World

KIEV — Pro-Western parties will dominate Ukraine's parliament after an election handed President Petro Poroshenko a mandate to end a separatist conflict and steer the country further out of Russia's orbit into Europe's mainstream.

Poroshenko held preliminary power-sharing talks with Prime Minister Arseny Yatseniuk on Monday after their political groups led other pro-Western forces committed to democratic reforms in sweeping pro-Russian forces out of parliament.

"The main task is to quickly form a pro-European coalition for carrying out agreements with the EU," Yatseniuk said at a meeting with election observers.

International observers from the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe gave a further lift to the pro-Western Kiev leadership, saying Sunday's election had "largely upheld democratic commitments" despite the conflict in the east.

It was "an amply contested election that offered voters real choice and [had] a general respect for fundamental freedoms", Kent Harstedt, OSCE special coordinator, told a news conference.

Despite a dire result for parties sympathetic to Russia, Moscow was not immediately confrontational. Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said he thought Russia would recognise the election.

But after months of conflict and turmoil there was no euphoria from Poroshenko's allies. The president faces huge problems: Russia opposes his plans to one day join the European Union, a ceasefire is barely holding between government forces and pro-Russian separatists in the east, and the economy is in dire straits.

Russian President Vladimir Putin can also still influence events, as the main backer of the rebels in the east and through Moscow's role as natural gas supplier to Ukraine and the EU. He could also remove trade concessions from Kiev if it looks West.

Poroshenko's first task is to cement an alliance with Yatseniuk's People's Front, which was running neck and neck with his bloc on about 21 per cent support after more than half the votes on party lists were counted.

Ukrainska Pravda, an online newspaper, calculated that an alliance between those two leading blocs would still not give Poroshenko and Yatseniuk a majority in the assembly. They are likely to turn to Selfhelp, a like-minded party with just over 11 per cent of votes. Final results for party list voting and in single constituency seats are due on October 30.

The tandem between the 49-year-old confectionery magnate Poroshenko and the professorial Yatseniuk, who has gone out ahead as an anti-Russian hawk in recent weeks, was emerging as a relationship likely to dominate the new political scene.

Several commentators said Yatseniuk, a favourite in the West for his stewardship of the war-ravaged economy, would probably remain prime minister to see through deep and possibly unpopular reforms, though he once called the job "political suicide".

Poroshenko and his allies are trying to restore normalcy to the sprawling country of 46 million and draw a line under a year of upheaval that began with street demonstrations against Poroshenko's pro-Russian predecessor, Viktor Yanukovych.

Yanukovych was overthrown in February in what Russia called a "fascist coup". Moscow responded by swiftly seizing and annexing Ukraine's Crimea peninsula and backing separatist rebellions in eastern regions.

More than 3,700 people have been killed in the conflict in the east, including 298 passengers on a Malaysian airliner shot out of the sky over pro-Russian rebel-held territory.

Moscow has also halted gas supplies to Ukraine in a row over the price and unpaid bills, causing alarm in the EU which gets a third of its gas needs from Russia, half of this via Ukraine.

The Kiev government says it is hoping for modest economic growth next year after a 6 per cent decline in 2014, but the World Bank expects the economy to continue shrinking.

In line with measures agreed with the IMF, Yatseniuk's government has cut budget expenditure and let the Ukrainian hryvnia float. The currency has lost about 40 per cent of its value against the dollar since the start of the year.

The economic decline has been aggravated by the fighting in the east, where the Kiev military said two Ukrainian soldiers were killed on Sunday as they tried to break through separatist lines in an armoured vehicle to relieve a government checkpoint.

Heavy shelling was also reported on the outskirts of the rebel stronghold of Donetsk on Monday despite a ceasefire.

Some allies of Yanukovych will be in parliament: The latest figures put the Opposition Bloc of ex-Fuel Minister Yuriy Boiko on 9.8 per cent, easily enough to put the party into parliament.

But other traditional allies of Russia, such as the communists, flopped and the make-up of the assembly seemed likely to spell future tensions with Moscow.

It is the first time the communists are not in parliament since Ukraine won independence from the Soviet Union in 1991.

SAO PAULO — Despite opposition from nearly half of Brazil's voters, leftist President Dilma Rousseff won re-election on Sunday and will have another four years to try to revive growth in a once-booming economy gone stagnant.

