If you live long enough, you get to see the world turn — or turn upside down. After a lifetime spent watching and living through the abrasive, competitive relationship between Australia and Britain, I can vouch for that. Growing up in the southern state of Tasmania in the 1950s, I measured the expanses of water on the map and wondered why we had been dumped at this forlorn global extremity. Plotting my escape, I played Monopoly — enabling me to buy and sell Piccadilly.

South Africa launched five tries in the first half-hour and cruised past Argentina 39-7 in a rugby international at Velez Sarsfield on Saturday. The Springboks led 36-0 after 30 minutes then loosened their grip and could add only a second-half penalty by fullback Gaffie du Toit, who finished with two tries in a 24-point haul.

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.

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.