South African mountaineer Lance de Willers has set a world record by being the fastest person to ascend and descend Kilimanjaro. ”The new record is mine,” De Willers said in a statement on Wednesday. ”I am very sore but it is so exhilarating to know that I did it,” he said.

Ronald Grimsley (25) had been high on dagga, heroin and drink and ”lost control for a few minutes” when he allegedly strangled Tanya Flowerday (18) in June last year. Grimsley, who made advertisements for a film company, has pleaded not guilty to charges of rape, indecent assault, aggravated robbery and murder on grounds that he was not ”in his sound and sober senses” at the time of the incident.

The Bush campaign on Wednesday night sent Vice-President Dick Cheney on the attack against John Kerry, portraying the Democratic challenger as a man ill-suited to lead the country at a ”defining moment” in its history. In his speech to the Republican convention, Cheney dwelt on what he described as Senator Kerry’s shifting positions on critical issues of war and peace, and said he did not have the resolve the country needed.

Slobodan Milosevic is refusing to take the medicine prescribed for his high blood pressure by United Nations doctors at his cell, jeopardising his trial for war crimes in what prosecutors said on Wednesday was a calculated attempt to delay the trial still further.

Iran has told United Nations nuclear inspectors that it is about to process dozens of tonnes of raw uranium into the gas which centrifuges can turn into nuclear bomb material, a disclosure certain to reinforce US arguments that Tehran has embarked on a secret atomic weapons programme.

The fate of two French journalists kidnapped in Iraq remained unclear on Wednesday night as a deadline passed with no word on their fate, while an Iraqi militant group said it had freed seven truck drivers seized more than a month ago. The drivers — from India, Kenya and Egypt — were on their way back to Kuwait on Wednesday after the firm that employs them announced it had agreed to the kidnappers’ demands to pull out of Iraq.

The United Nations secretary general, Kofi Annan, called for a substantial and speedy expansion of the international forces in Darfur after reporting that the Sudanese government had failed to stop attacks on civilians. He was delivering his verdict on Khartoum after the security council’s deadline.