30/09/2014 World News Today

This is BBC World News Today with me Philippa Thomas.

Pro-democracy demonstrators in Hong Kong ignore pleas

Hong Kong's chief executive says China won't accept their demands

for electoral reform, but, as these pictures clearly show,

tens of thousands of people are still on the streets.

British jets hit Islamic State targets in Iraq

for the first time helping Kurdish troops who'd come under attack.

Also coming up, Bill Gates tells the BBC how he

And ensuring the legends live on, the street artist giving dead

We start in Hong Kong where thousands more people have joined

We can't tell you exactly how many but you can see masses

This is the scene in the central district of Hong Kong in the early

The protesters are calling on Beijing to give them

a free vote on the next Chief Executive of Hong Kong in 2017.

Under China's "one country, two systems" approach to

administering the territory, Beijing can decide which candidates are

On Monday, Britain and the United States

weighed into the debate, supporting full democracy for the territory.

A move which didn't go down well with the Chinese authorities.

But that stern warning hasn't dented the protesters' fervour

We want to stress Hong Kong is one of China's special administrative

regions. Hong Kong affairs are purely china's internal affairs so

we demand that countries are cautious with their words and

actions and not get involved or interfere with China's internal

affairs in any way, we will not support them anyway illegal

activities. But that stern warning hasn't dented

the protesters' fervour as they continue to occupy large

parts of the city, including Mongkok on the Kowloon

peninsula to the north, and in the central district from Connaught

Place across to Causeway Bay. These drone pictures show us

the sheer numbers of people who've And,

although it may be quiet overnight, huge crowds are expected to pack the

city centre on this public holiday. The BBC's China Editor Carrie Gracie

has been out in the crowds No wonder it's called

the polite protest. But China called them extremists,

who show contempt for the law. And Hong Kong's Chief

Executive said he had enough. The organisers of Occupy Central

have said many times that if the movement goes out of control,

it will be halted. So now I call upon them to fulfil

their promise The protest has spread to another

front, blocking roads in one of Hong Many here say they support

the fight for democracy. TRANSLATION:

Business is down at least 50%. So far, the protests are peaceful,

but if they disrupt things for too long,

the impact will be hard to predict. The only police to be seen

today were behind railings. And even those who once called

themselves protest organisers say things have moved but

beyond their control. It is movement of the people,

initiated by Hong Kong people. Since riot police withdrew in

the early hours of Monday morning, these people have taken ownership

of the heart of Hong Kong. They have even renamed this

placed Democracy Square. And instead of getting tired, bored,

or scared, as the government hoped, they are actually growing

in confidence and conviction. First used as shields

against police pepper spray. And now it is known as the

Umbrella Revolution. It's going to take more than

a rainstorm to quench their spirit. For all their good manners,

this is a devastating challenge to British Tornado jets have launched

attacks against Islamic State positions in Iraq

for the first time since members of Parliament here voted to approve

direct military action last Friday. The RAF says they successfully hit

a heavy weapons position and an armed pick-up truck around Rabia

near Iraq's border with Syria. This is one of the jets involved

in the mission returning to And we have more reports

of heavy fighting in both Iraq and Syria, with fierce clashes

reported at the border town of Rabia, between Iraqi Kurdish

forces and Islamic State militants. Fighting has been reported

on both sides of the frontier, Iraqi Kurdish troops are said to have

recaptured the town, but suffered In a separate development,

Turkish tanks have taken up positions on a hill along the border

near the Syrian town of Kobane Meanwhile, as part of the attempt to

curb the flow of foreign fighters to the Middle East, the UK's Home

Secretary Theresa May has told her party's annual conference that if

the Conservatives win power in next May's British election, they will

impose tighter restrictions She said new

"banning orders" would allow the authorities to outlaw extremist

groups if they incite religious or racial hatred or threaten democracy,

without having to prove that they Those same groups could also be

subject to Extremism Disruption Orders which would restrict

their movements and prevent them As our home affairs correspondent

Daniel Sandford reports, the proposed crackdown has already

provoked some sharp criticism. It was the brutal killing of

Drummer Lee Rigby last year by two British men that reopened

the debate about extremism. Since then, hundreds

of Britons have gone to Syria to So, today, at the Conservative Party

Conference, the Home Secretary It will aim to undermine

and eliminate extremism Neo-Nazism and other forms

of extremism, And it will aim to build up society

to identify extremism, confront it, Muslims are over 2 billion,

around the world! The plan is to ban extremist groups,

even if they are not directly And prevent leaders addressing

public meetings or even giving Men like Anjem Choudary, who has

been linked to several Islamists who You know,

I think I am extreme from some views Yes, I am extreme

because I believe in submission. I am extreme from democracy

because I believe we belong to God. I'm extreme from man-made law

because I believe in divine law. Theresa May's speech has reopened

one of the most difficult debates How to keep the people of Britain

safe, and, at the same time, Things like freedom of expression,

which have been part of Daniel Sandford reporting,

and to give you just one example of radicalisation,

today a 15-year-old girl from Bristol has been reported missing,

and police believe she's trying to Let's talk about these issues now

with Erin Marie Saltman, a senior researcher with Quilliam,

the counter-extremism think tank. That is just one example but you

have been looking at the fact that there are at least several more

girls trying to get to join Islamic state. Yes, we have seen quite a few

case studies in the UK and across Europe. It is thought up to 200

European females of actual journey to Syria and Iraq to join forces,

sometimes it is unclear whether that is to be with jihadists and become

wives of them, because some individuals have gone specifically

for that purpose. What is the appeal? We shouldn't assume the same

mechanisms that would be lowering a male wouldn't be alluring to female.