The 66-year-old Rousseff, who was a Marxist guerrilla in her youth, overcame growing dissatisfaction with the economy, poor public services and corruption to narrowly clinch a second term for herself and the fourth in a row for her Workers' Party.

After a bitter, unpredictable campaign that pitted poorer Brazilians grateful for government anti-poverty programmes against those exasperated with a stalled economy, Rousseff must now seek to continue flagship social services even as she tweaks economic policies to restore growth.

Most investors are sceptical that Rousseff can turn around the slumping economy after four years of ineffective industrial policies. Futures contracts for Brazil's Bovespa stock index expiring in December fell more than 6 per cent on Monday before the Sao Paulo stock exchange opened, while Brazil's currency slipped 3 per cent to a nearly six-year low.

Still, Rousseff and aides consistently shrug off market pessimism as little more than tantrums by speculators. As her camp celebrated victory late on Sunday, longtime foreign policy adviser Marco Aurelio Garcia told reporters that investors should relax and "take tranquilisers”.

Speaking to a relieved crowd of supporters in Brasilia, the capital, Rousseff acknowledged the close race and the call for change expressed by many voters.

"I know that I am being sent back to the presidency to make the big changes that Brazilian society demands," she said after winning the runoff election with 51.6 per cent support.

Her slim, three-point margin over centrist candidate Aecio Neves came largely thanks to gains against inequality and poverty since the Workers' Party first came to power in 2003.

Using the fruits of a commodity-fuelled economic boom in the last decade, Brazil's government expanded welfare programmes that helped lift more than 40 million people from poverty despite the current economic woes.

The "Brazilian model" has been adopted by centre-left parties across Latin America and Rousseff's victory, however narrow, is a blow for conservatives in the region.

It also means there will be no dramatic improvement in ties with the United States, hit in recent years by trade disputes and US government spying programmes that infuriated Rousseff.

About 40 per cent of Brazil's 200 million people live in households earning less than $700 a month, and it was their overwhelming support that gave Rousseff victory on Sunday.

Now, she pledges to deepen social benefits while working to revive an economy that fell into recession in the first half of this year.

She has already promised to replace her finance minister, part of a pledge to rethink economic policies that she has so far been known to all but manage herself.

"Such a tight result reduces her capacity to radicalise policies," said Alberto Bernal, a Miami-based economist with Bulltick Capital Markets. "Pretty much half of the country is against what she has been doing."

Rousseff's victory came just a year after massive street protests swept Brazil because many advances of the past decade had stalled.

The slowing economy, rising prices and anger over a lack of investment in public services prompted many to ask whether the Workers' Party had exhausted its ability to improve the lives of people in a country still plagued by vast gaps between rich and poor.

Fear of the unknown 

But Neves, a senator and former state governor who enjoys support among the upper-middle and wealthy classes, failed to convince a majority of Brazilians that he had enough new ideas to pull Rousseff from power.

It didn't help that many poor Brazilians associate his centrist Brazilian Social Democracy Party with a less inclusive past, a perception that the Rousseff camp deftly exploited.

"Even if things are getting worse, many voters prefer to stick with what they know than take a risk on the unknown," said Fernando Abrucio, a political science professor at the Getulio Vargas Foundation, a business school in Sao Paulo.

A second Rousseff term will not be easy, especially as a slowing economy strains a government model accustomed to high tax revenues to finance social programmes and subsidised credit for companies and consumers.

Brazil's economy, after growing by as much as 7.5 per cent the year before she took office, is on track to grow less than 1 per cent this year. Prior efforts to gun growth, largely through tax breaks and other subsidies for select industries, have largely fallen flat.

Meanwhile, inflation, long a problem in a country with a history of runaway price increases, is now hovering above the government's tolerance ceiling of 6.5 per cent.

And while unemployment is near record lows, economists don't expect it to remain so for long as plunging investment, slower growth and further uncertainty prompt employers to cut back.

To correct the course, economists say Rousseff must pursue long-pending tax and labour reforms in order to increase productivity and engage further with the global marketplace.

"Without improving efficiency and making Brazil a more productive part of the global economy, the country will just keep muddling along," said Marcio Garcia, an economist at the Pontifical Catholic University in Rio de Janeiro.

Rousseff will also face gridlock in a congress increasingly weary of the ruling party, which lost seats in this election along with its most important ally. Leading lawmakers promise to make hay over a snowballing corruption scandal at the state-run oil company known as Petrobras.

