TRIPOLI (Reuters) – Colonel Muammar Gaddafi's regime was delivered by a caterer, on a memory stick.

Abdel Majid Mlegta ran the companies that supplied meals to Libyan government departments including the interior ministry. The job was "easy," he told Reuters last week. "I built good relations with officers. I wanted to serve my country."

But in the first few weeks of the uprising, he secretly began to work for the rebels. He recruited sympathizers at the nerve center of the Gaddafi government, pinpointed its weak links and its command-and-control strength in Tripoli, and passed that information onto the rebel leadership on a series of flash memory cards.

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ZURICH (Reuters) – The United States has written to Switzerland to set an ultimatum to hand over detailed information on its citizens using Swiss accounts to dodge tax or see Credit Suisse and nine other banks face charges, newspapers reported on Sunday.

The letter, quoted by two Swiss Sunday papers, was sent by U.S. Deputy Attorney General James Cole on August 31 and demands detailed figures on tax evasion at Credit Suisse by Tuesday and also seeks information from nine other smaller Swiss banks.

In the letter, Cole demands that Switzerland quickly deliver a significant number of client accounts, the Sonntagszeitung reported, adding that U.S. authorities are also ready to test a Swiss offer to settle the dispute under existing law.

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LONDON – Anti-secrecy group WikiLeaks said Thursday that its massive archive of unredacted U.S. State Department cables had been exposed in a security breach which it blamed on its one-time partner, Britain’s Guardian newspaper.

In a 1,600-word-long editorial posted to the Internet, WikiLeaks accused the Guardian’s investigative reporter David Leigh of divulging the password needed to decrypt the files in a book he and another Guardian journalist, Luke Harding, published earlier this year.

WikiLeaks said the disclosure had jeopardized the “careful work” it was doing to redact and publish the cables.

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CUPERTINO, Calif. – Apple headquarters is still standing in this leafy Silicon Valley suburb even after Steve Jobs’ industry-rattling announcement that he was resigning as chief executive of the company he co-founded in a garage more than three decades ago.

That news comes as little surprise in the Valley, where few doubted Thursday that despite the loss of its legendary leader Apple would continue to succeed — at least for the next few years.

“I don’t think in the short term it will suffer,” said Ethan Salter, 35, an engineering consultant who had stopped in at a Starbucks just down the road from the Mountain View headquarters of Google Inc., a major Apple competitor. “In the long term, things change really quickly around here.”

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BEIJING (Reuters) – North Korea’s leader Kim Jong-il is visiting northeast China after ending a trip to Russia, China’s official Xinhua news agency said late on Thursday in an unusually open confirmation of Kim’s latest visit to his neighbor and biggest patron.

The secretive Kim visited China as recently as May, but his visits are usually cloaked in official secrecy until nearly over.

Kim Jong-il “visited northeastern China starting from August 25 after his Russian tour,” said China’s official Xinhua news agency. China is isolated North Korea’s main source of economic and diplomatic support.

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