A vague and disturbing threat from Pyongyang – France’s ruling party gets its clock cleaned – Ebola has officially jumped borders in Western Africa – And a lot more in your CareerSpot World News Briefs:

North Korea is vowing to carry out a “new form” of nuclear test.  Pyongyang didn’t explain what that would be, but observers believe that North Korea has been trying to make its nuclear devices small enough to mount atop a missile, which is a technology the hermit kingdom is also developing.  Abut a year ago, North Korea made regional tensions just a little more tense with its third test of a nuclear device.

North Korea’s second day of talks with Japan ends today.  At the first session on Sunday in Beijing, the two sides agreed to work towards settling “outstanding issues” harming bilateral ties.  There were no breakthroughs to announce, but the two countries are talking for the first time since November 2012, at a time when Japan is looking at constitutional changes to enable military expansion and North Korea is talking about the afore mentioned “new form” of nuclear test.

Turkey’s Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s ruling party is claiming victory in local elections.  And Erdogan is vowing retribution against his political opponents, comparing them to assassins.  Erdogan himself was not on the ballot, but he dominated the conversation going in to the vote, with a steady stream of leaks in the rival media and social networks that revealed alleged wide-scale corruption in his government.

France’s Socialists have kept Paris, but the ruling party suffered huge losses in municipal elections.  The center-right opposition UMP is celebrating taking the mayor’s offices in a number of key cities.  The extremist, far right Front National won at least seven offices – not a big number, but proof that the party long associated with racism is capable if winning elections.  The Socialists’ one bright spot was Paris, where Anne Hidalgo is the new mayor.

Twenty-one people are dead in Nigeria when Boko Haram Militants tried to escape from detention in the secret police headquarters in the capital Abuja.  It’s not clear if all of the dead were prisoners, or if some guards or civilians were involved.  Boko Haram has waged a four-year war to carve out an independent state in the northeast that would be ruled by the militant group’s harsh brand of Sharia law. 

Peacekeepers from Chad killed eight people in a Christian neighborhood of the capital Bangui.  One report says the Chadians came under attack by a Christian militia.  The Chad forces have been seen as biased towards the Muslim militia who took over the country for several months last year.  Last week, the African Union warned its peacekeepers would treat Christian militias in the Central African Republic as hostile.

Liberia is confirming two cases of Ebola, apparently from over the border in Guinea where at least 70 people have died.  There is no vaccine, no cure, and ebola can kill up to 90 percent of those it infects when the acute form of the disease sets in with vomiting, diarrhea, and severe bleeding.  Eleven more deaths in Liberia and Sierra Leone are suspected to be Ebola.

Searchers north of Seattle in America’s Pacific Northwest have revised downward the number of missing from a massive mudslide that consumed a tiny mountain town.  Thirty people cannot be accounted for, down from 90.  At least 18 people are dead, and that does not include bodies that have yet to be identified.  The death toll could go higher than 27 lives lost.