Medvedev is trying a different approach: invite the activists to the Kremlin. Two weeks ago he met with representatives from 36 of Russia's leading nongovernmental organizations—groups that Putin had practically tried to eradicate with strict registration laws

The president said he regretted that Putin-era laws had been taken as meaning "all NGOs are enemies of the state." On the contrary, Medvedev said, their work is "essential for the health of our society."

The new tolerance goes far beyond the rights groups. State-controlled television has also undergone a marked liberalization. There's been a revival of televised political satire, and in February, Channel One gave serious airtime to Aleksandr Shokhin, head of the influential Russian Businessmen's Union, as he denounced the new charges against Khodorkovsky as a complete sham.

Real power has remained solidly in the grasp of Prime Minister Putin and his inner circle, while the president has appeared to be little more than their fresh-faced, sweet-talking puppet.

But lately some of Medvedev's detractors are starting to think they may have underestimated him. The president has begun publicly overturning some of Putin's key policies, rolling back repressive legislation and paying attention to the government's critics rather than trying to silence them.

Medvedev's liberalized approach has had little visible affect on the country's hard-nosed foreign policy. So far, Putin seems firmly in charge there. But inside Russia, many activists say they're floored by the recent thaw, after a decade of being frozen out.

After a week of strong criticism here and abroad over its inaction, the Pakistani military claimed on Wednesday to have reasserted control of a key town just 60 miles from the capital in the strategic district of Buner which was overrun by hundreds of Taliban militants last week.

Pakistan also agreed to move 6,000 troops from its Indian border to fight militants on its western border with Afghanistan, according to a Pakistani official who did not want to be identified discussing troop movements in advance.

But American officials, who welcomed the redeployment, said Pakistan was still not doing enough to fight the insurgents, who are tightening their hold on the country. The Americans expressed frustration that Pakistan was still rebuffing their offers to train more Pakistanis to fight Al Qaeda and the Taliban.

North Korea said on Wednesday that it will start an uranium-enrichment program, declaring for the first time that it intends to pursue a second project in addition to facilities that have provided it with plutonium for weapons.

The North also threatened to conduct a second nuclear test and launch an intercontinental ballistic missile unless the United Nations Security Council apologizes for its censure of the Communist state after its rocket test on April 5.

The Security Council adopted a unanimous statement on April 13 denouncing the launch as a violation of an earlier council resolution that banned Pyongyang from conducting nuclear and ballistic missile tests. The council called on United Nations member states to tighten sanctions _ a move that Pyongyang on Wednesday harshly criticized.

One of the few remaining moderate Republicans in the United States Senate defected to the Democrats yesterday, dealing a massive blow to the Republican party's ability to impede Barack Obama's legislative agenda, and opening the way for dramatic action on climate change, healthcare reform and other issues.

The defection by Arlen Specter, a veteran Pennsylvania Republican, puts the majority Democratic party closer to the 60 votes needed to pass most substantive legislation. All that remains for the party to achieve that margin, and the ability to ride roughshod over the Republicans, is the final confirmation in Minnesota of Al Franken's victory in a long-disputed Senate election.

the Republican party's conservative base has consolidated its hold, driving moderate voices from the party and pushing centrist voters toward the Democrats. In November, the Democrats won the White House and both chambers of Congress for the first time since 1994. "I now find my political philosophy more in line with Democrats than Republicans," said Specter, 79.

A Russian warship has seized a pirate vessel with 29 people on board off the Somali coast, Russian news reports say.

Navies from Nato, the EU, Japan, China, India, Yemen, US Malaysia and Singapore have also been patrolling the Indian Ocean and Gulf of Aden. However, the number of attacks has continued to rise.

Somali pirates have hijacked 25 vessels since the beginning of this year and are holding more than 260 crew around the stronghold of Eyl in northern Somalia, according to the International Maritime Bureau.