Brazilian media in recent weeks have been abuzz with leaked testimony by a former company executive relating alleged kickbacks by contractors to Workers' Party coffers.

One news magazine reported that another key suspect told prosecutors that Rousseff was aware of the scheme, an accusation that she has vehemently denied.

"She will face resistance on a number of fronts," said Carlos Melo, a political scientist at Insper, a Sao Paulo business school. "This is a victory in spite of all the problems — not an affirmation of a job well done."

CONAKRY, Guinea — The US envoy to the United Nations criticised the level of international support for nations hit by Ebola as she began a tour Sunday of West African nations struggling with the disease.

Samantha Power said before arriving in Guinea that too many leaders were praising the efforts of countries like the United States and Britain to accelerate aid to the worst-affected nations, but were doing little themselves.

"The international response to Ebola needs to be taken to a wholly different scale than it is right now," Power told NBC News before boarding her plane.

She said many countries "are signing on to resolutions and praising the good work that the United States and the United Kingdom and others are doing, but they themselves haven't taken the responsibility yet to send docs, to send beds, to send the reasonable amount of money".

After Guinea, Power will travel to Sierra Leone and Liberia. Those three nations account for the vast majority of the 4,922 deaths from the virus.

She will also visit Ghana, where the UN mission fighting Ebola is based, before meeting EU officials in Belgium.

More than 10,000 people have contracted the Ebola virus, according to the latest World Health Organisation figures.

Another West African country, Mali, was scrambling to prevent a wider outbreak after a two-year-old girl died from her infection following a 1,000-kilometre bus ride from Guinea. She was Mali's first recorded case of the disease.

'Feel like a criminal' 

An American nurse who was placed in quarantine after caring for Ebola sufferers in Sierra Leone has complained she was made to feel "like a criminal".

Kaci Hickox, who later tested negative, was the first person to be placed under a mandatory 21-day quarantine for medical staff returning to parts of the US who may have had contact with Ebola patients in West Africa.

The new rules took effect in New York and New Jersey on Friday, the same day Hickox returned.

"This is not a situation I would wish on anyone, and I am scared for those who will follow me," Hickox wrote in The Dallas Morning News.

"I am scared about how healthcare workers will be treated at airports when they declare that they have been fighting Ebola in West Africa. I am scared that, like me, they will arrive and see a frenzy of disorganisation, fear and, most frightening, quarantine."

In response, Ambassador Power expressed concern that the new quarantine policies were "haphazard and not well thought out".

She said there was a danger the new regulations could set back the fight against the virus.

"We cannot take measures here that are going to impact our ability to flood the zone" with health workers, Power said.

"We have to find the right balance between addressing the legitimate fears that people have and encouraging and incentivising these heroes."

Australian authorities said Sunday a teenage girl was in isolation in hospital and undergoing tests for Ebola after she developed a fever following her arrival from Guinea 11 days ago.

The 18-year-old, who arrived in Australia with eight other family members, had been in home quarantine in Brisbane before she developed a "raised temperature" overnight.

The WHO has warned the situation in Mali is an "emergency" after a girl died from Ebola following a bus ride from Guinea to Mali with her grandmother during which she was said to have showed contagious symptoms.

But Mali President Ibrahim Boubacar Keita tried to calm fears.

"We are doing everything to prevent panic," he said in an interview with French radio on Saturday, but he admitted that landlocked Mali could never "hermetically seal" itself.

Mauritania, meanwhile, reinforced controls on its border with Mali, which effectively led to the frontier being closed, according to local sources.

US Major General Gary Volesky took over Saturday as commander of the 700-man American military mission to combat Ebola in West Africa.

The mission is due to open a 25-bed hospital for health workers in the Liberian capital Monrovia in early November.

KIEV — Pro-Europe parties led by a group backing President Petro Poroshenko swept a parliamentary election in Ukraine on Sunday, an exit poll showed, giving him a mandate to end a separatist conflict and pursue democratic reforms.

The survey, issued after voting stations closed in the ex- Soviet republic, gave Poroshenko's bloc 23 per cent of the votes cast for the 29 competing parties, ahead of the Party of his ally, Prime Minister Arseny Yatseniuk, on 21.3 per cent.

A third pro-Europe Party was in third place but a surprise was the strong performance of a group representing allies of ousted president Viktor Yanukovych. The Opposition Bloc, led by former Fuel Minister Yuri Boiko, secured 7.6 per cent — enough to put his Party into parliament.

