Hong Kong protesters stockpile supplies, prepare for long haul

By Clare Baldwin and James Pomfret

HONG KONG (Reuters) - Tens of thousands of pro-democracy protesters extended a blockade of Hong Kong streets on Tuesday, stockpiling supplies and erecting makeshift barricades ahead of what some fear may be a push by police to clear the roads before Chinese National Day.

Riot police shot pepper spray and tear gas at protesters at the weekend but withdrew on Monday to ease tension as the ranks of demonstrators swelled. Protesters spent the night sleeping or holding vigil unharassed on normally busy roads in the global financial hub.

Throughout the night, rumors rippled through crowds of protesters that police were preparing to move in again. As the sun rose many remained wary, especially on the eve of Wednesday's anniversary of the Communist Party's foundation of the People's Republic of China in 1949.

"Many powerful people from the mainland will come to Hong Kong. The Hong Kong government won't want them to see this, so the police must do something," Sui-ying Cheng, 18, a freshman at Hong Kong University's School of Professional and Continuing Education, said of the National Day holiday.

"We are not scared. We will stay here tonight. Tonight is the most important," she said.

The protesters, mostly students, are demanding full democracy and have called on the city's leader Leung Chun-ying to step down after Beijing on Aug. 31 ruled out free elections for Hong Kong's leader, known as the Chief Executive, in 2017.

China rules Hong Kong under a "one country, two systems" formula that accords the former British colony a degree of autonomy and freedoms not enjoyed in mainland China, with universal suffrage set as an eventual goal.

Protesters massed in at least four of Hong Kong's busiest areas, including Admiralty, where Hong Kong's government is headquartered, the Central business district, Causeway Bay, one of the city's most bustling shopping areas, and the densely populated Mong Kok district in Kowloon.

Organizers said as many as 80,000 people thronged the streets after the protests flared on Friday night. No independent estimate of numbers was available.

"I must stress that the events happening now cannot be attributed to the students or Occupy Central. It has evolved into a civil movement," said Alex Chow, the leader of the Hong Kong Federation of Students.

Protesters set up supply stations with water bottles, fruit, crackers, disposable raincoats, towels, goggles, face masks and tents, indicating they were in for the long haul.

Some lugged metal road barricades into positions on the edge of crowds, presumably to slow a police advance. In at least one location, several minivans and a truck were parked in rows in an apparent effort to block a road.

EXERCISE RESTRAINT

Communist Party leaders worry that calls for democracy could spread to the mainland, and have been aggressively censoring news and social media comments about the Hong Kong demonstrations.

The movement presents Beijing's ruling Communist Party with a difficult challenge. Cracking down too hard could shake confidence in market-driven Hong Kong, which has a separate legal system from the rest of China. Not reacting firmly enough, however, could embolden dissidents on the mainland.

The outside world has looked on warily, concerned that the clashes could spread and trigger a much harsher crackdown.

"The United States urges the Hong Kong authorities to exercise restraint and for protesters to express their views peacefully," White House spokesman Josh Earnest told a daily briefing on Monday.

Human Rights Watch voiced concern about police use of force, and called on Leung to "show the kind of tolerance for peaceful protest for which Hong Kong is known, not the intolerance for it in the mainland".

The demonstrations, labeled "illegal" by China's Communist-run government in Beijing, are the worst in Hong Kong since China resumed its rule over the former British colony in 1997.

An editorial in the state-run Global Times newspaper said on Tuesday the government would not change its policy "just because of the chaos created by the oppositionists", and it suggested that the authorities might let the protests run their course.

"Without changing the earlier decision, the central and Hong Kong governments can exercise a certain degree of restraint in handling the shutdown of the city's financial areas, so as to leave some time for local people to realize the harm done by the protesters' illegal acts," it said.

The protests are expected to escalate on Wednesday, with residents of the nearby former Portuguese enclave of Macau also planning a rally.

"Maybe the police are planning a bigger operation for the coming night, so most of them need to rest and prepare," Stanley Fong, a 22-year-old property agent, said of the relative lack of police out on Monday night.

RESOLUTELY OPPOSED

Televised scenes of the chaos in Hong Kong over the weekend have already made a deep impression outside the financial hub.

That was especially the case in Taiwan, which has full democracy but is considered by Beijing as a renegade province that must one day be reunited with the mainland. Taiwan President Ma Ying-jeou said Beijing needed "to listen carefully to the demands of the Hong Kong people".

Britain said it was concerned about the situation and called for the right of protest to be protected.

Earlier, Chinese Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Hua Chunying said Beijing was "resolutely opposed to any country attempting in any way to support such illegal activities like 'Occupy Central'."

Banks in Hong Kong, including HSBC , Citigroup , Bank of China <601988.SS>, Standard Chartered and DBS , shut some branches and advised staff to work from home or go to secondary branches on Monday.

