World

LONGTOUSHAN, China — More than 400 people have died in an earthquake that devastated a Chinese village, officials said Tuesday, as relatives faced the stark probability that rescuers would only find the remains of their loved ones.

The death toll had risen to 410, authorities in the southwestern province of Yunnan said in a statement, as concerns mounted over a barrier lake formed by a landslide blocking a river in the disaster zone.

Some state media reports speculated that the swollen waters may burst within days, potentially flooding the downstream area.

The magnitude 6.1 tremor destroyed 80,000 houses and seriously damaged 124,000 more, wrecking the once-idyllic mountainside village of Longtoushan, where residents confronted their losses.

“My daughter and I have no hope for the future,” said farmer Lan Helian, 32, whose husband was crushed by a collapsing building.

“He should have been outside in the field, he only returned for a few minutes,” she said, holding her brow and staring at the floor.

“We have no money and I don’t know what we are going to do.”

Li Shanyan, 35, watched anxiously as emergency personnel dug through the debris of her home, searching for her 71-year-old aunt.

“We could still hear her yesterday morning,” said Li. “[The rescuers] dug for a whole day and couldn’t find her.”

Like many in poverty-stricken Longtoushan, the crudely-made house is built from yellow earth, with a tiled roof.

“It was flattened, all flattened,” she said. “We couldn’t salvage anything — all was buried in there. Everything is reduced to ruins.

“It’s just like Wenchuan in 2008,” she added, referring to the huge earthquake in neighbouring Sichuan province that killed more than 80,000 people, China’s deadliest quake since 1950.

Moments later, she sobbed as rescuers dug out her aunt’s lifeless body from under the wreckage.

More than 18,000 rescuers were deployed in Yunnan, where Premier Li Keqiang was overseeing the rescue effort, state-run media reported.

In one dramatic scene, an 88-year-old woman was pulled from a pile of rubble late Tuesday after being buried for more than 50 hours, state-media said.

“The aged person’s health is fine and uninjured, though is weak and suffering from low blood sugar due to a lack of food,” the Yunnan Information Daily cited medical staff as saying.

“With each life saved, there will be one more happy family,” Li told soldiers, according to the state-run China Daily newspaper.

Relatives of the dead will receive 20,000 yuan ($3,200) in compensation, state media said.

Longtoushan, the epicentre of Sunday’s quake, has a population of more than 50,000 and nearly every building in a 600-metre hillside swathe of the township was almost entirely demolished by the quake.

Many of the more modern buildings in the centre of Longtoushan appeared to be less severely damaged, but brick and old-style wooden houses were seriously affected.

Scores of workers assembled a red metal bridge across a river which cuts through the heart of the valley township.

Engineers set off huge explosions to dislodge boulders and rocks perched precariously over the narrow, winding roads that snake through the mountains.

‘Too sad to eat’ 

China’s state broadcaster CCTV raised the ominous possibility of a further disaster in Ludian county, which includes Longtoushan, where a landslide had blocked a river.

With heavy rains falling the lake which had formed behind the barrier could burst within days, endangering at least 800 people, the broadcaster said. Other reports said there was a power station downstream.

A local official surnamed Lu told AFP that people in villages close to the lake had already been evacuated.

The China Earthquake Administration pointed to the area’s population density and fragile building materials as contributing to the quake’s destruction.

“Most rural houses were made of brick or wood, were not designed to be resistant to quakes  and many of them were outdated,” it said, according to the official Xinhua news agency.

A landslide on a nearby mountain two weeks ago has also hampered the relief effort, residents said, leaving a small bridge the only connection between Longtoushan and the outside world.

“Water in the wells is all tainted with mud,” said Li Shanyan. “The government distributes a little [food and water], which we give to old people and children first.”

Each adult has about a half a bottle of water each day, she added.

“I feel too sad to eat, though there is not much to eat anyway.”

KIEV — Ukrainian government forces, backed by warplanes, kept up a military offensive to claw back lost territory from pro-Russian separatists on Tuesday while casting a nervous eye at Russian military exercises over the border.

Kiev’s military said government forces had clashed 26 times with separatists in the Russian-speaking east in the 24 hours up to Tuesday morning, while fighter jets had struck at rebel positions and concentrations of military equipment.