The exit polls confirmed expectations of a pro-Western assembly emerging from the first parliamentary election since Yanukovych's overthrow in February.

"We can say today that a third of voters supports the president's course for carrying out reforms for entering the European Union," said Yuriy Lutsenko, the leader of the Poroshenko Bloc.

The polls offered a reading only of Party voting for 225 of the 450 seats in parliament and results from voting to single constituency seats will be known only in a few days time.

With the Party of the pro-Europe Party, Selfhelp, in third place on 13.2 per cent, Poroshenko should easily be able to forge a coalition to press on with plans to end the conflict in the east and move Ukraine towards the European mainstream.

Other parties which seemed likely to enter parliament on the basis of the exit poll included the populist Radical Party and the nationalist Svoboda (Freedom) Party.

The Batkivshchyna (Fatherland) Party of former prime minister Yulia Tymoshenko performed worse than many had expected though with 5.6 per cent of the vote on Party lists she also should enter parliament.

Though the result for the Opposition Bloc, which has criticised Poroshenko's policies in the east, surprised many, other parties allied with the disgraced Yanukovych fared poorly, including the communists. The influence of pro-Russian groups looks set to be greatly diminished.

This reality could fuel fresh tension in the future with Russia which condemned Yanukovych's ousting as a "fascist" coup and went on to annex Crimea in March and back anti-Kiev rebellions by separatists in the east.

More than 3,700 people have been killed in the conflict which Poroshenko, after big battlefield losses by government forces, has now vowed to solve only by political negotiations.

Voting did not take place on Sunday in areas held by the rebels nor in Crimea.

NEW YORK — The first person quarantined under strict new rules in the New York City area for people with a high risk of Ebola tested negative, New Jersey officials said on Saturday, as President Barack Obama said the response to domestic cases of the deadly disease needs to be based on "facts, not fear".

Under the new policy, anyone arriving at the two international airports serving New York City after having contact with Ebola patients in Liberia, Sierra Leone or Guinea must submit to a mandatory 21-day quarantine. The requirement exceeds current federal guidelines.

"We have been examining the protocols for protecting our brave healthcare workers, and, guided by the science, we'll continue to work with state and local officials to take the necessary steps to ensure the safety and health of the American people," Obama said.

Like last week, the president used his weekly address to discuss the response to Ebola, which has killed thousands of people in West Africa and has become a political issue in the United States ahead of November 4 congressional elections.

The new rules in New York and New Jersey were announced a day after an American doctor who recently helped Ebola patients in Guinea also tested positive for the virus at Manhattan's Bellevue Hospital. The physician, who was self-monitoring, started feeling symptoms about week after he returned home.

The first person to face the mandatory quarantine under the new rules was a medical worker who arrived at Newark Liberty International Airport on Friday after treating Ebola victims in West Africa.

Tests on the worker, who has not been publicly identified, showed no signs of the virus, New Jersey's health department said on Saturday. Even so, the patient remains in quarantine at University Hospital in Newark.

Meanwhile, Obama commended New Yorkers for their calm reaction to the city's first case. He said that medical authorities were responding effectively to the threat from the deadly virus.

"It's important to remember that of the seven Americans treated so far for Ebola — the five who contracted it in West Africa, plus the two nurses from Dallas — all seven have survived," Obama said.

He did not refer to the new 21-day mandatory quarantines announced late on Friday by the governors of New York and New Jersey for medical workers returning from Ebola hot spots. His administration is discussing similar measures.

The worst Ebola outbreak since the disease was identified in 1976 has killed almost half of more than 10,000 people diagnosed with the disease — predominantly in Liberia, Sierra Leone and Guinea — although the true toll is far higher, according to the World Health Organisation.

The United Nations agency also said on Friday that trials of Ebola vaccines could begin in West Africa in December, a month earlier than expected, and hundreds of thousands of doses should be available for use by the middle of next year.

New York Governor Andrew Cuomo and New Jersey Governor Chris Christie put the screening measures in place after Dr. Craig Spencer, a 33-year-old New Yorker who had been treating Ebola patients in Guinea, tested positive for Ebola on Thursday.

Spencer, who spent a month in the West African nation working with the humanitarian group Doctors Without Borders, was the fourth person diagnosed with the virus in the United States and the first in its largest city.

Critics of the measures have raised concerns that mandatory quarantines could discourage Americans from going to help control the epidemic in West Africa.

