Harare - Zimbabwean riot police Wednesday beat a group of unarmed protestors and detained a number of trade union leaders during the latest in a series of demonstrations over crippling cash withdrawal limits that have rattled Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe's regime.

The police used batons to beat back a group of around 50 protestors that attempted to march on the Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe in central Harare to demand an end to cash restrictions.

Over 20 people, including several senior officials of the Zimbabwe Congress of Trade Unions, the body that called the protest, were taken away in police trucks.

Harare - Water began trickling again from taps in Zimbabwe's capital Harare on Tuesday, a day after supplies were shut down completely, forcing major sections of business and state administration to close.

Residents in a few suburbs and in the central business district reported that water was flowing at low pressure. "At last I can flush the loo," said Girlie Matandwa soon after she arrived in her city centre office. "It stank yesterday and we couldn't use it so we all had to go home."

Harare/Johannesburg  - Rioting broke out in central Harare late Monday as mobs of uniformed but unarmed soldiers followed by hundreds of civilians went on the rampage, eyewitnesses said.

Several shots were fired as authorities deployed a large force of heavily armed troops and riot police, and one man was reported shot. It was not known whether the shooting was fatal.

Panic ensued as vehicles were stoned, shop windows smashed and looted as the mobs - some of them waving the open hand salute of the country's pro-democracy Movement for Democratic Change - whistled and danced through the city centre.

The force of anti-riot police was swiftly deployed and the mobs dispersed, leaving bricks and stones littering the road.

Harare - An outbreak of the deadly cattle-born disease anthrax is threatening to turn into Zimbabwe's worst yet, compounding a seven-week national epidemic of cholera, an international aid agency warned Monday.

The British-based Save the Children Fund said health workers had reported 32 cases of human infection and three deaths of people who had probably been eating meat from the carcasses of cattle infected with the disease in remote north-west Zimbabwe.

The disease had already killed 150 livestock, two elephants, 70 hippo and 50 buffalo.

It threatened to wipe out 60,000 cattle in the region, it said.

Harare - Zimbabwe's political parties agreed on a draft constitutional amendment leading to the formation of a power-sharing government, but the opposition Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) warned that obstacles still remain.

"We have differed with Zanu-PF for a long time while the citizens suffer, but fortunately we have agreed on something," said MDC spokesman Nelson Chamisa in Harare late Friday. "I need to hasten to mention that we still have some outstanding issues such the cabinet, appointment of diplomats."