Harare

HARARE, Zimbabwe -- The main opposition party pressed its claim yesterday that it had won a landslide election victory to unseat Zimbabwe President Robert G. Mugabe, but the government said nothing about the presidential vote 48 hours after ballots had been cast. The only official announcement was that both sides were tied in early parliamentary results. At a news conference yesterday, officials from the opposition party, the Movement for Democratic Change, claimed to have seen the results from more than half of the constituencies and that, according to their calculations, the opposition presidential candidate, Morgan Tsvangirai, had won 60 percent of the presidential vote to beat the 84-year-old Mugabe.

FIVE THOUSAND delegates from 135 countries are in Harare, Zimbabwe, for a 10-day struggle over whether to downgrade the African elephant from Appendix I (threatened with extinction) to Appendix II (may become so) of the 1975 Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES). That is, whether to resume legal trade in tusks, banned in 1989.Cutting through the rhetoric of conservation, eco-imperialism, JTC self-determination, animal and human rights, this is a battle between two groups of elephant-inhabited African nations having opposite interests.

IT COULDN'T be any clearer if novelist Richard Preston had previewed it in his latest bioterrorism thriller. Any federal investigator trying to unearth the anthrax mailer who terrorized the nation last fall would want to speak with Dr. Steven J. Hatfill. He's a scientist knowledgeable about anthrax who commissioned a study on the danger of an airborne attack of the bacteria. He has worked at the nation's top biodefense laboratory and described the ease with which deadly germs can be cooked up at home.

Halliburton officials say shifting the oil service giant's center of gravity from Texas to the Persian Gulf is just a "strategic" move to drum up more oil business. Chief Executive David Lesar even lanced the announcement that he was moving himself and his CEO headquarters to the United Arab Emirates city of Dubai into the middle of a weekend energy conference in Bahrain. The implication: It is no big deal, especially since Halliburton promises not to reincorporate overseas, which would have huge tax consequences, or to uproot its 4,000-employee Houston headquarters.

HARARE, Zimbabwe -- Former Zimbabwean President Canaan Banana was convicted yesterday on 11 counts of sodomy, attempted sodomy and indecent assault by Zimbabwe's highest court, and prosecutors confirmed he has fled the country.In the most sensational trial involving homosexuality in modern African history, High Court Judge Godfrey Chidyausiku confiscated Banana's bail and issued an arrest warrant for the 63-year-old father of four and Methodist theologian.Banana went to neighboring Botswana on Nov. 17."

Rescue workers in Zimbabwe were searching yesterday for the body of a Maryland man whose riverboat capsized downstream of Victoria Falls during a whitewater rafting trip. HTC Tour operators and the U.S. State Department said he is presumed dead.John Mayer, 45, of Rockville has been missing since Feb. 11. A tour operator in Zimbabwe said Mayer had moved from Maryland to Hong Kong and was vacationing when the accident occurred.In addition to Mayer, six other passengers and a guide on the inflatable riverboat were tossed into the Zambezi River during an afternoon trip, said Jeremy Brooke, owner of Shearwater Tours in Harare, which organized the outing.

HARARE, Zimbabwe -- They are preparing to party here, stoking the passions and cuing the clown. They are planning a parade on rationed gas. The mighty United States is on the verge of losing in the first round of the Davis Cup to a team from the northern suburbs of Harare. The Black brothers, Wayne and Byron, got an assist yesterday from a friend and neighbor, Kevin Ullyett, who grew up a little more than walking distance away. Ullyett teamed with Wayne Black to scramble back from a two-sets-to-one deficit and outlast Americans Alex O'Brien and Rick Leach.

Earlier this year, I saw a powerful play set in Zimbabwe in the 1890s (when it was called Rhodesia) that brought back some disturbing memories of my visit there about 15 years ago. "The Convert," the first in a trilogy being written by Zimbabwean award-winning playwright Danai Gurira, ran from mid-February to March 10 at Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company. The play centered on Jekesai, a young girl from a rural village, who moved in with an aunt who worked for a Zimbabwean Catholic priest.

JOHANNESBURG, South Africa -- A small black guerrilla faction warned yesterday that its attack on a golf club Saturday night marked the beginning of a new campaign against white civilian targets, evidently aimed at disrupting a compromise on South Africa's political future.But the government and the leading black organization, Nelson Mandela's African National Congress, fiercely condemned the attack in King William's Town, which left two couples dead and 17 people wounded at a wine tasting where much of the town's white gentry had gathered.

HARARE, Zimbabwe - After a campaign defined by death, violence and economic turmoil, Zimbabwean voters will go to the polls this weekend in an election that may lead to the first change in government in two decades - or, some fear, may push their country further into chaos. Zimbabweans will be choosing new parliamentary leaders. But the election is viewed not so much as a contest between individual candidates as a battle between President Robert Mugabe's ailing, yet firmly entrenched, one-party government and a powerful new opposition group giving the government its first serious challenge.