Representative Diana DeGette, a Democrat from Colorado who was an early advocate of reassessing federal protocols on handling Ebola cases, warned against an overreaction by health authorities.

"It's a very fine balance between getting our people to go over and help treat these Ebola patients — and they are very courageous to go on the front lines like that — and also make sure we protect public health," DeGette said in an interview with CNN on Saturday morning.

The unidentified healthcare worker in New Jersey did not have any symptoms when she arrived at Newark Liberty International Airport on Friday, officials said, but developed a fever while quarantined at the airport before being taken to the Newark hospital.

Despite the negative test result, she will remain under mandatory quarantine for the full 21 days, the virus's maximum incubation period, the New Jersey health department said.

The federal government is considering similar quarantine rules, according to a spokesman for the US Centres for Disease Control and Prevention.

The virus is not airborne but is spread through direct contact with bodily fluids from an infected person who is showing symptoms.

NEW YORK — A hatchet attack on New York police officers was a "terrorist act" carried out by a self-radicalised Muslim convert who had been in the military and browsed Al Qaeda websites, police said Friday.

"This was a terrorist act," police commissioner Bill Bratton told a news conference on Friday, one day after the attack, saying he was "very comfortable" describing it as a "terrorist attack”.

Police said Zale Thompson, who was 32, unmarried and unemployed, appeared to have acted alone and was not affiliated to a particular group, but that the investigation was ongoing.

A loner who spent hours locked away in his bedroom, he had looked at websites about groups such as Al Qaeda and Islamic State, and watched beheadings and Wednesday's deadly attack in Canada.

Officer Kenneth Healy, 25, is in hospital in a critical but stable condition after being injured in the back of the head during Thursday's broad daylight attack in a busy shopping area.

Another officer was hit in the arm in the assault in New York's borough of Queens. The group of four young police officers had graduated from the police academy only months before.

In an attack that lasted just seven seconds, Bratton said Thompson charged with a hatchet in his hand, striking two officers before he was shot dead by the two other officers, who were uninjured.

A graphic video of the attack has been released, showing a bearded Thompson dressed in a green jacket, running towards his victims and swinging the hatchet in both hands.

A 29-year-old female bystander was accidentally shot and is also in hospital in a critical but stable condition, Bratton said.

Police said Thompson converted to Islam two years ago and that relatives described him as a "recluse" and "lately depressed”.

An axe and a large hunting knife were recovered from his home and Thompson made anti-Western, anti-government and in some cases anti-white statements on social media, police said.

He visited websites that focused on terror groups such as Al Qaeda, the IS organisation and the Shabab Islamists in Somalia.

Police said Thompson's Internet browsing history included the fence-jumping incident at the White House this week and Wednesday's shooting in Canada.

Online history 

"It appears... this is something he has been thinking about for some time and thinking about with more intensity in recent days," chief of detectives Robert Boyce said.

Police believe that Thompson acted alone and was self-directed.

"The investigation is hoping to determine as quickly as possible if there were any other actions that he was engaged in with others that might indicate a continuing a threat," Bratton said.

Police said they were investigating whether Thompson was affiliated with any mosque or association, but said most of his activity and exposure appears to have been through the Internet.

"The father described that he spent extensive amounts of time by himself in his bedroom and by all accounts was a true proverbial loner," said Bratton.

Thompson had no police record in New York but had come into contact with the force as a victim of assault when he was 16, and was arrested six times in California in 2003-04.

He spent three years in the military but was involuntarily discharged in 2003, most likely due to drugs, police said.

SITE, a private terrorism monitoring group, said that Thompson displayed "extremist leanings" in an array of statements on YouTube and Facebook.

Bratton said the issue of a lone wolf, self-radicalised assailant was one of "increasing concern" to counter-terrorism officers.

SITE said Thompson described "jihad as a justifiable response to the oppression of the 'Zionists and the Crusaders'" in a comment posted to a pro-Islamic State video on September 13.

Queens residents said that they were disturbed by the attack.

"A thing like that isn't supposed to happen, children can be on the streets," said a woman who gave her name as Helena.

"Anyone could get caught in this incident and I don't think that's right, it's not right," she told AFP.

BEIJING — China may ban Facebook, but not its co-founder Mark Zuckerberg. The young billionaire delighted an audience of students at a prestigious Beijing university this week with a 30-minute chat in his recently learned Mandarin Chinese.

