Zimbabwe's neighbours should close their borders in an attempt to bring down President Robert Mugabe, Botswana's Foreign Minister said yesterday.

Southern African leaders opened a regional summit on Zimbabwe in South Africa on Sunday, hoping to break a deadlock over the allocation of cabinet posts which has prevented formation of a power-sharing government.

My stepfather, Robert Graham Holt, died on 27 July after a notable career as an agriculturalist and teacher in developing countries, mainly African, followed by devoted service to the local Suffolk community in which lived with his wife on retirement.

A pipe and slippers, not an Olympic podium, is higher in the pecking order of pastimes for most 38-year-old swimmers but the evergreen Mark Foster is no ordinary swimmer. His longevity and popularity were rewarded last night when his peers on the British Olympic team voted for him to be Britain's flag-bearer at tomorrow night's opening ceremony for the Games.

The African Union called today for a national unity government in Zimbabwe, summit delegates said, after the widely-condemned re-election of President Robert Mugabe in a poll scarred by violence.

Amid mounting fears that the senior Zimbabwean opposition official Tendai Biti is being tortured in custody, his lawyers obtained a high court order yesterday that he be brought before a judge today.

It may only be a matter of time before Precious Ramotswe is operatically trilling her way through her private investigations. Alexander McCall Smith, the author of The No.1 Ladies' Detective Agency series, has founded Botswana's first opera house, The No. 1 Ladies' Opera House. But the writer, who is himself no mean bassoonist, is keeping his plans for a future world premiere at the new venue firmly under wraps. He's brimming with enthusiasm, however, over immediate plans for his latest project which opens with "a grand-ish concert" on 21 June, sponsored by the Edinburgh-based author.

Fans of Alexander McCall Smith's books have long awaited BBC1's television adaptation of The No 1 Ladies' Detective Agency and the final product, co-written by Richard Curtis and the late Anthony Minghella, and directed by Minghella, did not disappoint.

It's genuinely sad that Anthony Minghella should have died so young, and it makes reviewing The No.1 Ladies' Detective Agency a slightly awkward business. A popular bank holiday entertainment shouldn't have been the capstone to his career, and given a little time, it won't be. But following so closely on his death, it will inevitably be received as a parting gift, which is not a seemly thing to subject to criticism. It's a relief, then, to find that its merits are distinctively Minghella's own, and that in adapting Alexander McCall Smith's hugely popular and arguably emollient stories for the screen, he and Richard Curtis have found a way to stiffen their representation of African life without losing the sweet moral clarity of the originals.