Washington’s chief nuclear negotiator arrived in North Korea on Wednesday to try to keep the regime from reactivating its nuclear weapons program, while a news report said Pyongyang might be restoring a nuclear test site as well.

Christopher Hill, the U.S. assistant secretary of state, passed through the heavily fortified border to arrive in the North Korean capital of Pyongyang from Seoul. His trip was seen as the Bush administration’s last chance to salvage the nuclear disarmament deal it had struck with the North after years of difficult negotiations.

Ex-Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev is forming a new political party, according to a Russian tycoon who says he will team up with the Nobel winner.

Billionaire Alexander Lebedev said the Independent Democratic Party will be a new opposition movement for economic and legal reform and independent media. (something we could use here in the US)

Organisers hope the new party will take part in the 2011 elections.

Mr Gorbachev, who stepped down in 1991, last ran in the 1996 presidential election but won barely 1% of votes.

Former Gurkha soldiers from Nepal have won their legal bid to secure the right to retire in Britain.

The soldiers had begun a high court challenge earlier this month against a ruling that those retiring before 1997 had no automatic right to live in the UK.

A Muslim store owner alleges in a million-dollar civil rights lawsuit that an undercover cigarette sales bust at the market in 2005 was a ruse to conceal an FBI anti-terrorism investigation that has ruined his life and business.
The suit brought Monday in U.S. District Court in Sacramento charges the FBI conspired with the California Alcohol and Beverage Control Board to “entrap” Bilal Abdul Yasin, 39, the Palestinian-born owner of Chinca’s Market on Boucher Street, into buying purportedly stolen cigarettes so the government could search his home and business to determine if he was providing financial support to terrorists.

A one-time admirer of Osama bin Laden who plotted a hand-grenade attack at a mall jammed with Christmas shoppers — and tried to trade two stereo speakers for the weapons — was sentenced to 35 years in prison Tuesday.

U.S. District Judge David H. Coar said he hopes Shareef has changed but that a long sentence still was warranted to discourage others who might plan similar attacks. He could have given Shareef life in prison.

A bomb attack on Monday in the Lebanese city of Tripoli and a deadly blast in Damascus over the weekend have been linked to Sunni Islamist extremists, according to analysts and news reports.

A remote-controlled car bomb devastated a bus packed with Lebanese soldiers in the northern city Tripoli on Monday, killing at least five and wounding 33, according to news reports. The blast occurred during morning rush hour and also destroyed several cars and shops.