Did he complain about the ban? 

He made no explicit mention of China's ban on the social media giant, but an indirect reference to it drew laughter during the question-and-answer session Wednesday at Tsinghua University. Zuckerberg, whose company has long sought to enter China, noted Facebook already helps some Chinese companies in foreign markets, citing computer maker Lenovo's ads on Facebook in India.

"Speaking of China, I have a more difficult question for Mark, which I hope will not get me fired. What are Facebook's plans in China?" asked the forum facilitator and Facebook employee Wei Xiaoliang, to the laughter and applause from the audience.

"We are already in China," Zuckerberg said in Chinese, to more laughter. "We help Chinese companies gain customers abroad," he said.

"We want to help the rest of the world connect to China."

Why was Zuckerberg in China? 

Zuckerberg may be hoping to lay the groundwork for an eventual entry into China, but he visited Beijing this week as a newly appointed member of the advisory board for Tsinghua University School of Economics and Management and met with the university's president on Tuesday.

Both he and the university posted clips of his Wednesday session, which was open to questions from students for the last 8 minutes.

Facebook has been banned in China since 2009. Beijing promotes Internet use for business and education but bans material deemed subversive and blocks access to foreign news and social media websites that authorities believe could stoke social unrest.

Zuckerberg's Chinese pronunciation was far from fluent, and some native speakers called it a "challenge" to understand. He sometimes struggled with certain words and tones, and needed help in understanding questions in Chinese. But he was able to express himself well and maintain an intelligible conversation for a half hour. The students responded with warm cheers for his effort and laughter at his humour.

Zuckerberg married Chinese-American Priscilla Chan in 2012, and set himself the goal of learning Mandarin in 2010. He said Wednesday that he wanted to learn the language partly because his wife's grandmother only speaks Chinese. He recalled informing the grandmother of the marriage plans.

"Priscilla and I decided to get married, so I told her grandmother in Chinese, and she was very surprised," Zuckerberg said.

What else did he say?

 Zuckerberg said several things apparently aimed at endearing himself to the Chinese audience. He said China is a great country and hopes that learning the language will help him learn its culture. "The Chinese language is difficult, and I speak English, but I like challenges," Zuckerberg said.

When asked about his favourite food, he cited "Beijing hutong snacks" sold by street-side vendors in the capital, and Peking duck, Beijing's signature dish of duck meat served with sauce and rolled up in a crepe.

How was he received? 

Tsinghua students gave Zuckerberg a warm reception. On social media, many microbloggers noted the irony that Zuckerberg's famous creation is blocked in China.

Designer David Wang, in an interview in downtown Beijing, said he would be happy if Facebook was allowed across the so-called Great Firewall of China. "Because now we have to use software to jump the wall if we want to access Facebook," he said.

Li Qin, a computer programmer from the eastern city of Hangzhou, said on a microblog that she could barely understand Zuckerberg's Chinese.

"It was a challenge for Chinese listening comprehension. But even though Facebook cannot enter the Chinese market, Mark is still making a fighting effort to learn," she said. "It was quite a funny scenario."

GENEVA/LONDON — The World Health Organisation (WHO) said on Thursday it was "reasonably confident" that the Ebola virus plaguing three West African countries had not spread into neighbouring states.

Asked whether countries such as Guinea Bissau and Ivory Coast might have cases of the disease crossing their borders without knowing about or reporting them, WHO Assistant Director General Keiji Fukuda said he considered that unlikely.

"We are reasonably confident right now we are not seeing widespread transmission into neighbouring countries," Fukuda told reporters in a briefing. "It remains a concern...[but] right now I think we are not seeing it."

"We will keep looking for further spread of infection, but we simply haven't seen it," he added.

The WHO's emergency committee, advising on Ebola, said earlier on Thursday that screening people leaving Liberia, Sierra Leone and Guinea remained critical for reducing the spread of the disease.

At a minimum, exit screening should consist of "a questionnaire, a temperature measurement and, if fever is discovered, an assessment of the risk that the fever is caused by Ebola," the committee said.

Last week, the WHO said it would send teams of experts to Mali and Ivory Coast, two of the countries at highest risk, to check their preparedness.

The economic damage of a major outbreak in Ivory Coast would be felt around the world, since it and next-door Ghana produce about 60 per cent of the world's cocoa beans.

