News headlines in September 2010, page 3

John Mahanga sits on his hospital bed, coughing persistently. The 42-year-old has been suffering from tuberculosis (TB) for the past three years. He has been in treatment for it, but repeatedly stopped taking medication when he felt better. Doctors have now diagnosed him with multi-drug resistant (MDR) TB.

The U.N. children's agency UNICEF is taking the lead in an intense global campaign to provide schooling to some 69 million children who are unable to go to school - or don't have any schools to go to.

Dustbins in a university toilet rarely elicit a second look, but those at one of the oldest universities in Burma’s Kachin State do offer reason to pause. The bins, after all, collect a special form of garbage disposed of by students — hypodermic needles and syringes they have used to inject themselves with heroin.

Scientists are closely examining the reefs of this island just north of Venezuela to determine why it has escaped the devastation that wiped out 85 percent of the Caribbean's corals since the 1970s.

'We are not going to the election in tents. We want housing before elections.' These words were chanted in Creole and held high on placards during a recent demonstration at Haiti's crumpled National Palace, where protesters decried 'inhumane' conditions in the camps for displaced people and condemned the government and NGOs which they said have abandoned them.

Georgia's punitive criminal justice system has resulted in one of the highest imprisonment rates worldwide. Overcrowding of jails now hampers an ambitious government plan to reform the penitentiary system.

Obesity is no longer a problem confined to wealthy nations. In their developing counterparts in Africa, an increasing number of people can be categorised as obese. According to researchers this trend could be detrimental to countries’ already fragile economies.

'Sometimes, for a day or two we don't even have bread, nor flour to make bread. There's a store nearby that, when we are truly desperate, lets us take a bag of bread or something simple, on credit. I owe them a lot of money for the food I've brought from them, but I still can't pay them.'

Monsoon rains might have brought welcome relief to the inhabitants of Inle Lake, but concerned Burmese groups — both government and non-governmental organisations alike — are rallying to preserve Burma’s second largest lake from drying up again, as it did from earlier this year due to prolonged drought.

More than a year ago U.S. President Barack Obama came to Eastern Europe to announce his vision of a world without nuclear weapons. One year later, in the same place, the Czech capital Prague, he signed a deal slashing nuclear weapons stocks with his Russian counterpart Dmitri Medvedev.