The United Nations is urging Central African Republic Prime Minister Nicolas Tiangaye to restore security in the strife-torn nation, a UN spokesman said Saturday. At a meeting in Cameroon, top UN official Jeffrey Feltman passed on UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon's "deep concern over the alarming situation regarding security and human rights in the country," UN spokesman Martin Nesirky said.

The leader of Egypt's tiny Jewish community was buried in Cairo on Thursday in a dilapidated cemetery that has come to symbolise the dying community. More than a hundred mourners, including Christians and Muslims as well as Jews from both Egypt and abroad, attended the funeral of Carmen Weinstein under tight security in central Cairo's Shaar Hashamayim synagogue. "Egypt has lost a great lady," said Rabbi Marc Elfassi, who lives in France but has overseen rites in Egypt for nine years.

A Frenchman accused of rape and seven Algerians implicated in a pornography ring appeared in court on Thursday amid heavy security, as the trial began of a case making waves in Algeria. Main suspect Jean-Michel Baroche, 67, denied the charges against him, insisting he had never raped anyone, according to sources at the criminal court in Annaba, in northeast Algeria.

The son of Senegal's former leader Abdoulaye Wade was charged with corruption on Wednesday by detectives investigating his vast fortune, valued at more than $1 billion, his lawyer told AFP. Karim Wade, who held a number of cabinet posts during his father's presidency, "has just been charged with illicit enrichment and placed in custody", said El Hadji Amadou Sall. Wade is alleged to have acquired a number of foreign companies and real estate by corrupt means, including Dubai Port World, which runs the port container terminal in Senegal's capital Dakar and Moroccan bank BCME.