Although Senegal and Nigeria managed to contain the disease after it was imported by travellers, Ebola is still raging in the three countries at the heart of the epidemic, the worst Ebola outbreak on record.

At least 4,877 people are known to have died, but the true toll may be three times as much.

The response to the disease is now based on a "70-70-60 plan" to get 70 per cent of patients in isolation and 70 per cent of bodies buries safely within a 60-day period ending on December 1.

But the elements needed to achieve that — bed spaces, treatment centres, laboratories, dead-body-management teams and volunteers — are still far short of what is required.

The WHO originally appealed for 12,000 local staff and 750 foreign experts, but it has raised those targets to 20,000 and 1,000 respectively. Fukuda said there were only 600 foreign experts so far.

"It has been terrifically difficult to get enough health workers, both domestic and international healthcare workers, this continues to be one of the major challenges," Fukuda said.

OTTAWA, Ontario — A Canadian soldier standing guard at a war memorial in the country's capital was shot to death Wednesday, and gunfire then erupted inside parliament, authorities said. One gunman was killed, and police said they were hunting for as many as two others.

The bloodshed immediately raised the specter of a coordinated terrorist attack, with Canada already on alert because of a deadly hit-and-run earlier in the week against two Canadian soldiers by a man who police say was fired up with radical Muslim fervor.

Witnesses said the soldier was gunned down at point-blank range by a man carrying a rifle and dressed all in black, with a scarf over his face. They said the gunman then ran off and entered parliament, a few hundred yards away, where dozens of shots soon rang out.

People fled the complex by scrambling down scaffolding erected for renovations, while others took cover inside as police with rifles and body armor took up positions outside and cordoned off the normally bustling streets around parliament.

Police gave no details on how the gunman died. But on Twitter, Member of Parliament Craig Scott credited parliament sergeant-at-arms Kevin Vickers with shooting the attacker just outside the MPs' caucus rooms.

Ottawa police spokesman Chuck Benoit said two or three gunmen were believed to be involved in the attacks. Gilles Michaud, assistant commissioner of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, called it a "dynamic, unfolding situation”.

Ottawa Hospital said it received two patients, both listed in stable condition, in addition to the soldier.

Tony Zobl, 35, said he witnessed the soldier being gunned down from his fourth-floor window directly above the National War Memorial, a 70-foot, arched granite cenotaph, or tomb, with bronze sculptures commemorating
World War I.

"I looked out the window and saw a shooter, a man dressed all in black with a kerchief over his nose and mouth and something over his head as well, holding a rifle and shooting an honor guard in front of the cenotaph point-blank, twice," Zobl told the Canadian Press news agency.

"The honor guard dropped to the ground, and the shooter kind of raised his arms in triumph holding the rifle."

Zobl said the gunman then ran up the street toward Parliament Hill.

Cabinet Minister Tony Clement tweeted that at least 30 shots were heard inside parliament, where Conservative and Liberal MPs were holding their weekly caucus meetings.

"I'm safe locked in a office awaiting security," Kyle Seeback, another member of Parliament, tweeted.

The top spokesman for Prime Minister Stephen Harper said Harper was safe and had left Parliament Hill. The US Embassy in Ottawa was locked down as a precaution.

Officials also cancelled two events in Toronto honoring Pakistani teenager and Nobel laureate Malala Yousafzai, including one in which she was supposed to receive honorary Canadian citizenship. The teenager was shot in the head by a Taliban gunman in 2012 for calling for schooling for girls.

President Barack Obama condemned the attacks as "outrageous" and spoke by telephone with the prime minister, offering to help and reassuring him of the American people's solidarity with Canada.

The attack came two days after a recent convert to Islam killed one Canadian soldier and injured another with his car before being shot to death by police. The killer had been on the radar of federal investigators, who feared he had jihadist ambitions and seized his passport when he tried to travel to Turkey.

Canada had raised its domestic terror threat level from low to medium Tuesday because of "an increase in general chatter from radical Islamist organisations," said Jean-Christophe de Le Rue, a spokesman for the public safety minister.

In the hours after Wednesday's attack, police warned people in downtown Ottawa to stay away from windows and rooftops.

Scott Walsh, 21, a construction worker working in a manhole right in front of Parliament Hill, said he heard the shots at the war memorial.

"We're in construction and we're used to loud bangs. When people started screaming and running, that's when I clued, and I saw this guy running" with a gun, he said. "It was intense. I didn't think it was real. "

He said the gunman had long black hair with a scarf covering the lower half of his face.