But it acknowledged that separatist forces had pushed it out of Yasynuvata, a railway junction near the main rebel-controlled city of Donetsk that it seized from separatists on Sunday.

Tension rose further with Ukraine denouncing Russian war games near the joint border as a “provocation” and alleging violations of Ukrainian air space by Russian warplanes and drones, as well as cross-border shelling from Russia.

Defence officials said separatists had also opened fire on unarmed Ukrainian soldiers on Tuesday as they crossed back into Ukraine from Russia, where they had taken shelter from fighting.

Ukraine acknowledged on Monday that 311 soldiers and border guards had been forced by fighting with separatists to cross into Russia. It said they had destroyed their weapons before crossing the border, but the rebels said they had left them behind, enabling separatists to seize them.

A military spokesman said there had been no casualties from the attack, though he said three Ukrainian soldiers had been killed and 46 wounded in action against the separatists in the past 24 hours.

Government troops have been battling the rebels since April in a war in the Russian-speaking east in which the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights says more than 1,100 people including government forces, rebels and civilians have died.

Ukraine and its Western allies accuse Russia of orchestrating the revolt and arming the rebels — something denied by Moscow. The United States and the European Union have imposed sanctions on Russia.

Fighting has intensified since the shooting down of a Malaysian airliner last month, killing all 298 people on board — an act the West laid at the door of the rebels. Russia and the rebels blame the disaster on Kiev’s military offensive.

Ukrainian forces say they have been making steady gains and have virtually encircled the separatists’ second-largest stronghold of Luhansk, while rebels have declared a “state of siege” in Donetsk, the largest city they hold.

Rising alarm

Defence spokesman Andriy Lysenko said Ukrainian forces, apart from engaging separatists, had come under mortar and artillery attack from Russia, and there had been violations of Ukrainian airspace by Russian planes.

He expressed alarm at Russian military exercises this week near their long joint border, including deployment of 100 fighter aircraft.

“Ukraine regards the carrying out of such unprecedented military exercises on the border with Ukraine as a provocation,” he said, while a foreign ministry statement called for Russia to pull its forces back.

Ukrainian security officials said separatist fighters were launching counter-attacks to break a tightening noose around the rebels who seek to set up pro-Russian ‘people’s republics’ in the east of Ukraine.

Lysenko conceded that Ukrainian troops had abandoned control of Yasynuvata, a railway hub whose recapture from the separatists had been trumpeted.

Rebels at the scene on Tuesday told Reuters they had lost at least one fighter, with three others injured, to shelling by Ukrainian forces.

“Every 15 minutes a shell comes over. They [the Ukrainians] fire from a distance and avoid fighting us directly,” one separatist fighter said.

Lysenko told reporters that Ukraine had moved up its main troops near Donetsk and Luhansk, but he would not be drawn on when they would launch an operation to storm the towns.

“We’ll not talk about starting an offensive. We will speak only about liberating these towns,” he said.

KUNMING, China — Rescuers found scores of survivors on Monday as they dug through homes shattered by an earthquake in southern China that killed at least 398 people and injured more than 1,800. Rainstorms were expected to continue to hinder rescue efforts over the coming days.

About 12,000 homes collapsed when the quake struck Sunday afternoon in impoverished Ludian county, around 370 kilometres northeast of Yunnan province’s capital, Kunming, the official Xinhua news agency reported.

Rescuers digging in the debris by hand freed a 5-year-old boy whose legs were injured, Xinhua reported. It also said firefighters rescued 32 people who had been trapped but had retrieved the bodies of 43 residents.

Drenched survivors, including some half-naked, were sitting along muddy roads in the rain waiting for food and medication, Xinhua reported. Medics were reporting severe shortages of medicine and an inability to perform operations on the severely injured, while rescuers said their work had been hampered by continuous downpours and quake-triggered landslides, Xinhua said.

Ma Yaoqi, an 18-year-old volunteer in the quake zone, said by phone that at least half of the buildings had collapsed on the road from the city centre of Zhaotong to the hardest-hit town of Longtou. The rest of the buildings were damaged, she said.

“I saw dead bodies being wrapped in quilts and carried away,” said Ma, who arrived with 20 other volunteers Monday. “Some were wrapped with small quilts. Those must be kids.”

Overhead footage of the quake zone shot by state broadcaster CCTV showed older houses flattened but newer multistorey buildings still standing.