Financial fallout from the turmoil has been limited so far. Hong Kong shares <.HSI> ended down 1.9 percent on Monday.

The protests have spooked tourists, with arrivals from China down sharply ahead of the National Day holidays, which are normally a peak. On Monday, Hong Kong canceled the city's fireworks display over the harbor, meant to mark the holiday. The United States, Australia and Singapore issued travel alerts.

(Additional reporting by Donny Kwok, Elzio Barreto,; Venus Wu, Yimou Lee, Diana Chan, Kinling Lo, Twinnie Siu, Bobby Yip and Stefanie McIntyre in HONG KONG; Writing by John Ruwitch and Anne-Marie Roantree; Editing by Paul Tait)

• Unrest, Conflicts & War
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U.S., Kurds strike at Islamic State in Syria

By Mariam Karouny and Jonny Hogg

BEIRUT/MURSITPINAR Turkey (Reuters) - U.S. warplanes attacked Islamic State targets in Syria overnight, in raids that a group monitoring the war said killed civilians as well as jihadist fighters.

The British-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said the strikes hit mills and grain storage areas in the northern Syrian town of Manbij, in an area controlled by Islamic State, killing at least two civilian workers.

Strikes on a building on a road leading out of the town also killed a number of Islamic State fighters, said Rami Abdulrahman, who runs the observatory, which gathers information from sources in Syria.

The U.S. military said on Monday an American air strike targeted Islamic State vehicles in a staging area adjacent to a grain storage facility near Manbij, but it had no evidence so far of civilian casualties.

While raids in Iraq and Syria have taken a toll on Islamic State equipment and fighters on the ground, there is no sign the tide is turning against the group, which controls large areas of both countries.

A U.S. Air Force general said Islamic State militants were changing their tactics in the face of American air strikes in Iraq and Syria, abandoning large formations such as convoys that had been easier for the U.S. military to target.

"They are a smart adversary, and they have seen that that's not effective for their survival, so they are now dispersing themselves," Air Force Major General Jeffrey Harrigian said at a Pentagon news conference.

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Islamic State flags flutter on the Mullah Abdullah bridge in southern Kirkuk September 29, 2014. REU …

That "requires us to work harder to locate them, and then develop the situation to appropriately target them", he said.

In a statement to the United Nations that appeared to give approval of U.S. and Arab air strikes in Syria against the militants, Syria's foreign minister said his country backed the campaign against Islamic State.

Syria "stands with any international effort aimed at fighting and combating terrorism", said Walid al-Moualem, whose government has long been an international pariah because of what critics say is its brutality in a civil war that has killed 190,000 people.

U.S. congressional aides said Congress might not vote until next year on an authorization for President Barack Obama's air strikes against Islamic State militants in Iraq and Syria, despite some lawmakers' insistence that approval is already overdue.

Obama has said he does not need approval for the air strikes, despite the constitutional requirement that Congress authorize military action.

The U.S.-led strikes have so far failed to halt an advance by Islamic State fighters in northern Syria on Kobani, a Kurdish town on the border with Turkey where fighting over the past week caused the fastest refugee flight of Syria's three-year-old war.

At least 15 Turkish tanks could be seen at the frontier, some with guns pointed towards Syrian territory. More tanks and armored vehicles moved towards the border after shells landed in Turkey on Sunday and Monday.

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Abu Ismail (front R), the owner of a plastics factory that was targeted on Sunday by what activists  …

ARAB ALLIES

The United States has been bombing Islamic State and other groups in Syria for a week with the help of Arab allies, and hitting targets in neighboring Iraq since last month. European countries have joined the campaign in Iraq but not in Syria.

Islamic State, a Sunni militant group that broke off from al Qaeda, alarmed the West and the Middle East by sweeping through northern Iraq in June, slaughtering prisoners and ordering Shi'ites and non-Muslims to convert or die.

It is battling Shi'ite-backed governments in both Iraq and Syria, as well as other Sunni groups in Syria and Kurdish groups in both countries, part of complex multi-sided civil wars in which nearly every country in the Middle East has a stake.

The head of Syria's al Qaeda branch, the Nusra Front, a Sunni militant group that is a rival of Islamic State and has also been targeted by U.S. strikes, said Islamists would carry out attacks on the West in retaliation for the campaign.

Obama has worked since August to build an international coalition to combat the fighters, describing them last week in an address to the United Nations as a "network of death".

His comments in an interview broadcast on Sunday that U.S. intelligence had underestimated Islamic State offered an explanation for why Washington appeared to have been taken by surprise when the fighters surged through northern Iraq in June.

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Militant Islamist fighters on a tank take part in a military parade along the streets of northern Ra …

The militants had gone underground when U.S. forces quashed al Qaeda in Iraq with the aid of local tribes during the U.S. war there that ended in 2011, Obama told CBS's "60 Minutes".