WASHINGTON — The new US Ebola "czar" starts work on Wednesday as the Obama administration ramps up its response to the potential spread of the virus, and drugmakers started a project to accelerate development of a vaccine and produce millions of doses.

As the administration boosted airport screening measures in response to criticism that it was slow to act against Ebola, a Pentagon emergency Ebola medical team was scheduled to begin training at Fort Sam Houston in San Antonio, Texas.

The virus has killed more than 4,500 people, predominantly in three impoverished West African countries, in the worst outbreak of the disease since it was identified in 1976.

US President Barack Obama was set to hold a meeting on Wednesday with Ron Klain, his new Ebola response coordinator, amid rising Republican criticism ahead of congressional elections next month.

Klain, a lawyer and veteran Democratic political operative, was expected to improve coordination between the federal government and the states after three cases were diagnosed in the United States, all in Texas; Liberian Thomas Eric Duncan, who died on October 8 in Dallas, and two nurses who treated him.

Leading drugmakers said on Wednesday that they planned to develop an Ebola vaccine and produce millions of doses of the most effective experimental product for use next year.

The World Health Organisation said it hopes tens of thousand of people in Africa, including front-line healthcare workers, can start receiving vaccines beginning in January.

US drugmaker Johnson & Johnson announced that it aims to produce 1 million doses of its two-step vaccine next year, and said it has discussed collaboration with Britain's GlaxoSmithKline, which is working on a rival vaccine.

Human testing of a second "investigational" Ebola vaccine is under way at the US National Institutes of Health's Clinical Centre in Maryland, NIH said on Wednesday. Testing on a first possible vaccine began last month and initial data was expected by the end of the year.

"The need for a vaccine to protect against Ebola infection is urgent," said Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. He said the vaccine, called VSV-ZEBOV, was "promising”.

The US Defence Department's emergency medical team — including five infectious disease doctors, 20 critical care nurses and five trainers who are experts in infectious disease protocols — will gather in Texas on Wednesday to start three days of training, the Pentagon said.

No travel ban

The Obama administration has ratcheted up its response to Ebola but so far has stopped short of a travel ban from West African countries hit by Ebola demanded by some lawmakers.

The Department of Homeland Security said on Tuesday that travelers from the three countries at the centre of the epidemic — Liberia, Sierra Leone and Guinea — would be funneled to one of five major US airports conducting enhanced screening for the virus. The restrictions on passengers whose trips originated in those countries were due to go into effect on Wednesday.

Affected travellers will have their temperatures checked for signs of a fever that may indicate Ebola infection, among other protocols, at New York's John F. Kennedy, New Jersey's Newark, Washington Dulles, Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta, and Chicago's O'Hare international airports, officials said.

Two travellers from Liberia were under observation in hospitals in Chicago on Wednesday after they reported symptoms during screening at O'Hare on Tuesday.

One, a child, reportedly vomited on the flight to Chicago, health officials said. A physician at the hospital where the child was taken said doctors suspect the patient does not have Ebola but was isolated as a precaution.

In New Jersey, a Liberian passenger detained at Newark Liberty Airport on Tuesday appears to be symptom free, Governor Chris Christie said at a news confrence. "There is no indication that he has been infected with Ebola," Christie said.

A Reuters/Ipsos online poll released on Tuesday showed that nearly three-fourths of 1,602 Americans surveyed favoured a US ban on civilian air travel in and out of the three countries.

But Elhadj As Sy, secretary general of the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies (IFRC), on Wednesday said such restrictions would not effectively curb Ebola.

"It [Ebola] creates a lot of fear and extreme panic that sometimes lead to very irrational type of behaviors and measures, like closing borders, cancelling flights, isolating countries, etc.," Sy told reporters in Beijing, where the IFRC was holding a conference. "Those are not solutions."

A group of some 50 Cuban doctors and nurses arrived in Liberia on Wednesday to help treat patients.

The two US nurses who contracted Ebola after treating Thomas Duncan were both improving. The US National Institutes of Health upgraded the medical condition Nina Pham on Tuesday to good from fair. The other, Amber Vinson, is weak but recovering, her mother said.

NBC freelance cameraman Ashoka Mukpo, an American who contracted Ebola while working in West Africa, is free of the virus and will leave the Nebraska Medical Centre on Wednesday, the hospital said.