The magnitude-6.1 quake struck at 4:30pm on Sunday at a depth of 10 kilometres, according to the US Geological Survey. China’s earthquake monitoring agency put the magnitude at 6.5.

The central government has allocated 600 million yuan ($97 million) for rescue and relief work after the quake, the finance ministry said.

Dozens of trucks carrying paramilitary troops with banners declaring “Help is on the way” travelled along the four-lane highway from Kunming to Zhaotong on Monday evening.

Heavy rain and thunderstorms in the area were complicating efforts to bring tents, water, food and other relief supplies to survivors. Roads had caved in, and rescuers were forced to travel on foot.

The national meteorological centre said the area near the centre of the quake would suffer thundershowers over the next three days.

Repeated aftershocks also were making the rescue work dangerous.

The Yunnan Civil Affairs Bureau said on its website that 398 people were killed, three were missing and a further 1,801 injured. The death toll is expected to rise after rescuers reach remote communities to assess casualties. About 230,000 people had been evacuated.

Many of the homes that collapsed in Ludian, which has a population of about 429,000, were old and made of brick, Xinhua said, adding that electricity and telecommunications were cut off in the county.

The mountainous region where the quake occurred is largely agricultural, with farming and mining the top industries, and is prone to earthquakes.

More than 2,500 troops were dispatched to the disaster region, Xinhua said. The government also sent thousands of tents, quilts, sleeping bags, cotton coats, folding beds, chairs and tables, and 50 mobile toilets, Xinhua said.

Chinese Premier Li Keqiang reached the worst-hit area Monday afternoon to oversee quake relief, state media reported.

In 1970, a magnitude-7.7 earthquake in Yunnan killed at least 15,000 people, and a magnitude-7.1 quake killed more than 1,400 in 1974. In September 2012, 81 people died and 821 were injured in a series of quakes in the region.

In May 2008, a powerful quake in Sichuan province left nearly 90,000 people dead or missing.

KIEV — Ukraine said on Monday it was in talks with Moscow over the return of 311 Ukrainian soldiers and border guards who had been forced by fighting with separatists to cross into Russia, but Russian border authorities said the troops were seeking asylum.

Both sides seemed set to use the fate of the troops to score propaganda points as Ukrainian government forces extended steady gains it has made against the pro-Russian separatists since a Malaysian airliner was downed over a rebel-held area on July 17.

Ukrainian defence spokesman Andriy Lysenko said a group of soldiers and border guards, who had been caught between the Russian border to the east and rebel positions in the west, had crossed into Russia in the early hours of Monday.

He put their number at 311, telling a news briefing they had retreated into Russia for safety reasons after helping their comrades break through rebel lines.

Kiev, he said, was now negotiating with Russian authorities for their return.

In Moscow, authorities acknowledged that Ukrainian troops had crossed into Russian territory — though they put the number at 438 — and Russian border guards said they had crossed during the night seeking asylum.

“They were tired of the war and wanted no further part in it,” Vasily Malayev, spokesman for the border guards in the Rostov region of Russia, told Reuters by telephone. However, he added that 180 would be returned to Ukraine later on Monday.

Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, speaking to Itar-Tass and Rossiya24 TV, said Russia would facilitate the return of the Ukrainian soldiers but suggested they would be vulnerable to prosecution for desertion once they returned home.

“I expect Ukrainian authorities to understand that it is absolutely unacceptable, when Ukrainians... are forced to fight with their own people, to treat those who refuse to do so as traitors to the motherland,” Lavrov said.

Railway hub

Ukrainian government forces recaptured the important railway hub of Yasynuvata on Sunday from the rebels, Lysenko said, adding that five soldiers had been killed and 15 others wounded in fighting in the 24 hours up to Monday.

However, the rebels, who seized Yasynuvata — which lies just north of the city of Donetsk — in May, denied that government forces had retaken the railway hub.

Government troops, who have been battling the rebels since April, have now all but encircled the separatists’ second-largest stronghold of Luhansk and rebels have declared a “state of siege” in Donetsk, the largest city they hold.

Luhansk has been left without electricity or running water and the mobile network is also down, local officials said.

At the crash site of the Malaysian Boeing, international experts resumed their recovery and investigative work on Monday.

“After a delay due to fighting, the team of Australians, Dutch and Malaysian experts began work,” a statement by the Dutch mission said.

