Harare  - The charges against Zimbabwean ministerial appointee Roy Bennett, who was arrested last week as a new coalition government was being sworn in, have been changed for a third time, his lawyer said Tuesday.

The 52-year-old Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) politician now faces charges of possessing weapons for the purposes of insurgency and banditry, one of his lawywers, Trust Maanda, told Deutsche Presse-Agentur dpa.

Hong Kong  - China Tuesday defended the right of Robert Mugabe to own a Hong Kong home after the Zimbabwean leader reportedly paid 5 million US dollars for a villa in the former British colony.

"Hong Kong is a free port, and even Falun Gong practitioners can buy a property there, am I right?" a Foreign Ministry spokesman in Beijing told Tuesday's South China Morning Post.

Harare  - The planned court appearance of detained Zimbabwean opposition politician Roy Bennett failed to happen Monday because of prosecution delays, his lawyer said.

Bennett, who was due to be sworn in later this week as deputy agriculture minister in the country's new unity government, had been expected to appear in court in the north-eastern city of Mutare to be formally charged with attempted terrorism.

But the prosecutor failed to arrive from Harare, where the investigating police officer had taken the docket, Bennett's lawyer said.

Wellington  - The New Zealand government is likely to order the national cricket team not to go to Zimbabwe for a scheduled tour in July, Prime Minister John Key indicated on Monday.

The cabinet had not yet considered the issue, he said at his weekly news conference, "but I'd be deeply sceptical about whether they would be going."

London/HongKong  - Zimbabwean president Robert Mugabe has spent more than 5 million US dollars on a luxury Hong Kong hideaway, a news report said Sunday.

The three-storey home at the JC Castle development in Hong Kong's Tai Po district was bought in June last year by a middle-man acting on behalf of Mugabe and his wife, the Sunday Times in London reported.

The newspaper speculated that the property may have been bought as a Far East "bolt-hole" for the dictator whose 30-year stranglehold power appears to be finally ending as his country sinks into economic and political chaos.

Harare/Johannesburg  - Zimbabwe's new finance minister, Tendai Biti, has vowed to save the virtually worthless Zimbabwe dollar and to sideline controversial central banker, Gideon Gono, South Africa's Sunday Times newspaper reported.

Biti, who was sworn in as one of the former opposition's ministers Friday by President Robert Mugabe, told the Times: "Our money can only be saved by floating the Zimbabwe dollar so that it finds its natural value," he said.