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ZIMBABWE'S military wants to forge a new "strategic partnership" with China, an increasingly important ally as Robert Mugabe's government fights international isolation, an official newspaper said yesterday. Mr Mugabe, 82, is seeking friends in Asia under an economic and diplomatic drive called the "Look East Policy", developed after the West accused his government of human rights abuses. Analysts say Zimbabwe plays an important role in China's strategic plans to increase access to African oil and other raw materials. The state-run Herald newspaper said Zimbabwe Defence Forces (ZDF) commander General Constantine Chiwenga told a group of Chinese military visitors Zimbabwe's army...

ROBERT Mugabe has ruled out ever trying to get back into the "useless" Commonwealth during a blistering attack on Tony Blair and his "gay gangsters".In his first interview for more than a year, Mugabe also insisted he had discussed the issue at length during a meeting with Prince Charles, where he expressed his admiration and respect for the Royal Family. The 81-year-old did, however, say he would open his doors to Foreign Office diplomats in a bid to restore relations between Zimbabwe and Britain. Mugabe has been ostracised by the international community after a million of his own people were...

PRESIDENT Robert Mugabe's government was making desperate attempts to paint a massive blitz on shacks in a positive light yesterday as a United Nations envoy arrived in Zimbabwe.Anna Tibaijuka, the head of UN housing agency Habitat and the world body's most senior African woman, was due to hold talks with the Zimbabwean president today on Operation Clear Out Trash, which has made at least 300,000 people homeless in five weeks. Ms Tibaijuka and her eight-member team will also meet officials from the main opposition Movement for Democratic Change (MDC), who claim the operation is a well-planned attack on its supporters....

Throughout Africa, millions of people live in circumstances scarcely imaginable. It is too simple to lay the conditions of grinding poverty, failing institutions, rampant corruption, recurring conflict, starving children, and flagging economies all at the feet of some notoriously wretched leaders, although the continent has its share. Africa has also been the victim of good intentions. Decades of promises from Western donors have littered the landscape with half-finished projects that now stand as rusted monuments to the African miracle that hasn't happened.We should all applaud Tony Blair for making Africa the centrepiece of the July G8 summit at Gleneagles Hotel,...

Plumes of smoke rise from houses that stood among meagre patches of withered maize The poorer suburbs of Harare have been bulldozed by Mugabe’s storm troopsIN TWO WEEKS’ TIME, at a luxury hotel in Scotland, Tony Blair will sit down to dinner with President Mbeki of South Africa, an unashamed ally and apologist of the monstrous Mugabe regime in Zimbabwe. As the two leaders wine and dine in Gleneagles, Robert Mugabe’s riot police will be engaged on their brutal and systematic mission to destroy the homes and livelihoods of some of the poorest people in Africa. How can Mr Blair...

A huge majority of Britons believes that pumping billions of pounds into Africa would be a waste of money, a verdict that is a major blow to Tony Blair's crusade to rescue the continent.As the Prime Minister prepares to fly to Washington on Monday to try to secure American support for proposals to tackle poverty in the Third World, a poll for The Daily Telegraph shows that 83 per cent of people are not confident that money given by the West would be spent wisely. It also shows that 79 per cent of voters believe that corruption and incompetence were...

President George W Bush has rebuffed Gordon Brown's plan to double aid to Africa, days before Tony Blair arrives in Washington to argue its merits.In a humiliating slap down for one of the Chancellor's pet projects, Mr Bush voiced his administration's dislike of the idea in person for the first time. "We've made our position pretty clear on that: that it doesn't fit into our budgetary process," he said after a meeting with South Africa's President Thabo Mbeki. Downing Street yesterday played down Mr Bush's remarks, with officials pointing out that the Government was still in negotiations on the issue...

Are Zimbabwean thug Robert Mugabe's increasingly brutal crackdowns on virtually every segment of society leading the country toward inevitable civil war? In a race against North Korea to claim the world's biggest basketcase title, the government recently attacked poor citydwellers and announced plans to nationalize all farmland, abolishing private land ownership.

JUST over 20 years ago, American Express had an idea that changed the world. Every time someone used its credit card, it donated one cent to charity, thus linking its product to a good cause. The result was an explosion of profit.Its link with the Statue of Liberty restoration appeal sent its credit card usage soaring by 28%, ensuring AmEx recouped far more than it gave away. This act of commercial genius was given a name: cause-related marketing. Give a little to charity, get a lot of kudos - it's a seductive win-win equation which has been adopted world over....

The Red Continent?By Frederick W. StakelbeckFrontPageMagazine.com | May 10, 2005 China’s rapid ascension as an influential economic and political force in Africa is raising complex questions concerning the security of the African continent and the future of its people. China’s involvement on the continent has increased dramatically over the past several years, fueled by Africa’s growing demand for cheap Chinese products and the need for greater infrastructure investment in the African energy and transportation sectors. Africa possesses two key attributes which makes it an attractive investment for an expansionist China. First, it is a continent rich in the high-value, natural...