A large group of international experts began work there on Friday after a lull in fighting in the area allowed them finally, after lengthy delays, to reach the site. The victims included 196 Dutch, 27 Australians and 43 Malaysians.

BEIJING — A strong earthquake in southern China’s Yunnan province toppled thousands of homes on Sunday, killing at least 175 people and injuring more than 1,400.

About 12,000 homes collapsed in Ludian, a densely populated county located around 366 kilometres northeast of Yunnan’s capital, Kunming, China’s official Xinhua News Agency reported.

The magnitude-6.1 quake struck at 4:30pm at a depth of 10 kilometres, according to the US Geological Survey. Its epicenter was in Longtoushan township, 23 kilometres southwest of the city of Zhaotong, the Ludian county seat.

Ma Liya, a resident of Zhaotong, told Xinhua that the streets there were like a “battlefield after bombardment”. She added that her neighbour’s house, a new two-story building, had toppled, and said the quake was far worse than one that struck the area in 2012 and killed 81 people.

“The aftermath is much, much worse than what happened after the quake two years ago,” Ma said. “I have never felt such strong tremors before. What I can see are all ruins.”

Xinhua said at least 175 people were killed in the quake, with 181 missing and 1,402 injured.

At least 122 of the dead were in Ludian, with another 1,300 people injured there, Xinhua reported. It said another 49 people died and 102 were injured in Qiaojia county.

News reports said rescuers were still trying to reach victims in more remote towns Sunday night.

Photos on Weibo, China’s Twitter-like social media site, showed rescuers searching through flattened buildings and people injured amid toppled bricks.

Many of the homes that collapsed in Ludian, which has a population of about 429,000, were old and made of brick, Xinhua said, adding that electricity and telecommunications were cut off in the county.

The mountainous region where the quake occurred is largely agricultural, with farming and mining the top industries and is prone to earthquakes.

Relief efforts were under way, with more than 2,500 troops dispatched to the disaster region, Xinhua said. The Red Cross Society of China allocated quilts, jackets and tents for those made homeless by the quake, while Red Cross branches in Hong Kong, Macau and neighbouring Sichuan province also sent relief supplies.

Chinese state broadcaster CCTV said the quake was the strongest to hit Yunnan in 14 years.

In 1970, a magnitude-7.7 earthquake in Yunnan killed at least 15,000 people and a magnitude-7.1 quake in the province killed more than 1,400 in 1974. In September 2012, 81 people died and 821 were injured in a series of quakes in the Yunnan region.

In May 2008, a powerful quake in Sichuan province left nearly 90,000 people dead or missing.

DONETSK, Ukraine — Fighting between government forces and pro-Russian rebels left at least 10 civilians dead in eastern Ukraine Sunday, as international experts pushed on with their grim hunt for remains at the crash site of downed Flight MH17.

The deputy mayor in the besieged insurgent stronghold of Donetsk told AFP that shooting in a residential suburb had killed six civilians and injured 13, the latest victims of more than three months of civil war that has claimed at least 1,150 lives.

Local authorities in the second-largest separatist bastion of Lugansk said shelling had left three dead and eight injured, while the city council in the frontline rebel base of Gorlivka reported one dead and 16 hurt in clashes there.

Ukraine’s military said its positions in the region continued to come under heavy bombardment, including shellfire allegedly from across the porous border with former Soviet master Russia.

Government forces have made major gains over the past month and say they are getting close to cutting off fighters in Donetsk from the Russian border and thier comrades in Lugansk.

Kiev has promised to stamp out the insurgency in the near future but analysts warn the fighting could drag on as rebels have holed up in major cities and pledged to battle to the death.

And it is civilians in the blighted region who are bearing the brunt of the violence.

Lugansk, a city of some 420,000, is trapped in a punishing government blockade with the mayor warning of a looming “humanitarian catastrophe” as electricity has failed, and water and fuel supplies have been exhausted.

The United Nations says over 100,000 people have fled the fighting for other parts of Ukraine while Russia claims some 500,000 have crossed the border in search of refuge.

One zone searched 

The latest violence came as scores of Dutch and Australian police investigators completed a third day trawling through wreckage for more unrecovered remains of the 298 people killed when the Malaysian passenger jet was blown out of the sky over separatist territory almost three weeks ago.