"But over the past couple of years, during the chaos of the Syrian civil war, where essentially you have huge swathes of the country that are completely ungoverned, they were able to reconstitute themselves and take advantage of that chaos," he said.

Obama's remarks came under fire on Monday from several U.S. lawmakers and members of the intelligence community.

"This was not an intelligence community failure but a failure by policy makers to confront the threat," said Mike Rogers, Republican chairman of the House of Representative Intelligence Committee.

BATTLE ON BORDER

Gunfire rang out from across the border, and a plume of smoke rose over Kobani as periodic shelling by Islamic State fighters took place. Kurds watching the fighting from the Turkish side of the border said the Syrian Kurdish group, the YPG, was putting up a strong defense.

"Many Islamic State fighters have been killed. They're not taking the bodies with them," said Ayhan, a Turkish Kurd who had spoken by phone with one of his friends fighting with the YPG. He said Kurdish forces had picked up eight Islamic State bodies.

At Mursitpinar, the nearby border crossing, scores of young men were returning to Syria saying they would join the fight. More refugees were fleeing in the opposite direction.

"Because of the bombs, everyone is running away. We heard people have been killed," said Xelil, a 39-year-old engineer who fled Kobani on Monday. "The YPG have got light weapons, but Islamic State has big guns and tanks."

A local official in Kobani said Islamic State continued to besiege the town from the east, west and south and that the militants were 10 km (6 miles) from the outskirts.

"From the morning there has been shelling into Kobani and ... maybe about 20 rockets," Idris Nassan, deputy foreign minister in a local Kurdish administration said by phone. He said the rockets had killed at least three people in the town.

Turkey has not permitted its own Kurds to cross to join the battle: "If they've got Syrian identity or passports, they can go. But only Syrians, not Turks," said one Turkish official at the border where security has been tightened.

A NATO member with the most powerful army in the area, Turkey has so far kept out of the U.S.-led coalition, angering many of its own Kurds who say the policy has abandoned their cousins in Syria to the wrath of Islamic State fighters.

(Additiona reporting by Sylvia Westall in Beirut, Philip Stewart, Patricia Zengerle and Mark Hosenball in Washington; Writing by Sylvia Westall, Peter Graff and Giles Elgood; Editing by Philippa Fletcher, Peter Cooney and Ken Wills)

• Unrest, Conflicts & War
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Australian police charge man over funding 'terrorist organization' after raids

By Lincoln Feast

SYDNEY (Reuters) - Australian police raided homes in Melbourne on Tuesday and charged one man with funding a terrorist organization in a crackdown on radical Islamists who authorities believe are supporting Middle East militants or planning attacks at home.

The operation, following information from the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation, was much smaller than raids earlier this month that authorities say thwarted a plan for a random beheading.

Australian police said they would accuse the unnamed 23-year-old, arrested on Tuesday, of having funneled around A$12,000 ($10,500) through a known and "proscribed terrorist organization" to a U.S. citizen.

"He had actually funded someone to travel from the United States to Syria and that person, we allege, is currently fighting in Syria," Australian Federal Police Assistant Commissioner Neil Gaughan told reporters.

Last week, counter-terrorism police in Melbourne shot and killed an 18-year-old, identified as Abdul Numan Haider, after he attacked them with a knife.

Police said Tuesday's raid was unrelated to that incident and there was no suggestion a further attack was planned.

Australia is concerned over the number of its citizens believed to be fighting with militant groups overseas, including a suicide bomber who killed three people in Baghdad in July and two men shown in images on social media holding the severed heads of Syrian soldiers.

Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott has said at least 150 Australians are in the Middle East either fighting with, or supporting, Islamic State or other militant groups, a number that he said has increased in recent months.

At least 20 are believed by authorities to have returned to Australia and pose a security risk, and some 60 people have had their passports canceled.

The national security agency this month raised its four-tier threat level to "high" for the first time.

Prominent Australian Muslims say their community is being unfairly targeted by law enforcement agencies, and threatened by right-wing groups, because the government's tough policies aimed at combating radical Islamists threaten to create a backlash.

Police said Haider's family had received death threats after his shooting, while a man was arrested after allegedly carrying a large knife into a Muslim school in Sydney last week.

Australia has deployed troops and aircraft to the Middle East in preparation to join a U.S.-led coalition that has begun strikes against Islamic State militants. The Australian government is expected to sanction involvement of its forces in action in Iraq as early as Tuesday.

($1=1.1480 Australian dollar)

(Editing by Cynthia Osterman, Paul Tait and Clarence Fernandez)

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Israel PM tries to shift focus from Islamic State to Iran at U.N

By Louis Charbonneau and Michelle Nichols

UNITED NATIONS (Reuters) - Israel's Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Monday tried to shift the spotlight away from the Islamic State militant group and back to Iran, warning the United Nations that a nuclear-armed Tehran would pose a far greater threat than "militant Islamists on pickup trucks."