Rose was raised as a good Catholic schoolgirl by her grandparents, but now the 18-year-old orphan survives by selling sex in a Ugandan slum with scant regard for the teachings of the church. Yahoo! Health Have questions about your health? Find answers here. Whatever the next pope says about condoms, she believes they are the only way to stop an AIDS epidemic that killed more than 2 million people in sub-Saharan Africa last year. "I'd like to follow the Church's teachings, but with condoms you can stay safe," she said. "Maybe I'm already sick, but I don't think so. You...

South African government observers yesterday gave President Robert Mugabe's victory in Zimbabwe's election a clean bill of health, endorsing his Zanu-PF party's grip on power which will enable him radically to alter the country's constitution.The decision of Mr Mugabe's most important regional ally to endorse the results of Thursday's parliamentary election - in which Zanu-PF won an overwhelming majority of seats - came despite widespread complaints of electoral fraud and the opposition's total rejection of the outcome. The group's leader, labour minister Membathisi Mdladlana, who weeks earlier predicted that it would be free and fair, declared that the landslide win...

President Robert Mugabe celebrated his 81st birthday yesterday by portraying Tony Blair as Zimbabwe's chief villain and vowing to defeat him in the forthcoming election.Mr Mugabe appeared on state television and described the parliamentary polls due on March 31 as a personal battle between him and the Prime Minister. "I am for the truth, Blair is for the untruthful," said Mr Mugabe. "I would tell him that he is a liar, straightforwardly, on Zimbabwe, and he knows he is telling a lie, a deliberate lie." These "lies" are, according to the president, Mr Blair's accusations that human rights abuses are...

It has persuaded women from Detroit to Delhi to celebrate their anatomy, but in Uganda, an attempt to stage The Vagina Monologues has been foiled by the forces of Christian conservatism.American author Eve Ensler's controversial theatre piece, which celebrates female genitals through a series of soliloquies, has been branded 'indecent and tasteless' by a Ugandan government minister, while church groups have described it as pornographic and 'anti-male'. Rarely-used powers of censorship have been reinvoked to demand drastic script alterations, including the deletion of references to lesbianism and the removal of the crucial word 'vagina' from the title. The Vagina Monologues...

Widespread allegations of sexual exploitation and abuse of Congolese women, boys and girls have been made against U.N. personnel who were sent to help and protect them — despite a so-called zero tolerance policy touted by the United Nations toward such behavior. The range of sexual abuse includes reported rapes of young Congolese girls by U.N. troops; an Internet pedophile ring run from Congo by Didier Bourguet, a senior U.N. official from France; a colonel from South Africa accused of molesting his teenage male translators; and estimates of hundreds of underage girls having babies fathered by U.N. soldiers who have...

THE United States yesterday announced it was suspending its funding of Kenya’s anti- corruption measures, amid a mounting sleaze crisis in the country.The British government said it was also reviewing contributions, following the resignation of Kenya’s leading anti-corruption official. The announcement is the latest setback for the government of Mwai Kibaki as he attempts to roll back 24 years of rampant sleaze under the former regime of Daniel Arap Moi. His most senior corruption fighter, John Githongo, resigned on Monday amid mounting international criticism that Kenya was dragging its feet on reform. Yesterday, William Bellamy, the US ambassador to Kenya,...

I love Kenya. But I also despair of it. I spent nearly two years of my childhood in Nairobi, and throughout the long, grey years of my Glaswegian youth the memories never left me. The orange dirt roads of Tsavo. The dazzling white beaches of Mombasa. The broiling sun. The pungent rains.It was just a few years after independence when we went there. The "winds of change" that Macmillan had spoken of in 1960 - 45 years ago this week, as it happens - had blown away British rule. Kenyatta, with his Kikuyu fly-whisk, was in charge. Every morning the...

Dear Family and Friends, My letter this week has been written by my Mum who came to this country in the mid 50's. I have added nothing to her words as they speak for themselves and express the pain that 3 million other families have gone through as they too have been forced to leave Zimbabwe. My name is Pauline and I am proud to say that I am Cathy Buckle's mother and the grandmother of her son about whom she has written so movingly in many of her letters and in the two books which describe the horrors of...

Night falls across Harare and Tracy Ncube sashays up Fife Avenue in a tight skirt and borrowed shirt to sell the only thing she can.Half a dozen other young women are already stationed outside Tipperary's bar and Ncube picks her spot, a tree opposite the car park illuminated by headlights. She has been a prostitute for two weeks and has bagged three customers, earning $45 (£25). Zimbabwe's youth were once considered Africa's brightest, graduates of one of the continent's best education systems which bred sophistication, confidence and ambition. But the economy has crumbled and, with it, opportunity. There are virtually...

Zimbabwe's President Robert Mugabe, long a thorn in the side of the United States and Britain, drew applause at the United Nations on Wednesday for a scathing speech that tore into the Iraq war allies.Mugabe blasted the two nations for holding up the reform of the UN Security Council in "calculated" attempts at trying to preserve their influence at the UN. "Ironically, it is some of the same forces that since last year have been raining bombs and hellfire on innocent Iraqis, purportedly in the name of democracy," he said. "Iraq today has become a vast inferno created by blatant...