After days of fierce fighting prevented experts reaching the scene of the disaster, the Dutch-led probe has now bulked up to near full-strength with sniffer dogs and refrigerated ambulance vans brought in as they scramble to make up for lost time.

“We have already searched one of the five zones that we have divided the crash site into,” said Pieter-Jaap Aalbersberg, head of the Dutch police mission.

Search crews continue to turn up body parts and personal belongings scattered across some 20 square kilometres, and those leading the probe say it could take some three more weeks despite 220 coffins already taken to the Netherlands for identification.

Another plane carrying an unspecified number of remains will fly out of the government-held city of Kharkiv Monday.

Aalbersberg told journalists in the city that a train wagon carrying victims’ possessions was currently stuck at a rebel-held train station.

The United States accuses insurgents of blowing the airliner out of the sky on July 17 with a surface-to-air missile likely supplied by Russia, while Moscow and the rebels have pointed the finger at the Ukrainian military.

International fallout 

International shock waves from the crisis continue to reverberate with tensions between Russia and the West at their highest point since the Cold War.

The United States and European Union have hit Moscow with the toughest sanctions seen since the collapse of the Soviet Union over the Kremlin’s alleged arming and instigation of the separatist rebellion.

But the punishing measures are yet to quell the fighting and US President Barack Obama on Friday expressed “deep concerns” about Moscow’s increased support for the insurgents in a phone call with Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin.

Russia — which risks seeing its fragile economy slip into recession following the sanctions — has warned that measures will backfire on Western interests.

Some EU diplomats have warned that the sanctions could actually embolden Putin by convincing him he has nothing to lose by going all-in over the Ukraine crisis.

NATO chief Anders Fogh Rasmussen said in an interview published Sunday that the alliance would draw up new defence plans in the face of “Russia’s aggression” against Ukraine, urging members to up their military spending.

KIEV/DONETSK, Ukraine — Government forces tightened the noose around the main stronghold of pro-Russian rebels in east Ukraine on Saturday and, with diplomacy stalled, Moscow and the West stepped up their war of words.

The seizure of Krasnogorovka and Staromikhailovka, towns just outside Donetsk, brought the army to the edge of one of the last cities still in rebel hands following its advances in the past month. The other is Luhansk, near the border with Russia.

The separatists shot down a drone in the latest violence but both sides observed a truce around the fields in rebel-held territory where a Malaysian airliner was downed last month, enabling international experts to resume the search for victims.

Diplomatic efforts to end the wider conflict, the worst stand-off between Moscow and the West since the Cold War ended in 1991, show no sign of progress.

British Prime Minister David Cameron said NATO must rethink its ties with Moscow and called for it to overhaul itself to be able to better defend member states from a potential Russian military threat.

“Six months into the Russia-Ukraine crisis we must agree on long-term measures to strengthen our ability to respond quickly to any threat, to reassure those allies who fear for their own country’s security and to deter any Russian aggression,” he wrote in a letter to fellow alliance leaders and NATO Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen.

US President Barack Obama also vented his frustration with Russia after speaking to President Vladimir Putin by telephone on Friday.

Obama told reporters the United States had done “everything that we can do”, short of going to war, to persuade Putin of the need to resolve the crisis diplomatically.

“But sometimes people don’t always act rationally and they don’t always act based on their medium- or long-term interests,” he said.

Russia sees EU ‘double standards’

The United States and the European Union imposed new sanctions on Moscow this week after accusing Putin of failing to use his influence with the separatists to end the fighting in the mainly Russian-speaking east.

Putin denies arming the rebels and accuses the West of pursuing a policy of containment against Moscow, using a Cold War-era phrase to suggest Washington wants to reduce Russia’s global influence.

In a new attack on Western policy, Russia’s Foreign Ministry accused the EU of “double standards”, saying it was punishing Russian defence sector with the latest sanctions but “on the quiet” had ended restrictions on sales of military technology and equipment to Ukraine.

“We call again on our EU colleagues to follow sound logic, and not conjecture and goading from Washington,” the Foreign Ministry said, questioning the EU’s “dubious political goals”.

The rebellion in east Ukraine began in mid-April, two months after Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovich was ousted following a shift in policy away from the EU towards Moscow, and one month after Russia annexed the Crimea peninsula from Ukraine.

