News headlines in September 2011, page 11

With Pakistan’s Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province turning into the ‘polio capital of the world’, authorities are warning parents that heeding Taliban propaganda against oral polio vaccination (OPV) could earn them a prison sentence.

Kobina’s legs are dappled with scars. He gets them flitting across the beach in Sekondi, in southwest Ghana, slipping in the soot-black mud and clambering over pirogues slippery with fish guts, only to sell a sachet of water or a freshly peeled orange to fishermen working on the shore.

Microsoft co-founder and billionaire philanthropist Bill Gates appears poised to endorse the adoption of a controversial financial transactions tax (FTT) to be used as a new source of development aid for poor countries.

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said Thursday that Iran would be willing to halt production of enriched uranium that is close to weapons grade if the United States sells Iran fuel for a reactor that produces medical isotopes.

Drug dealers in the favelas of this Brazilian city are doing the same brisk business as before the installation of the 'Police Pacification Units' (UPPs) in those poor neighbourhoods, authorities and experts admit, while they acknowledge the difficulties in combating the problem.

A 'boycott' by more than a dozen Western nations, including the United States, Germany, Canada and Israel, failed to derail a high-level meeting on racism and xenophobia hosted by the 193-member General Assembly.

The U.S. state of Georgia executed Troy Davis at 11:08 p.m. on Wednesday, Sep. 21, despite serious doubts about his guilt that inspired mass protests in Georgia, across the United States, and indeed, around the world.

The bodies of 35 people who allegedly had links to organised crime have been found in two abandoned lorries on a highway underpass in eastern Mexico, authorities say.

Brothers, husbands, boyfriends and fathers are key actors in the creation of a world where girls enjoy the same rights as boys, and will themselves benefit from greater gender equality, stresses a new report from Plan International released Thursday.

African countries are increasingly taking up Brazil's offer of training in the art of diplomacy, seeing it as a partner that could help them set up or improve their own foreign service institutes.