BBC在线收听下载:奥巴马称西非埃博拉病毒爆发威胁全球

BBC news 2014-09-17

BBC News with David Austin.

President Obama has described the outbreak of Ebola in West Africa as a threat to global security. Speaking at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta, Mr. Obama said the situation in West Africa was grave.

It's spiraling out of control. It is getting worse. It's spreading faster and exponentially. Today thousands of people in West Africa are infected. That number could rapidly grow to tens of thousands. And if the outbreak is not stopped now, we could be looking at hundreds of thousands of people infected with profound political and economic and security implications for all of us.

President Petro Poroshenko of Ukraine has welcomed the simultaneous ratification of association agreements by Ukrainian and European parliaments. He said it was a first but a very decisive step towards bringing Ukrainian fully into the European Union. The agreement strengthened the economic and political ties between Ukraine and the EU. At the same time, the Ukrainian parliament approved a bill granting self-rule to the rebel-controlled regions in eastern Ukraine.

 The French government has narrowly won a vote of confidence in parliament which has been brought by the Prime Minister Manuel Valls in an attempt to boost the support for planned spending cuts. It comes after criticism from within his own cabinet about the plans which forced a government reshuffle. Lucy Williamson reports.

For a government not used to good news, this has come as a welcome relief. After purging the cabinet of rebels last month, Mr. Valls has gambled that taking on his critics in parliament would pay off. Addressing the chamber before the vote, he said government was about resisting, about standing firm, as his own government would on the issue of spending cuts. This was a kill-or-killed moment for the government but the passing of the vote doesn't solve the underlying problems, economic stalemate, and voters' deep disappointment with President Hollande.

Reports from Syria say that at least 12 children have died and dozens have become ill after being given contaminated measles vaccination in a rebel-held area. The British-based Syrian observatory for human rights say the inoculation took place in rural parts of northern Syria. Sebastian Usher has this report.

It's not yet clear what caused the children's death but medical sources have suggested the vaccines may have expired or been stored badly. The conflict in Syria and the resulting breakdown in state institutions has meant that diseases like measles and polio had been spreading with sometimes fatal consequences. Opposition groups have tried to make up for the losses of state-run mass immunization programs, and the clubs of basic medical services. The Syrian National Coalition has been running health programs in the areas where it holds sway. But there are huge problems in coordinating health services and getting medicine into warzones.

This is the BBC.

The top US military chief has suggested that US soldiers serving as advisers to Iraqi forces could at some points become directly involved in combat missions against IS militants. General Martin Dempsey told the Senate Panel that he would recommend to President Obama that the advisers should accompany Iraqi troops on attacks against specific IS targets if he believed it was necessary.

The Israeli military says that a mortar round has been fired from Gaza into Israel for the first time since the end of Israel's offensive against the Palestinian territory last month. The army said the explosion did not injure anyone or cause any damage. Hamas has said it has no knowledge of any attack.

The Egyptian postal authorities have issued a second set of postage stamps celebrating the planned expansion of the Suez Canal. The initial set was pulled because it featured images of the Panama Canal in Central America as Orla Guerin reports.

The first series of commemorative stamps show tankers on a waterway bordered by lush greenery. That should perhaps have been a clue since the Suez Canal runs through the desert. The Egyptian Postal Service had in fact used an image of the Panama Canal more than 11 thousand kilometers and half a world away. The authorities landed in hot water and had to issue new stamps featuring a rather generic-looking waterway. The original series is now a collectors' item selling for hundreds of dollars online.

The US space agency NASA has chosen Boeing and SpaceX to build a new generation of spaceships to carry astronauts to the International Space Station. NASA has set an ambitious target of 2017 for the first rocket launch from American soil since the shuttle program was ended in 2011. The spaceships will again blast off from the Cape Canaveral launch sites in Florida. For the past three years, US astronauts have flown to the space station aboard Russia rockets.

BBC News.