Harare/Johannesburg - Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe's regime has banned a visit planned by a distinguished group of international "Elders" to assess Zimbabwe's humanitarian crisis, state media reported Thursday.

Most of the patients lay limp as corpses, on the ground in the open, some of them with their drip bags of saline solution suspended from tree branches.

Zimbabwe's gold mining industry, Africa's third biggest nine years ago, is on the brink of "total collapse" because the country's central bank refuses to pay for the gold it buys from the mines, the mines' representative body said Monday.

An angry statement issued by the Chamber of Mines of Zimbabwe accused the Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe (RBZ) of "deliberately" ruining the industry.

A UN General Assembly committee on Friday voted by a large majority to push for an arms trade treaty to control the sale of weapons around the world worth hundreds of billions of dollars a year.

New talks aimed at salvaging Zimbabwe's power-sharing deal were due to get underway in Harare Monday, amid fears the Movement for Democratic Change of prime minister-designate Morgan Tsvangirai could pull out of the agreement.

Zimbabwe's Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) on Friday ratcheted back an earlier threat not to participate in a regional meeting on the crisis in Zimbabwe, saying party leader Morgan Tsvangirai would attend, despite still lacking a passport.

The United States will consider more sanctions against Zimbabwe if President Robert Mugabe does not follow through on commitments to set up a power-sharing government, the US State Department said Monday.

A month after the signing of a power-sharing accord in this troubled southern African country, talks collapsed late Friday over formation of a coalition government.

Morgan Tsvangirai, leader of the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC), described the situation as a dead end. He called for help from the African Union and the