The United States is scaling up its military presence in Africa as concern mounts over terrorist threats on the continent, the deputy head of American forces in Europe said. ”The threat is not weakening, it is growing,” said US Air Force General Charles Wald.

Insurance giant Sanlam gave the African National Congress and New National Party one million rand each at the request of former presidents Nelson Mandela and F W de Klerk, Mandela said on Friday. Mandela said he was working together with his predecessor to raise funds and they were approaching big firms for funding.

Jayson Blair, a disgraced New York Times journalist whose trail of fabricated stories and plagiarism led to the resignation of the newspaper’s top two editors, has struck a new blow against his former employer with a tell-all book due to be published next week.

Yuri Kaloyev knew his brother was a broken man even before he disappeared a week ago. Two years after his wife, son and daughter, victims of a head-on plane collision over the Swiss-German border, had been laid to rest amid the sombre rows of a cemetery in their home town of Vladikavkaz, in southern Russia, his family’s ghosts still haunted his nights.

The United Nations spying row widened on Friday when its former weapons inspector, Hans Blix, told The Guardian he suspected both his UN office and his home in New York were bugged in the run-up to the Iraq war.

Wallaby fullback Mat Rogers helped himself to 23 points as the New South Wales Waratahs maintained their winning start to the Super 12 rugby season with a 48-14 thumping of South Africa’s Sharks in Sydney on Saturday.