For a female, it is very empowering to think that not only is it a sense

of adventure that you are going abroad, but you are taking part in a

humanitarian cause, that is ordained by Lord, because that is what the

extremist rhetoric says. And you have a real man to support in his

effort to fight for this Moslem state. So, even though we might see

these young women go into a position where they have to know their place,

dress conservatively, they might see at liberating? They might see it as

liberating. And there is a network online, it is where women are

tweeting in using social media, just like the foreign fighter men, to

encourage women to come to join them, discussing what daily life is

like, encouraging them how to get across the border. You look

carefully about how people are being radicalised, encouraged to go out

there, so what do you make of Theresa May's measures, saying that

if the Conservatives win the general election they will clamp down in

these different ways? The rhetoric was interesting. This idea of

extremist disruption orders, because extremist disruption is welcome and

we should not be given undue platforms to hate preachers, but

this doesn't necessarily go against pre-existing laws. It is already

illegal to have hate speech, to incite violence in others. Perhaps

this is a case of just being better about putting into practice the laws

we have. We will see. There is the danger of creating an object to

resist against, if the clamp down goes too far. Censorship is not the

key, on or off-line. It will always come back. We don't want to give

credence by giving special treatment to certain individuals by censoring

them. Thank you for coming in. Rescue teams in Japan have had to

abandon attempts to recover the bodies of hikers who died

on Mount Ontake for a second time. The volcano erupted on Saturday,

and there are now fears Rupert Wingfield-Hayes has been

speaking to someone who survived the wall of ash that killed dozens

of people. On Saturday, she was climbing alone,

scouting a new route up Japan's She shows me the point where she was

standing, right near the summit when Mount Ontake suddenly exploded

without warning. TRANSLATION:

It was a beautiful autumn day. I looked back and saw tonnes

of ash and rock in the air. The smell

of sulphur was really strong. I really thought I was going to die.

I thought I was going to be trapped in the gas and die right there

on the spot. I thought to myself,

"Why did I come here today?" Completely exposed, Sayuri jammed

herself into a hole in the rocks. She hid there for an hour as the

mountain exploded just metres away. TRANSLATION:

I hid beneath the rock. Then, suddenly,

it would go completely black. That was when I saw a rock the size

of a small car, or others the size I could hear the noise, swish-swish,

of the rocks flying by. Sayuri took her chance and ran

for it, climbing down as fast She knew there were many others

still back up there I wonder

about those people I saw out on the peak, people who were taking

pictures and enjoying the view. I ask her

if the experience would stop her The mountains, she says,

are her life. Bill Gates has been speaking to the

BBC about his foundation's decision to pledge $50 million to fight

the Ebola outbreak in West Africa. We'll take you live in a moment to

Liberia to hear about events on the ground, first let's hear

a little of what he had to say. It's hard to predict how quickly

we can bring the case counts down. We have to build these Ebola

treatment units, we've got to get medical personnel in there,

and have a capacity so that anyone And also by being in there,

they are not infecting more people And that capacity simply

hasn't been there. The US, the UK and others are now

pledging very substantial resources. The US, the UK and others are now

pledging very substantial resources. Despite that donation,

for some families it is too late. The charity Unicef says that 3,700

children in Liberia, Guinea and Sierra Leone have lost one,

or both, of their parents to Ebola. Let's go live to Sarah Crowe who is

working for Unicef I suppose you are seeing these

children who are losing their parents. Absolutely. The sheer scale

and nature of this crisis requires us to do things we have never done

before. We think there are about a couple of thousand orphans in

Liberia. There is no real documentation, no real process at

the moment, so it requires or calls on us to be extremely creative and

to be courageous, and try new and inventive solutions to take care of

these children records of both terrible stigma and fear that so

many have when children come out of an Ebola treatment unit. It requires

no protocols and for us to find new ways of doing something we have

never done before. People are afraid to take them on? Yes. It is children

who are in contact with a relative who has died as a result of Ebola

and are potentially infectious themselves. In all of these

countries and in Liberia as well we are trying to work with a network of

survivors who themselves are immune. You can imagine taking care

of a small baby and protective personal equipment is an anathema to

nurturing a small child. Using this network of survivors, and it will

require an army of them effectively, and others brave enough

to join us, this is one way in which we are starting to open these

centres, interim care centres, in the coming weeks, where we will be

able to provide children who have been in contact with better care and

support. It sounds as if you are working against the odds to put

systems in place to contain Ebola. Do you share any of the optimism

that this will be defeated? We have seen glimmers of hope. This is what

we have to hang onto. In the past couple of days there was one little

boy who was put into emergency foster care. His father died at the

Ebola treatment unit and through a process of tracing we found,

together with the ministry and other partners, we found an emergency

foster care for him. In an extended family. He was sorted out. We have a

number of cases where my children think there might have lost their

parents and are reunited. You can imagine the rate at which families

or the sick are processed through an Ebola treatment centre is such that

documentation is often not accurate, so children fall through the cracks,

and it is about improving the system. We are seeing glimmers of

hope like that. That is what we have to hang onto. We have to be able to

focus on what is possible. Thank you.

By which I mean, do you understand the language of economics or do you

think that the world of banks and investments and balance sheets is

Even though the credit crunch of 2008 and

the global recession that followed definitely did affect all of us?

One man who's here to help is author John Lanchester, whose

I have been learning things from your lexicon of money. Why did you

think it was important to write this book? I wrote a book about London

and got interested in how finance works. As I educated myself I

realised that there was an awful lot I did not know, at the most is the

level of not understanding words. -- Basic. A lot of it is not knowing

what words mean. I found that there were a lot of words I might use that

I did not really grasp. It can balance being one of them. That is

when something falls so far and it looks as if it is going to have a

great recovery and then it falls down again. -- dead cat balance. It

was a phrase in circulation. Purchasing power parity, it is used

as an index to see how expensive it is to live somewhere. Two most

expensive countries in the world according to the Big Mac index are

Norway and Venezuela which have nothing in common apart from

enormous amounts of oil. Failing up words. That is when someone is so

embarrassingly rubbish at a job, this never happens at the BBC, so

amazingly rubbish there is nothing to do apart from promote them, and

it is a well-known feature in corporate life that people are so

rubbish they keep being promoted. One other thing that might matter in

the future, what is shadow banking? Stuff like credit cards, insurance,

finance spread globally through the system which is not regulated. One

of the things that is weird about it, and civilians are alarmed by

this, nobody knows how big it is. It is this gigantic sector and you

cannot put hard numbers on the scale of it. When we talk about the

financial sector we often talk about markets, looking at Hong Kong, and I

wanted to ask you about that, you grew up there and wrote a novel

about it. What strikes you when you see these protests? It is an amazing

thing and optimistic thing and I think people may have seen protests

before but what is different is these are not with the consent of

the police. This is not a managed demonstration. A lot of it is to do

with Hong Kong identity, younger people in Hong Kong very strongly

feel that as well as being Chinese and Cantonese they are also Hong

Kong-ese. People thought in 20 years time that the mainland would be

converging and the systems would be growing together and what this shows

is that young people from Hong Kong do not think that. They are feeling

more strongly about their sense of their own identity as a separate

thing. This is a political expression of that. Thank you.

Kurt Cobain, Tupac Shakur, Amy Winehouse, all iconic figures from

Their early deaths are now the subject of a pop-up art

Scars and Stripes is the work of D*Face, a British street artist

The murals for me have always been about a big expression,

a big volume of paint on the wall and grabbing people's attention.

I am starting on the eyes because it is more interesting

It is nice to have these eyes which will be almost finished

and everything else filling in around them.

The exhibition is called Scars and Stripes.

It is separated into two bodies of work.

One is a question of celebrity, fame, stardom, and those people

particularly who have died young in their field, and how

How they go on to live past the end of their lives, and how we

put them on a mantle and we let them becoming manipulated into how we

Someone like Sid Vicious, for example, has gone on to represent

Buddy Holly representing the very early days of someone dying

in the pinnacle of their career, to the great shock and surprise

This is a very close crop of James Dean who epitomises that burning

When I was experimenting with these I was looking at how they died,

so I was playing with metal, the idea of him dying

in a car crash, this is scratched out onto a still that is rusted.

These people often go on to live not just in their own songs but in the

way in which there are songs are sampled, and that is an important

element of how those myths carry on living outside of their own world.

Kurt Cobain is a really important figure to me

because I was hugely influenced by Nirvana and the grunge culture.

I remember how shocked and surprised I was when he took his own life,

having what seemed like the world at his feet.

Often these artists that have been thrust into the limelight become

celebrities often overnight and don't know how to handle it.

Struggled long and hard, and suddenly everything is available

to them, and that for me is very interesting.

The message in the work is very much like the work on the street.

It is about giving yourself to question your relationship to it.

That can be your relation to celebrity, what it means to you, and

the artist's drive for celebrity, this appetite we have for more fame.

The volume seems to get turned up more and more.

People are famous for nothing now, as opposed to being famous

That is a very interesting subject matter.

It is about questioning that relationship and what that

You can also talk to me about this or any other

Most of you finish September on a warm and dry not, but there has been

some rain around today and