POP STAR: Madonna opens children’s ward at Malawi hospital

US pop star Madonna on Tuesday opened a children’s hospital wing that her charity built in Malawi, saying it would make a difference in the lives of thousands of children in the southern African country.

The Mercy James Paediatric Surgery and Intensive Care Ward, which could
accommodate 50 patients at the Queen Elizabeth Central Hospital in the country’s second-largest city, Blantyre, was named after one of the four children Madonna adopted from Malawi.

According to the UN, Raising Malawi, funded by Madonna’s charity, is the first specialised health unit for children in the country of 18 million residents, which is among the 20 poorest in the world.

Madonna said at the opening ceremony that she started planning to build the ward a decade ago when she was doing a documentary on children with HIV in Malawi.

The 58-year-old singer said her legal battle to adopt Mercy James in 2009 was a fight which she won, adding that “I fought for Mercy and I won.

“I am here to say ‘never give up on your dream. Love conquers.

“If you do things with love in your heart, you will conquer.”

Madonna said the new paediatric ward would create superior learning environment for training Malawi’s next generation of doctors so that the country could be self-sufficient in that field.

The President of Malawi, Peter Mutharika, described Madonna as “a loving mother.

“We can now have our children with heart conditions undergo surgery; this centre is our national pride.”

Tupac breakup letter to Madonna cites race

Tupac Shakur

Rap legend Tupac Shakur broke off a hush-hush fling with Madonna two decades ago because he thought dating the white pop star would hurt his image with his fans, a letter reveals.

The brief relationship between the two music icons only emerged two years ago, and now an auction house has put up for sale a 1995 letter from Tupac — who was shot dead just a year later — to Madonna in which the rapper breaks off the romance, saying, “I never meant to hurt you.”

“For you to be seen with a black man wouldn’t in any way jeopardize your career, if anything it would make you seem that much more open and exciting,” Tupac wrote neatly on lined paper.

“But for me at least in my previous perception I felt due to my ‘image’ I would be letting down half of the people who made me what I thought I was,” he wrote.

Tupac was apparently referring to his newfound status as a leading voice in hip-hop, with his songs frequently taking on police brutality and other issues of concern to many African Americans.

In the letter, he told Madonna he had read an interview in which the pop great said “‘I’m off to rehabilitate all the rappers and basketball players’ or something to that effect.”

“Those words cut me deep seeing how I had never known you to be with any rappers besides myself,” Tupac wrote.

The letter, first reported by the gossip site TMZ, will go on the block later this month at New York auction house Gotta Have Rock and Roll.

Shortly after the split with Madonna, Tupac went to prison on charges, which he denied, of sexually assaulting a woman in a hotel room.

Tupac, who left prison with an increasingly gangsta image, was killed the following year at age 25 in a still murky shooting in Las Vegas.

The relationship between the two music icons was not widely known until 2015 when Madonna — usually known for her openness — explained a foul-mouthed appearance two decades earlier on David Letterman’s late-night television show.

"I was dating Tupac Shakur at the time and, the thing is, he got me all riled up on life in general. So when I went on the show I was feeling very gangstar"she told radio host Howard Stern.

Madonna in 1998 began to date English director Guy Ritchie, to whom she was married for eight years. She recently complained that she faced a double standard as a woman for taking younger lovers.

Tupac was engaged at the time of his death to designer Kidada Jones.