The army has been making advances against the separatists since President Petro Poroshenko stepped up the military campaign against them after his election in May and fighting intensified after the Malaysian airliner was downed on July 17.

The United States says the separatists probably shot down the plane by mistake with a Russian-made missile. The rebels and Moscow deny the accusation and blame it on Kiev.

After being unable to reach the plane’s wreckage for several days because of the fighting, international experts worked at the site for a second successive day but the results of the day’s work were not immediately announced.

Ukrainian officials said last week the bodies of 80 of the 298 victims had not yet been recovered, but the experts found some human remains on Friday and continued their search on Saturday. The dead included 196 Dutch, 27 Australians and 43 Malaysians.

CONAKRY, Guinea — West Africa’s Ebola-hit nations announced a cross-border isolation zone on Friday, sealing off the epicentre of the world’s worst-ever outbreak as health chiefs warned the epidemic was spiralling out of control.

The announcement came at an emergency summit in the Guinean capital to discuss the outbreak, which has killed more than 700 people, with the World Health Organisation (WHO) warning Ebola could cause “catastrophic” loss of life and severe economic disruption if it continued to spread.

“We have agreed to take important and extraordinary actions at the inter-country level to focus on cross-border regions that have more than 70 per cent of the epidemic,” said Hadja Saran Darab, the secretary general of the Mano River Union bloc grouping the nations.

“These areas will be isolated by police and military. The people in these areas being isolated will be provided with material support,” she said at the meeting in Conakry.

The leaders of Sierra Leone, Liberia and Guinea used the summit to launch a $100 million (75 million euros) action plan which will see several hundred more medical staff deployed to battle the epidemic.

The three countries will also bolster efforts to prevent and detect suspected cases, urge better border surveillance, and reinforce the WHO’s sub-regional outbreak coordination centre in Guinea.

Darab did not outline the exact area to be part of the isolation zone, but the epicentre of the outbreak has a diameter of almost 300 kilometres, spreading from Kenema in eastern Sierra Leone to Macenta in southern Guinea, and taking in most of Liberia’s extreme northern forests.

“The healthcare services in these zones will be strengthened for treatment, testing and contact tracing to be carried out effectively,” she said.

‘Catastrophic loss of life’ 

Opening the summit, WHO chief Margaret Chan told leaders that the response of the three countries to the epidemic had been “woefully inadequate”, revealing that the outbreak was “moving faster than our efforts to control it”.

“If the situation continues to deteriorate, the consequences can be catastrophic in terms of lost lives but also severe socio-economic disruption and a high risk of spread to other countries,” Chan said.

She described the outbreak as “by far the largest ever in the nearly four-decade history of this disease”.

“It is taking place in areas with fluid population movements over porous borders, and it has demonstrated its ability to spread via air travel, contrary to what has been seen in past outbreaks,” she told the summit.

“Cases are occurring in rural areas which are difficult to access, but also in densely populated capital cities. This meeting must mark a turning point in the outbreak response.”

The meeting came after Dubai’s Emirates became the first global airline to announce it was suspending flights to the stricken area, while the United States, Germany, France and Italy have issued warnings against travel to the three African countries.

US President Barack Obama announced on Friday that the United States will screen delegates travelling from Ebola-hit countries to Washington for a three-day Africa summit next week.

Meanwhile Nigeria quarantined two people who had “primary contact” with a man who died of Ebola in Lagos last week.

The WHO raised the death toll by 57 to 729 on Thursday, announcing that 122 new cases had been detected between Thursday and Sunday last week, bringing the total to more than 1,300.

“Current numbers of national and international response staff are woefully inadequate,” Chan said, revealing that 60 health workers had died treating patients in the outbreak.

Sierra Leone’s leader Ernest Bai Koroma has announced a state of emergency, quarantining Ebola-hit areas and cancelling foreign trips by ministers, while Liberia has closed all of its schools and put government workers on leave.

Liberian President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf warned ahead of the summit that the crisis was “nearing a catastrophe” and appealed for more doctors and supplies.

Ebola, which has no vaccine, causes severe muscular pain, fever, headaches and, in the worst cases, unstoppable bleeding.

It has killed around two-thirds of those it has infected since its emergence in 1976, with two outbreaks registering fatality rates approaching 90 per cent.

The death rate in the current outbreak is a lower-than-average 55 per cent.

