Harare

Zimbabwe’s financially troubled national airline has resumed flights after the company’s entire fleet was temporarily grounded due to lack of fuel, state radio reported on Tuesday. Hundreds of passengers were left stranded at Harare International airport on Monday.

Zimbabwe’s beleaguered national airline has grounded its entire fleet of planes due to lack of fuel, a state-controlled newspaper reported on Tuesday. Angry passengers bound for destinations including Johannesburg and Singapore found themselves stranded on Monday at Harare’s main airport following the flight cancellations, the Herald reported.

Zimbabwe’s plans to process its uranium deposits into energy will slash the huge amounts the power-starved country pays to import electricity, Energy Minister Mike Nyambuya said on Monday. ”When we exploit it, we would like to use it for peaceful purposes and reduce our electricity importation bill,” the minister said.

Zimbabwe’s government has decided to accept a United Nations offer to build emergency shelter for victims of its demolitions campaign, scrapping its previous refusal of the aid, a UN official said on Tuesday. ”We received a letter which conveys the wish of the government for the UN to proceed with phase one of the shelter programme,” said the official, who asked not to be named.

Capitalising on damaging power struggles rocking Zimbabwe’s opposition Movement for Democratic Change (MDC), a ruling-party legislator has urged Zimbabweans to vote for his party in this month’s Senate polls because it is ”more organised”, the state-controlled Herald reported on Monday.

Twenty-six members of Zimbabwe’s beleaguered opposition party who refused to withdraw as candidates for this month’s Senate elections have been expelled, a spokesperson said on Sunday in a move likely to lead to a final split in the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC).

Fourteen children have died from food poisoning in the Zimbabwean capital, Harare, in recent weeks, an official newspaper reported on Saturday, a day after reports of an outbreak of dysentery in Harare and its satellite town of Chitungwiza. The children were all under the age of five.

Zimbabwean authorities on Friday freed more than 100 protesters, including top labour leaders, arrested in the capital on Tuesday for demonstrating against economic hardships and shortages in the country. ”They are being released now,” lawyer Alec Muchadehama said in a telephone interview.

A war veterans’ organisation said on Friday that customs officials in Zimbabwe impounded thousands of red paper poppies sent from Britain for ceremonies commemorating the end of World War I. Red poppies are traditionally worn in the lapel in the run-up to Remembrance Sunday, the closest Sunday to November 11.

Police in Zimbabwe have arrested a top civil rights leader and the mayor of a major city for allegedly inciting public violence, according to local reports on Thursday. Chitungwiza mayor Misheck Shoko was arrested for ”inciting people to carry out an illegal demonstration in the town”, the state-controlled Herald newspaper said.

Zimbabwe police have charged more than 120 people arrested on Tuesday for staging protests to demand better living conditions, as the opposition warned the people’s patience is being stretched to the limit. Opposition Movement for Democratic Change leader Morgan Tsvangirai angrily reacted to the arrests.

The United States government said on Tuesday it stands by its ambassador facing intense criticism after blaming President Robert Mugabe’s government for Zimbabwe’s economic crisis. The State Department’s defence of Christopher Dell came in a statement as Mugabe said the US envoy ”should rather go to hell”, according to state radio.

Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe on Tuesday said the United States ambassador to the country, Christopher Dell, accused by Harare of ”undiplomatic behaviour” could end up in hell, a state news agency reported. ”Tell him [Dell] that I can’t spell ‘Dell’ but ‘hell’,” the New Ziana news agency quoted Mugabe as saying.

The Zimbabwe government has accused Britain of pressuring members of the royal family to step into a political dispute between Harare and London. Zimbabwe’s foreign minister Simbarashe Mumbengegwi told a news conference on Friday it was ”regrettable” that Prince Charles had made an ”unhelpful intervention” over Zimbabwe when he addressed a meeting at the United Nations this week.

Zimbabwe’s main opposition party teetered on Friday on the brink of a devastating split after malcontents announced they will boycott reconciliation talks and accused the party leader of being a dictator-in-the-making. The party’s deputy secretary general said Saturday’s reconciliation meeting has been convoked illegally.

Police officers in Zimbabwe will be given houses under the government’s ambitious housing-construction programme, the state-controlled Herald newspaper reported on Friday. Government ministers have promised that hundreds of thousands of homes will be built in the next four years.

The Zimbabwe government says United Nations Secretary General Kofi Annan does not have a ”factual position” on the country and is being misled by people in his office, a government spokesperson told the state-controlled Herald newspaper on Thursday.

Zimbabwe on Tuesday launched its strongest criticism of black farmers who benefited from its controversial land reforms, saying their apathy was responsible for a serious food crisis. ”We have a few people that are really committed to production while many others are doing nothing on the farms,” said Deputy Minister of Agriculture Sylvester Nguni.

Zimbabwe’s main opposition party edged closer to a split on Monday as crisis talks to resolve differences over taking part in controversial polls next month ended in a deadlock. ”The president and members of the management committee agreed to disagree,” said Movement for Democratic Change deputy secretary general Gift Chimanikire.

Three hundred Somali and Ethiopian nationals who entered Zimbabwe as refugees over the past two months have slipped out of holding centres and disappeared, the state-controlled Herald reported on Monday. ”When we made a check on them [at the holding centres], they were nowhere to be found,” Chief Immigration Officer Elasto Mugwadi told the paper.

Zimbabwean authorities are considering moving elephants from the country’s overburdened national parks to Namibia after at least 50 pachyderms starved to death. About 50 elephants died in separate incidents in the famous Hwange National Park in Zimbabwe’s dry southwestern region, prompting senior government officials to visit the area.

Top officials from Zimbabwe’s main opposition held crisis talks on Thursday amid an appeal by its leader to iron out differences over contesting next month’s controversial polls to a new Senate which threatens to split the party. Cracks in the opposition widened on Monday after 26 members defied Tsvangirai’s call to boycott next month’s elections to a new upper house of Parliament

Zimbabwe’s main opposition party, the Movement for Democratic Change, is to be investigated over ,5-million in illegal funds it is said to have received from Ghana, Nigeria and Taiwan, a state-controlled newspaper reported on Wednesday. Under Zimbabwe’s Political Parties Finance Act it is illegal for local parties to receive foreign funding.

Tanzania’s outgoing President Benjamin Mkapa has said African leaders should be guided by continental ”elders” like Zimbabwe’s President Robert Mugabe instead of being dictated to by former colonisers. Mkapa, who steps down later this month after a decade in power, was speaking late on Monday at a farewell banquet in Harare.