinet meeting to the military headquarters.

A suicide bomber has struck at an Iraqi security checkpoint in the northern Diyala province, killing at least 28 people and wounding 42 others, police say.

As other parts of the country have stabilised over the last year, Diyala - both ethnically and religiously mixed - has remained one of the most violent parts of the country.

Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili called the CEE leaders’ support “heroic” and “decisive” for the stabilization of the situation, the President’s Chancellery reported. George W. Bush also supported the initiative. However, some German and French media criticized the Polish President for not agreeing the visit beforehand with EU.

In Poland, the president’s visit was met with cautious support by the ruling Civic Platform and condemnation from the post-communist Democratic Left Alliance party. Polish society also took action on behalf of the Georgians. A charity drive and collection of food and medical equipment for Georgian civilians was held by the Polish Humanitarian Action, Caritas Polska and other charity organizations. Several protests took place at the Russian embassy and its consulates.

The war against Islamic terrorism in the south is being won, slowly. More and more of the terrorists are being identified and arrested, and the number of violent incidents is decreasing.

A 25-year-old man has been arrested by police in northern England amid claims he made terrorist threats against Prime Minister Gordon Brown and his predecessor Tony Blair.

Police said the man’s arrest was part of an ongoing investigation by Lancashire police and the Greater Manchester counter terrorism unit.

A windfall tax will be charged to energy companies and go to the government. Because of the shaky nature of energy development, the energy companies will have to charge more for their product. Regular citizens will pay more on a product that is already taxed by government. Government, after it bureaucratically skims off some of the money, will spend the rest on things that it thinks we need. Unfortunately this never includes money.

A petition calling for a windfall tax has been signed by 70 Labour MPs, including three ministerial aides. Five other junior members of the Government have told The Times that they are backing the campaign. They include Rob Marris, Parliamentary Private Secretary (PPS) to Shaun Woodward, the Secretary of State for Northern Ireland, who indicated that he may quit over the issue.

The pound has hit its weakest levels against the dollar in more than two years, extending recent losses on fears about the health of the UK economy.

The pound’s losses gathered pace on Friday due to fresh recession fears.

Two iconic concrete cooling towers in South Yorkshire have been demolished in a controlled explosion.

For the people of Georgia, any optimism about the future has been suddenly displaced by uncertainty and worries from the past, as its conflict with Russia ends in swift defeat and humiliation.

The concrete walls of the former presidential palace which is Eduard Shevardnadze’s Tbilisi home are streaked with water stains, the formal gardens as scruffy as the gaggle of soldiers guarding the gate.

The president of Switzerland stepped to a podium in Bern last May and read a statement confirming rumors that had swirled through the capital for months. The government, he acknowledged, had indeed destroyed a huge trove of computer files and other material documenting the business dealings of a family of Swiss engineers suspected of helping smuggle nuclear technology to Libya and Iran.
The files were of particular interest not only to Swiss prosecutors but to international atomic inspectors working to unwind the activities of Abdul Qadeer Khan, the Pakistani bomb pioneer-turned-nuclear black marketeer. The Swiss engineers, Friedrich Tinner and his two sons, were accused of having deep associations with Khan, acting as middlemen in his dealings with rogue nations seeking nuclear equipment and expertise.

The Swiss president, Pascal Couchepin, took no questions. But he asserted that the files — which included an array of plans for nuclear arms and technologies, among them a highly sophisticated Pakistani bomb design — had been destroyed so that they would never fall into terrorist hands.