Fears that it could spread to other continents through air travel have been growing, with European and Asian countries on alert alongside African countries outside the Ebola crisis zone.

In Britain, Sierra Leone cyclist Moses Sesay was quarantined and tested for Ebola at the Commonwealth Games in Glasgow, before being given the all-clear, the athlete told a British newspaper.

Kenya, Ethiopia, Democratic Republic of Congo and Benin said they had enhanced screening at border points and airports.

Pan-African airlines Arik and ASKY have halted flights to and from Liberia and Sierra Leone, while Asia-Pacific nations from Hong Kong to Australia have announced tighter security measures at airports, some warning against travel to the Ebola-hit countries.

WASHINGTON — The New York Times called for the legalisation of marijuana on Saturday, in a bold editorial comparing the federal ban on cannabis to Prohibition.

The prestigious publication said pot laws disproportionately impact young black men and that addiction and dependence are “relatively minor problems” — especially when compared with alcohol and tobacco.

“It took 13 years for the United States to come to its senses and end Prohibition, 13 years in which people kept drinking, otherwise law-abiding citizens became criminals and crime syndicates arose and flourished,” the newspaper said.

“It has been more than 40 years since congress passed the current ban on marijuana, inflicting great harm on society just to prohibit a substance far less dangerous than alcohol. The federal government should repeal the ban on marijuana.”

Noting that the editorial board reached its conclusion after much discussion, the Times described the social costs of marijuana laws as “vast”.

Citing FBI figures showing there were 658,000 arrests for marijuana possession in 2012 — far higher than for cocaine, heroin and their derivatives — it said “the result is racist, falling disproportionately on young black men, ruining their lives and creating new generations of career criminals”.

While advocating for a ban on marijuana sales to those under 21, the paper also said the “moderate use of marijuana does not appear to pose a risk for otherwise healthy adults”.

The call comes just weeks after recreational pot sales began in the western US state of Washington, which followed Colorado’s decision to let people buy marijuana with no medical prescription.

And earlier this month, Governor Andrew Cuomo signed a bill making New York the 23rd state to legalise marijuana for medical use.

In another recent move reflecting growing public support for easing marijuana laws, the House of Representatives voted in May to bar federal authorities from raiding medical marijuana facilities or growers in states that have legalised its use.

Call sparks reader reaction 

The Times editorial, titled “Repeal Prohibition, Again”, kicks off a series of pieces on the issue by members of the editorial board and invites readers to weigh in.

The first have already done so, with their views posted on the newspaper’s website.

E.S. Lawrence, a self-described 20-year veteran high school teacher, expressed concern about children getting access to the substance, describing it as a “gateway drug” with detrimental effects on memory and learning.

“It’s NOT a benign drug. As long as there’s a danger of pot being acquired by children, I’m against legality,” Lawrence posted.

But Emmett Hoops argued that legalisation would allow for both taxation and regulation, adding that “mere decriminalisation keeps profits in the hands of criminal gangs”.

“It is beyond ridiculous to keep marijuana illegal while tobacco and alcohol kill scores every day in our state,” Hoops, from New York, posted.

In January, President Barack Obama made headlines when he said smoking pot was no more dangerous than drinking, though he called the practice a “bad idea”.

In comments to The New Yorker magazine, the US leader also noted that poor minority youths were more likely to get prison time for using marijuana than their richer counterparts.

However, he stopped short of calling for legalising the drug at the federal level.

DONETSK, Ukraine — Ukrainian armed forces mounted a major onslaught against pro-Russian separatist fighters Sunday in an attempt to gain control over the area where a Malaysia Airlines plane was downed earlier this month.

Reports of the intensifying unrest prompted a postponement of a trip to the site by a team of Dutch and Australian police officers who had planned to start searching for evidence and the remaining bodies.

In the Netherlands, Prime Minister Mark Rutte said his government has rejected the idea of deploying armed troops to secure the crash site because there is no way they could achieve “military superiority” in a region where heavily armed pro-Russian rebels are battling Ukrainian government forces.

“The option we looked at was a military option in which you could secure the area so you can work in a stable environment,” Rutte said. But “that the option would be such a provocation to the separatists that it could destabilise the situation”.

The US State Department released satellite images that it says back up its claims that rockets have been fired from Russia into eastern Ukraine and heavy artillery for separatists has also crossed the border.