North Korea has threatened to carry out nuclear missile tests unless the UN Security Council apologises for its condemnation of a recent rocket launch. Pyongyang said it would be compelled to take self-defence measures "including nuclear and intercontinental ballistic missile tests" if no apology was made.

North Korea conducted its first and only nuclear test in 2006.

North Korea's foreign ministry said the UN should apologise for "infringing" the country's sovereignty and retract "all its resolutions and decisions" against Pyongyang. It also announced plans to build a light-water nuclear reactor, according to the statement carried by the official Korean Central News Agency.

Venezuela has withdrawn its ambassador to Lima in response to Peru's decision to grant political asylum to an opponent of President Hugo Chavez.

The Venezuelan foreign ministry said Peru's decision to grant Manuel Rosales asylum constituted a "mockery of international law". Mr Rosales ran against Mr Chavez in Venezuela's 2006 presidential election. He faces corruption charges which he says are baseless and went into hiding when the charges were filed last month.

Earlier, Peruvian Foreign Minister Jose Garcia Belaunde announced that asylum had been granted to Mr Rosales, who arrived in Lima a week ago.

Construction has begun on approximately 60 new homes in a Jewish settlement in Israeli-occupied East Jerusalem, the Israeli campaign group Peace Now says. The work, in East Talpiot settlement, is aimed at creating a belt around East Jerusalem that would sever it from the rest of the West Bank, the group says.

Settlements on occupied land are illegal under international law. Israel disputes this and also argues that East Jerusalem is not subject to its pledge to freeze settlement work. Israel's claim is based on its annexation of East Jerusalem, unrecognised by the international community, which it captured along with the West Bank and other Arab territory in the 1967 war.

Israelis view settlements such as East Talpiot as neighbourhoods of Jerusalem. Such areas tend to be well integrated into the city's infrastructure.

For more than a year now, Warsaw public prosecutor Robert Majewski has been investigating former Polish Prime Minister Leszek Miller's government on allegations of abuse of office. At issue is whether sovereignty over Polish territory was relinquished, and whether former Polish President Aleksander Kwasniewski and his left-leaning Social Democratic government gave the CIA free reign over sections of the Stare Kiejkuty military base for the agency's extraterritorial torture interrogations.

"No European country is so sincerely and vigorously investigating former members of the government as is currently the case in Poland," says Wolfgang Kaleck from the European Center for Constitutional and Human Rights in Berlin, which supports the investigations.

The public prosecutor's office has also launched a probe to determine whether the Polish intelligence agency made 20 of its agents available to the CIA, as was recently reported by the conservative Polish daily newspaper Rzeczpospolita. A former CIA official confirmed this information to SPIEGEL. There was reportedly a document issued by the intelligence agency that mentioned both the 20 Polish agents and the transfer of the military base to the Americans. Two members of a parliamentary investigative committee in Warsaw had an opportunity to view this document in late 2005, but it has since disappeared.

During his first days in detention, senior al-Qaeda operative Khalid Sheik Mohammed was stripped of his clothes, beaten, given a forced enema and shackled with his arms chained above his head, according to the International Committee of the Red Cross. It was then, a Red Cross report says, that his American captors told him to prepare for "a hard time."

Over the next 25 days, beginning on March 6, 2003, Mohammed was put through a routine in which he was deprived of sleep, doused with cold water and had his head repeatedly slammed into a plywood wall, according to the report. The interrogation also included days of extensive waterboarding, a technique that simulates drowning.

But whether harsh tactics were decisive in Mohammed's interrogation may never be conclusively known, in large part because the CIA appears not to have tried traditional tactics for much time, if at all. According to the agency's own accounting, Mohammed was waterboarded 183 times during his first four weeks in a CIA secret prison.

C.I.A. interrogators used waterboarding, the near-drowning technique that top Obama administration officials have described as illegal torture, 266 times on two key prisoners from Al Qaeda, far more than had been previously reported.

