BBC在线收听下载:塞拉利昂努力应对埃博拉疫情

BBC news 2014-10-23

BBC News with Stewart Macintosh.

A massive security operation is taking place in the Canadian capital Ottawa after shots were fired at two locations including the Parliament. In the first incident, the soldier guarding a war memorial was shot and killed. Eyewitnesses say the gunman was chased by police into the nearby Parliament Building. Members of the Canadian Cabinet meeting in the building say they took cover after hearing volleys of gunfire. US officials say the gunman who was shot dead is believed to be Michael Z., a Canadian citizen. James C. is a senior CBC reporter in Ottawa.

The lockdown which has been in place over much of the downtown Ottawa parliamentary precinct is now beginning to lift. Uh, many of the buildings, uh, that surround the Parliament Building had been under lockdown all day long now, and that is now beginning to lift. Police are still on the streets, the streets are effectively empty of vehicles. There is no one out there apart from people who are now leaving their workplaces where they have been closed all day. Uh, the Parliament Buildings are still under lockdown. There's a very painstaking and difficult operation going on; they are trying to secure the building in its totality.

Meanwhile President Obama has offered his condolences in the wake of the attacks in Canada.

It emphasizes … which we have to maintain vigil, like comes dealing with this kind of accesses, sense what smiles or terrorism. And I pledged as always, uh, to make sure that our national security team will be coordinating very closely given not only it's Canada, one of our closest allies in the world, but there are neighbors and our friends. Obviously we are all shaken by it, but we're gonna do everything we can to make sure that we are standing side by side we can to prepare for this difficult time.

Police in Ottawa have warned people to stay away from windows and rooftops. Heavily armed police and soldiers, somewhere in balaclavas, are going door to door in downtown Ottawa.

The Red Cross which is trying to tackle Ebola in Sierra Leone says the scale of the outbreak is so bad that it's now having to retrieve a very high number of corpses a day. Steve M. is the organization's director of the Emergency Ebola Operations in Sierra Leone.

On a daily bases, we are getting between 75 to 100 bodies a day that need to be recovered here in the Free, capital Freetown and in the rest of the country we are also having numbers increase anywhere between 20 and 50 a day. It's absolutely a huge challenge because this work needs to be impeccable; you could not make one mistake. We have to be extremely disciplined, and the discipline comes from repetition. Any little exposure puts our teams at risk.

Earlier, the head of the International Red Cross and Red Crescent described travel bans imposed by some countries to curb the virus as irrational. He said measures such as closing borders, canceling flights and isolating countries make no sense and created panic.

World News from the BBC.

Parliament in Rwanda has voted in favour of banning the BBC in the country following a television documentary about the genocide of 1994. The BBC programme Rwanda's Untold Story which was broadcast earlier this month questioned some of the official accounts of what happened during the genocide.

A US Federal jury has found four formal security guards from the company Blackwater guilty of shooting dead 14 unarmed Iraqis and wounding more than a dozen others in Baghdad in 2007. One formal guard was found guilty of first degree murder and three others of voluntary manslaughter as Juana Jolly reports from Washington.

The seven-week trial focused on why four Blackwater's security guards opened fire and threw grenades into a crowded Baghdad street as they attempted to clear a path for a US State Department convoy. The US investigation found 14 people died in the incident with a further 80 injured. Lawyers for the defence said the guards were reacting to gunfire from insurgents in the Iraqi police. But prosecutors argued they had shown a grave indifference to the carnage their actions would cause and that some of them harboured low regard and deep hostility towards Iraqi civilians.

Police in Israel say a man has deliberately driven his car into a group of passengers at a train stop in east Jerusalem killing a baby and injuring eight people. The man was shot and injured by officers when he tried to run away. The BBC Middle East correspondent says there have been a growing number of security incidents in east Jerusalem.

The International Olympic Committee has granted provisional recognition to Kosovo and it's proposed that it be granted full membership when the IOC's General Assembly meets in December. The IOC's decision was opposed by Serbia from which Kosovo declared independence in 2008. If Kosovo does get full membership, it will be able to take part in the 2016 Olympics in Rio de Janeiro.

BBC News.