VOA NEWS

October 3, 2014

From Washington, this is VOA news. Coming up, the Hong Kong protests are continuing. We'll also have the latest on the Ebola outbreak. Hello everyone, I'm Steve Norman.



Hong Kong student leaders spearheading days of mass protests have agreed to 11th-hour talks with the pro-Beijing government aimed at easing the crisis that has brought much of the city to a standstill.

The agreement announced early Friday came just hours after the territory's embattled chief executive offered to have his Chief Secretary Carrie Lam meet with protest leaders. In extending the offer, however, Chief Executive Leung Chun-ying refused a key student demand that he step down.

As the resignation deadline passed, there were no reports of violence.



Federal and state health officials are looking at as many as 100 people who may have had direct or indirect contact with the first Ebola patient diagnosed in the United States.

But the head of the Centers for Disease Control, Tom Frieden, says he is confident the spread of the disease can be contained.

Officials say none of the 12 to 18 people who had close contact with the patient show any signs of the disease.

They are being monitored for 21 days. That's the Ebola virus incubation period.

The patient has been identified as Liberian national Thomas Duncan. He is in serious but stable condition in isolation at a Dallas hospital.



British Foreign Secretary Philip Hammond is calling for "decisive action" to fight the Ebola outbreak that's killed more than 3,300 people in West Africa.

"We are behind the curve in the sense that the disease is increasing faster than the international response. We now need to step up the international response in a really meaningful way."

Secretary Hammond spoke at a conference Thursday in London.



This is VOA news.



Nigeria's military is standing by its assertion that the self-proclaimed leader of militant group Boko Haram is dead.

The military's comments Thursday came after the insurgents released a new video that shows the purported Abubakar Shekau asserting he is alive and that his group is running an "Islamic caliphate" in territory it controls.

The Nigerian Defense Headquarters insisted the man in the video, who it says actually is a militant named Mohammed Bashir, was killed last month during a battle in the town of Kondunga.



Turkish lawmakers have authorized military forces in Syria and Iraq in a vote that could allow the country to battle Islamic State militants near Turkey's border.

The law also allows foreign forces to operate from Turkey against the Islamic State.



And hundreds of protesters took to the streets in the central Syrian city of Homs on Thursday after a double bombing killed dozens of children outside a primary school a day earlier.

Protesters called for the resignation of the Homs governor.

Syrian state media also said at least 25 children and eight adults were killed. The Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights says 47 children were killed.



Shelling in the eastern Ukrainian city of Donetsk on Thursday killed a Swiss employee of the International Committee of the Red Cross.

Western journalists in Donetsk and Russian news agencies reported the building housing the local office of the Red Cross in the center of the rebel-controlled city was hit during the shelling.



At least seven people were killed when a bomb exploded on a passenger bus in northwest Pakistan. Four people were also injured in Thursday's attack, which took place on the outskirts of Peshawar, the region's main city.

No one claimed responsibility for that attack.



Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi is launching a massive nationwide cleanliness drive to spruce up the country. Anjana Pasricha has a report.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi literally wielded the broom Thursday in a poor colony housing sanitation workers in New Delhi before administering a pledge to tens of thousands of school children and government officials to spend two hours every week in cleaning up the country.

He asked people to make a beginning with themselves, their families, neighborhoods, workplaces and villages.

Ministers, lawmakers and school principals also picked up brooms and trash cans to sweep streets and clear garbage to raise public awareness of better sanitation in a country where cleaning is considered a task to be done by lower castes.

Anjana Pasricha, New Delhi.



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