The C.I.A. officers used waterboarding at least 83 times in August 2002 against Abu Zubaydah, according to a 2005 Justice Department legal memorandum.

A former C.I.A. officer, John Kiriakou, told ABC News and other news media organizations in 2007 that Abu Zubaydah had undergone waterboarding for only 35 seconds before agreeing to tell everything he knew.

Padilla, however, was arrested at Chicago's O'Hare International Airport on May 8, 2002, more than two months before the issuance of the Justice Department's Aug. 1, 2002, memo authorizing the use of harsh methods in interrogating Abu Zubaida. "The dates just don't add up," wrote Ali Soufan, a former FBI special agent, in an opinion piece in the New York Times last week. Soufan, who questioned Abu Zubaida between his capture in March 2002 and early June of that year, said the detainee gave up Padilla without any physical or psychological duress. He also said Abu Zubaida identified Mohammed as the mastermind of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks "under traditional interrogation methods."

Padilla, a U.S. citizen, was sentenced in January 2008 to 17 years in prison after being convicted of conspiracy and providing material support for terrorism.

An attack on both coasts was conceived by Mohammed before Sept. 11, 2001, but the plot was scaled back to target only New York and Washington. Mohammed continued to consider striking the U.S. Bank Tower in Los Angeles, administration officials said. His interrogation led to information that he planned "to use East Asian operatives to crash a hijacked airliner into a building in Los Angeles," according the 2005 Justice Department memo.

The CIA's use of waterboarding to interrogate al-Qaeda suspects was approved by Condoleezza Rice as early as 2002, a senate report reveals.

Ms Rice, as national security adviser at the time, gave consent to the CIA's harsh interrogation programme, the Senate Intelligence Committee found.

The latest details were revealed in a timeline of the CIA's interrogation programme produced by the US Senate Intelligence Committee. It shows Ms Rice and other top Bush administration officials were first briefed about "alternative interrogation methods, including waterboarding", in May 2002.

It is unclear from unclassified reports whether the information gained was critical in foiling actual plots. Mohammed later told outside interviewers that he was "forced to invent in order to make the ill-treatment stop" and that he "wasted a lot of their time [with] several false red-alerts being placed in the U.S.," according to the Red Cross, whose officials interviewed Mohammed and other detainees after they were transferred to the military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, in September 2006.

Mohammed continued to be a valued source of information long after the coercive interrogation ended. Indeed, he has gone on to lecture CIA agents in a classroom-like setting, on topics from Greek philosophy to the structure of al-Qaeda, and wrote essays in response to questions, according to sources familiar with his time in detention.

Counterterrorism officials also said the two men and other captured suspects provided critical information about senior al-Qaeda figures and identified hundreds of al-Qaeda members, associates and financial backers. if ( show_doubleclick_ad && ( adTemplate & INLINE_ARTICLE_AD ) == INLINE_ARTICLE_AD && inlineAdGraf ) { placeAd('ARTICLE',commercialNode,20,'inline=y;',true) ; } The accumulation and triangulation of information also allowed officials to vet the intelligence they were receiving and to push other prisoners toward making full and frank statements.

The current debate in the US on the "special interrogation methods" sanctioned by the Bush administration could soon reach Europe. It has long been clear that the CIA used the Szymany military airbase in Poland for extraordinary renditions. Now there is evidence of a secret prison nearby.

Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the architect of the 9/11 attacks on New York and Washington, also known as "the brains" behind al-Qaida. This was the man who had presented Osama bin Laden with plans to attack the US with commercial jets. He personally selected the pilots and supervised preparations for the attacks. Eighteen months later, on March 1, 2003, Sheikh Mohammed was captured in Rawalpindi, Pakistan by US Special Forces and brought to Afghanistan two days later. Now the CIA was flying him to a remote area in Poland's Masuria region. The prisoner slept during the flight from Kabul to Szymany, for the first time in days, as he later recounted:

A large number of Polish and American intelligence operatives have since gone on record that the CIA maintained a prison in northeastern Poland. Independent of these sources, Polish government officials from the Justice and Defense Ministry have also reported that the Americans had a secret base near Szymany airport. And so began on March 7, 2003 one of the darkest chapters of recent American -- and European -- history.