A four-page document released by the State Department seems to show blast marks from where rockets were launched and craters where they landed. Officials said the images, sourced from the US Director of National Intelligence, show heavy weapons fired between July 21 and July 26 — after the July 17 downing of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17.

Ukraine’s National Security Council said Sunday that government troops have encircled Horlivka, a key rebel stronghold, and that there had been fighting in other cities in the east. Horlivka lies around 30 kilometres north of the main rebel-held city of Donetsk.

The armed forces “have increased assaults on territory held by pro-Russian mercenaries, destroyed checkpoints and positions and moved very close to Horlivka,” the council said in a statement.

A representative of the separatist military command in Donetsk confirmed that there had been fighting in Horlivka, but said that rebel fighters were holding their positions.

Elsewhere, Russian state news agency RIA Novosti reported Sunday that a column of Ukrainian armoured personnel carriers, trucks and tanks had entered the town of Shakhtarsk, 15 kilometres west of the site of the Boeing 777 crash.

Shakhtarsk is a strategic town in the area. By controlling the town, the Ukrainian army would cut off vital rebel supply lines.

Local media reported fighting also taking place in the towns of Snizhne and Torez, the two nearest mid-sized towns to the crash site.

The government accused rebel forces of firing rockets Sunday on residential apartment blocks in Horlivka in what they said was an attempt to discredit the army and whip up anti-government sentiment. The separatist self-declared “Donetsk People’s Republic” has accused the army of being responsible for that and other rocket attacks in nearby cities.

The Donetsk regional government — which is loyal to Kiev and based elsewhere since rebels took over the area — said Sunday in a statement that at least 13 people, including two children aged 1 and 5, were killed in fighting in Horlivka. It said another five people were killed as a result of clashes in a suburb north of Donetsk.

New York-based Human Rights Watch last week condemned what it said was the Ukrainian government forces’ practice of using unguided rockets in populated urban areas. It said that use of the rockets was a violation of international humanitarian law that “may amount to war crimes”.

Malaysian Airlines Flight 17 was shot down with a surface-to-air missile over a part of eastern Ukraine controlled by pro-Russian separatists on July 17, killing all 298 people on board. US and Ukrainian officials say it was shot down by a missile from rebel territory, most likely by mistake.

Ten days after the disaster, a full-fledged investigation still has not begun at the crash site, with some bodies still unrecovered and the site forensically compromised. Concerns about the integrity of the site were raised further when a couple that had flown from their home in Perth, Australia, visited the site Saturday outside the village of Hrabove and even sat on part of the plane’s wreckage.

It remained unclear when the forensic experts from the Netherlands and Australia would be able to begin their work at the site.

Alexander Hug, the deputy head of a monitoring team from the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe, said it was too dangerous for the unarmed officers to travel there from their current location in Donetsk.

“We reassess the situation continuously and we will start to redeploy tomorrow morning back to the site if the situation changes,” Hug said.

Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott had said earlier Sunday that unarmed Australian police would be part of the Dutch-led police force to secure the area and help recover victims’ remains.

Abbott said that by using unarmed police, Ukraine’s parliament won’t need to ratify the deployment as it would if the security force were to be armed.

“This is a risky mission. There’s no doubt about that,” Abbott told reporters. “But all the professional advice that I have is that the safest way to conduct it is unarmed, as part of a police-led humanitarian mission,” he said.

Malaysian Prime Minister Najib Razak said in a statement that his country would send dozens of police and that his country had received assurances from pro-Russia separatists that they would provide protection for investigators.

Flights from Ukraine to the Netherlands have taken 227 coffins containing victims of the plane disaster. Officials say the exact number of people held in the coffins still needs to be determined by forensic experts in the Netherlands.

The Malaysia Airlines disaster prompted some expectations in the West that Russia would scale back its involvement in the uprising in Ukraine’s east, but the opposite seems to be the case.

In addition to producing evidence that rockets have been fired into Ukraine from Russia, the US has said it has seen powerful rocket systems moving closer to the border.

In Warsaw, about 250 people marched through the city to protest what they called the “terror” imposed by Russian President Vladimir Putin in Ukraine. Some of the demonstrators carried Ukrainian flags, and there were banners that proclaimed “Putin is a Sponsor of Terror” and “Europe, Stop Just Talking. Start Taking Action! Stop Terror in Ukraine”.