He always claimed to drink everyday Georgian red wine served from clay jugs, but the truth about ”Uncle Joe” Stalin’s taste in vintages proved very different on Friday. In the shameful arena — for a communist — of Sotheby’s auction rooms in London, 195 bottles from the great dictator’s dessert wine cellar were auctioned, several going for more than £2 000 a bottle.

The Mi-17 helicopter rocks and shudders into life, the rotors accelerating until flight UN863 is airborne and skimming the rooftops of Goma for another mission in the Democratic Republic of Congo. The helicopter is Russian-made, the crew is Indian and the passengers comprise South African infantrymen, a Uruguayan officer, a Filipino technician and an American diplomat.

The United States-led hunt for the Taliban continues relentlessly in Afghanistan. Three years after invading, 18 000 soldiers wield a battery of hi-tech weapons; stealth aircraft crowd the skies; satellites spin overhead; and special forces creep across remote mountains in a billion-dollar mission.

A 76-year-old retired Dutch maths teacher described on Friday how for more than 25 years he was feted by communist leaders around the world as the inspired head of a radical Marxist-Leninist party that never, in fact, existed. As Chris Petersen, head of the supposedly 600-member Marxist-Leninist party of the Netherlands, Pieter Boevé travelled to Beijing more than two dozen times and met Mao Zedong.

Gunmen stormed a police station and bombed a Shia mosque in two simultaneous dawn attacks in Baghdad on Friday which killed at least 30 Iraqis and injured several. Dozens of prisoners were freed and weapons were looted from the police station, a brazen show of strength by the insurgents. Shortly afterwards guerrillas attacked at least two police stations in the northern city of Mosul.

United States sprinter Marion Jones says she’ll sue accused steroid peddler Victor Conte over his allegations that she received banned drugs before winning five medals at the Sydney Olympics ”Victor Contes’s allegations about me are not true, and the truth will come out in the appropriate forum,” Jones said Friday in a statement issued through her attorney.

South African President Thabo Mbeki met some of the key figures in Côte d’Ivoire as he held talks on Friday aimed at pushing a ”roadmap to peace” for the divided West African nation, but he faced big hurdles. Mbeki arrived on Thursday in the troubled country’s commercial capital Abidjan and has been shuttling between talks with the main players.