A White House official apologized Monday after a low-flying Boeing 747 spotted above the Manhattan skyline frightened workers and residents into evacuating buildings.

The huge aircraft, which functions as Air Force One when the president is aboard, was taking part in a classified, government-sanctioned photo shoot, the Federal Aviation Administration said.

Two officials told CNN the White House Military Office was trying to update its file photos of Air Force One. The officials said the president was angry when he learned Monday afternoon about the flight, which sparked fear in the New York-New Jersey area. "The president was furious about it," one of the officials said. The incident outraged many New Yorkers, including Mayor Michael Bloomberg. "First thing is, I'm annoyed -- furious is a better word -- that I wasn't told," he said, calling the aviation administration's decision to withhold details about the flight "ridiculous" and "poor judgment." "Why the Defense Department wanted to do a photo op right around the site of the World Trade Center defies the imagination," he said. "Had we known, I would have asked them not to."

Selig Harrison, the director of the Asia Program at the Center for International Policy, said the North Korean announcement about restarting its nuclear facilities should come as "no surprise" to the United States. "The North Koreans had said that they were going to do this. The United States leadership made a mistake by going to the U.N. because the North Koreans said on March 26 that if we went to the U.N., they would resume their nuclear program," he said, referring to North Korea's recent decision to launch a rocket despite international opposition.

Harrison visited Pyongyang in January and doesn't expect North Korea to reprocess plutonium for at least a year. Nuclearization may not even be their primary goal with this latest announcement, he said. "You have to put it all into context of the North Korean situation, they want to negotiate to get economic help. All of this is a re-bargaining chip," he said. "The North Koreans are not hell-bent on nuclear weapons, this is just their opportunity, and they want to negotiate in bilateral talks with the US."

"The North Koreans have shut down the six-party talks, but they haven't ruled out bilateral negotiations," he said, referring to talks aimed at persuading North Korea to scrap its nuclear program. The talks involved China, Japan, North Korea, Russia, South Korea and the United States.

The ailing carmaker General Motors has proposed handing a controlling stake of more than 50% to the US government as it struggles to reach a deal with its lenders to avert imminent bankruptcy.The nationalisation, in effect, of the biggest US motor manufacturer would be part of a huge debt-for-equity swap as GM tries to shed $44bn (£30bn) of $62bn in crippling liabilities owed to the government, trade unions and bondholders.

But the plan was condemned last night as "neither reasonable nor adequate", by bondholders who would get only 10% of the company, forcing them to write off billions of dollars. Existing shareholders would be left with only 1%.

With its future on a knife-edge, GM delivered a blunt warning that unless its creditors accepted the plan, it would declare bankruptcy and leave the courts to carve up the company. Fritz Henderson, the chief executive, told a press conference at the company's headquarters: "If this cannot be accomplished out of court, we'll go into court and restructure GM under bankruptcy if it's necessary."

A Mexican village whose inhabitants were overwhelmed by an outbreak of respiratory illness starting in February has emerged as a possible source of the swine flu outbreak which has now spread across the world.

The state government of Veracruz in eastern Mexico has confirmed one case of swine flu in the village of La Gloria with the sufferer named locally as a four-year-old boy, Edgar Hernandez Hernandez. The federal government said tonight that he tested positive for the same strain of the virus which has claimed lives in Mexico.

Mexico's national public health authority, the Mexican social security institute, raised concerns that waste from the Granjas Carrol facility may be responsible for the outbreak of illness, according to local media."According to state agents of the Mexican social security institute, the vector of this outbreak are the clouds of flies that come out of the hog barns, and the waste lagoons into which the Mexican-US company spews tons of excrement," reported Mexico City newspaper La Jornada.