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The aid group Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF) has urged other countries to "deploy their civil defence and military assets, and medical teams, to contain the epidemic".

"As soon as their family member shows more severe symptoms, like bleeding, they will seek to bring them in a treatment centre anyway," says Brice de la Vigne, MSF's director of operations.

Senegal, where many UN agencies and non-governmental organisations (NGOs) have their regional offices, is expected to become a logistical hub.

Libya gunmen attack Corinthia Hotel in Tripoli

Corinthia Hotel,

car bomb exploded near the premises

EU leaders have asked their foreign ministers to consider imposing further sanctions on Russia in response to the continued fighting in Ukraine.

5,000 people have been killed in fighting since the rebels seized swathes of the Donetsk and Luhansk regions last April, according to UN estimates. More than a million people have been displaced.

Ukraine.

He said President Ernest Bai Koroma revealed this staggering and depressing news to ministers at a special cabinet meeting. "The agricultural sector is the most impacted in terms of Ebola because the majority of the people of Sierra Leone - about 66% - are farmers," he said.

Rio Tinto, the world's third largest mining company, which owns a share in Simandou, has donated $100,000 to the World Health Organization's work in the area and is also making sanitation equipment available to local people there.

A smaller British company, London Mining, has moved out some its non-essential expatriate staff from Sierra Leone, where mining has accounted for much of the country's recent growth. According to the International Monetary Fund, Sierra Leone's output grew by 20% last year; excluding iron ore mining, it grew by 5.5%.

But it is only now, four or six months later, that the great machine of the so-called "international community", the United Nations, is lumbering into action.

Imagine trying to set up and run a medium sized multinational company. But then imagine trying to set it up in countries with very bad roads and electricity supply, dodgy telecommunications and mostly badly-educated populations

To establish your "multinational company" you have to do some mundane tasks. You have to bring in people from all over the world. Then you have to feed and house them. You have to get them cars and desks and telephones. You have to make sure each bit of the machine knows what the other bits are doing. And that's before your aid workers can move to the front line and actually do their job.