Former Paralympic athlete Oscar Pistorius has filed papers to South Africa’s Constitutional Court, appealing against his 13-year jail term for murdering his girlfriend, Reeva Steenkamp. A court last month increased Pistorius’s sentence for murdering Reeva Steenkamp to 13 years after the judges ruled it as “shockingly lenient’ in the latest stage of a long court battle since his trial in 2014.

Burkina Faso is banning imports from North Korea to comply with UN sanctions, the AFP news agency quotes the government as saying.

The UN measures were passed in September to restrict oil imports and ban textile exports - an attempt to starve North Korea of fuel and income for its weapons programmes.

South Africa's ruling African National Congress (ANC) has selected Cyril Ramaphosa to succeed President Jacob Zuma as the party's leader.

The country's deputy president defeated former cabinet minister Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma, Mr Zuma's ex-wife, after a marathon voting process.

Mr Ramaphosa is in a strong position to become president in 2019 polls.

Angola’s sovereign wealth fund made a profit of $40.5 million in the third quarter, it said on Wednesday, attributing it to a good performance in its bonds and securities investments.

The fund, which launched in October 2012 and is known by its Portuguese acronym FSDEA, said however its total asset value was $5.03 billion at the end of the third quarter, down from $5.05 billion in the second quarter.

In a statement, the fund said its investments in bonds and securities had generated a gross margin of $117.5 million in the third quarter. It allocates over a third of its portfolio to treasury bills, high grade bonds, listed equities, derivatives, currencies and other securities.

At least two people have been killed in a fire which swept through a popular nightclub on the outskirts of Kenya's lakeside city of Kisumu, police say.

The number of dead could rise as many people are feared trapped in the building, police told the BBC.

Voting has begun in Gauteng, South Africa by delegates of the African National Congress(ANC) to elect a new leadership and more important, the successor to President Jacob Zuma as party leader. After initial delays over delegate accreditation, polling finally kicked off around midnight at the 54th National Congress of the party. The result will be announced on Monday afternoon, the Sowetan reported. By 6am only four provinces were still left to cast their votes.