World briefs

MYANMAR-USA An influential Washington think tank is criticizing Myanmar’s government for presiding over a “humanitarian catastrophe” in western Rakhine state and doing little to track down perpetrators of Buddhist-on-Muslim violence around the country.

AUSTRALIA’s prime minister says he’s considering a personal request from President Barack Obama to send a medical team to Africa to fight Ebola, but that priority remains responding to an outbreak in the Asia-Pacific region.

USA All travelers who come into the U.S. from three Ebola-stricken West African nations will now be monitored for three weeks, the latest step by federal officials to keep the disease from spreading into the country. The move is in sync with a new AP poll showing Americans want tighter screening for Ebola.

UAE Many Asian and African women working as domestic workers in the United Arab Emirates say their employers beat them with sticks or cables, punched and slapped them, and there’s little they can do because they’re excluded from the country’s labor law protections, a rights group says.
LEBANON A Lebanese man who arrived in Beirut from West Africa believing he may have Ebola was reassured by doctors that he is disease free but was still taken into a hospital quarantine yesterday as a practice run to check the country’s preparedness, a health official said.

GAZA STRIP Several dozen tons of cement bags stored in a warehouse are one of the few tangible achievements so far of a USD2.7 billion plan to rebuild war-wrecked Gaza Strip. The program was launched with high expectations at an international conference in Cairo on Oct. 12, but has run into obstacles, including wrangling between the rival Palestinian factions Hamas and Fatah for control in Gaza and what officials say has been a trickle of promised aid.

MEXICO Officials say a drug gang implicated in the disappearance of 43 students in a southern city essentially ran the town, paying the mayor hundreds of thousands of dollars a month out of its profits from opium.

BRAZIL’s tightest presidential race in decades is in the hands of the lower middle class, which accounts for 35 percent of voters. Going into Sunday’s election, the group is torn between those who want to stick with President Dilma Rousseff, whose Workers’ Party has enacted expansive welfare programs that have helped lift millions out of poverty, and those who are ready to take a risk on change and back center-right candidate Aecio Neves, who promises to spark the stalled economy by opening the nation to more trade and shrinking the government.