Beijing  - Ministers from 27 nations have backed a 15-billion-dollar plan to provide universal access to diagnosis and treatment of multi-drug-resistant tuberculosis (MDR-TB) by 2015, the World Health Organization (WHO) said Friday.

The ministers agreed to remove barriers to TB care, guarantee supplies of medicines, and develop full management and training systems for treatment of MDR-TB and extremely drug-resistant TB (XDR-TB), the WHO said in a statement.

Beijing - Protestors from China's Hui Muslim minority blocked three bridges in the central province of Henan after a Han Chinese bus driver accused of killing a Hui Chinese was released by police, sources said Thursday.

Up to 1,000 people took to the streets in Luohe, unhappy with the 200,000-yuan (29,000-dollar) compensation offered to the family, according to a statement by the Information Centre for Human Rights and Democracy.

Beijing  - China's Ministry of Public Security has launched a three-month campaign to eliminate "unnatural deaths" in prisons following several alleged beatings to death by guards, one of which prison staff claimed was caused by the prisoner's own nightmare, state media said on Thursday.

The ministry posted a notice on its website ordering all prisons and detention centres to learn from the case of Li Qiaoming, a man who was beaten to death in February by other prisoners at a detention centre in the south-western province of Yunnan.

Beijing - A former police chief in China's south-western Yunnan province has been jailed for 18 years for illegally selling explosives and accepting bribes, local media reported Wednesday.

Kang Tianxiang, 43, a former public security bureau director of Yunnan's Yiliang County, was originally handed a life sentence by the province's intermediate court, according to the Metropolis Times newspaper based in the provincial capital, Kunming.

Beijing, Apr. 1 : A Hindustan Times report last week that suggested that the Indian army had on March 25 concluded a three-day military exercise codenamed Divine Matrix, based on the assumption a "nuclear-armed China will attack India before 2017", has left the government in Beijing surprised.