President Thabo Mbeki on Friday described as ”astounding” the original approach by the Congress of South African Trade Unions to President Robert Mugabe about its intention to conduct a fact-finding mission in Zimbabwe.

United States forces were on Friday night awaiting final orders to storm Fallujah, the resistance stronghold, in what is expected to be the bloodiest assault since the invasion of Iraq last year. As the US stepped up air raids, blocked roads into the city, and issued loudspeaker warnings to the population to leave, the interim Iraqi prime minister, Ayad Allawi, indicated that time had almost run out.

Even before Yasser Arafat is declared dead, he is at the centre of a dispute over where he will be laid to rest, after Israel refused to allow his burial in the holy city of Jerusalem. The Palestinian leader wishes to be interred at one of the most sacred sites in Islam, Haram as-Sharif, known to Jews as the Temple Mount, inside Jerusalem’s old city.

In the coming days, millions of Democrats across the United States, who wrote cheques, manned phone lines, knocked on doors, or merely voted in the most intense election season since the Vietnam generation, will struggle to come to terms with defeat.

After a journey of seven years and more than 3,2-billion kilometres, a £1,7-billion United States-European mission is preparing for the unknown. Cassini, a Nasa spacecraft the size of a truck, carrying Huygens, a European robot not much bigger than a commercial washing machine, will complete one more preparatory loop around Titan, the largest moon of Saturn.

The first results of an investigation into the murder of controversial Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh, whose suspected assailant has ties to radical Islamists, point to a ”terrorist conspiracy”, prosecutors said on Friday. Seven people with ties to Islamic groups are to be charged with involvement in a terrorist conspiracy.