Islamic State's seizure of large swaths of Syria and Iraq and its killings of civilians and soldiers have dominated discussions during five days of speeches at the United Nations General Assembly podium and on the sidelines.

But Netanyahu described Iran, Islamic State and the militant group Hamas that controls the Gaza Strip as part of a single team, comparing them all to Germany's Nazis, who killed six million Jews in World War Two.

"The Nazis believed in a master race; the militant Islamists believe in a master faith," Netanyahu said in his speech at the annual gathering of the 193-nation assembly in New York. "They just disagree who among them will be the master of the master faith."

"Make no mistake, ISIS (Islamic State) must be defeated," Netanyahu added. "But to defeat ISIS and leave Iran as a threshold nuclear power is to win the battle and lose the war."

"It's one thing to confront militant Islamists on pickup trucks armed with Kalashnikov rifles. It's another thing to confront militant Islamists armed with weapons of mass destruction," Netanyahu said.

Iran rejects allegations by Western powers and their allies that it is developing the capability to produce atomic weapons and wants economic sanctions lifted as part of any nuclear deal with six countries negotiating with Tehran.

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Israel's Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu addresses the 69th United Nations General Assembly at …

After Monday's speeches, an Iranian delegate took the floor to respond to Netanyahu's "laughable" speech, saying he "tried in vain to wash his hands of this most recent bloodbath in Gaza," wrongfully equating the Muslim world "with the ISIS terrorist group and propagating Iranophobia and Islamophobia."

By describing Iran, Islamic State and Hamas as part of the same team, Netanyahu appeared to play on doubts among U.S. lawmakers about the wisdom of President Barack Obama's decision to engage with Tehran after the 2013 election of President Hassan Rouhani, a soft-spoken pragmatist, to resolve the 12-year-old nuclear standoff between the Iran and the West.

"You know, to say that Iran doesn't practice terrorism, is like saying Derek Jeter never played shortstop for the New York Yankees," he said.

Asked if Washington agreed with Netanyahu that Iran, Islamic State, Hamas, Hezbollah are all part of a joint Muslim effort to seize control of the world, State Department spokeswoman Jen Psaki said: "We would not agree with that characterization, no."

These issues will undoubtedly come up during Obama's meeting with Netanyahu in Washington on Wednesday.

"Iran's nuclear military capabilities must be fully dismantled," Netanyahu said. He added that the goal of a charm offensive by Iran's "smooth talking president and foreign minister" was to get international sanctions lifted "and remove the obstacles to Iran's path to the bomb."

"The question before us is whether militant Islam will have the power to realize its unbridled ambitions. There is one place where that could soon happen – the Islamic State of Iran."

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Israel's Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu holds up a photograph as he addresses the 69th United …

He twice referred to the "Islamic State of Iran," which would appear to be a deliberate play on the country's official name - the Islamic Republic of Iran - and Islamic State, which is often referred to as ISIL or ISIS.

"CROCODILE TEARS"

Netanyahu referred mockingly to Rouhani's speech to the assembly last week, in which he accused the West and its allies of nurturing the group.

"Iran's President Rouhani stood here last week and shed crocodile tears over what he called the globalization of terrorism. Maybe he should spare us these phony tears and have a word instead with Iran's Revolutionary Guards," he said.

Rouhani said he supported efforts to combat Islamic State, a Sunni militant group that views the predominantly Shi'ite Iran as heretical, though he said it should be handled by the region, not countries outside the Middle East.

Iran and six world powers held 10 days of talks on the sidelines of the annual gathering of world leaders at U.N. headquarters in New York City but made little progress in overcoming deep disagreements on issues such as the future scope of Tehran's nuclear program and the speed of lifting sanctions.

The talks involve Iran, the United States, Britain, France, Germany, Russia and China. They are aimed at getting a long-term agreement that would gradually lift sanctions against Tehran in exchange for curbs on its atomic program.

The two sides are expected to meet again in Europe in the next two weeks, Iranian and Western officials say. Speaking about the talks, U.S. Deputy Secretary of State Bill Burns told reporters in Washington: "It's no secret that the gaps that remain in the negotiations are quite significant right now."

Netanyahu's strident critique of Iran may be a preview of the hard line he will take in Washington. He has repeatedly warned Obama not to make concessions in the nuclear talks.

On the topic of the peace process between Israel and the Palestinians, he expressed his support for a "historic compromise" with the Palestinians that would bring peace and stability for the Israeli people and the region. But he offered no new details of what such a compromise would envisage.

An Egyptian-brokered ceasefire in late August ended a 50-day war in the Gaza Strip between Israel and the Palestinian militant group Hamas that controls Gaza. Israel began an offensive on July 8 with the aim of halting cross-border rocket salvoes by Hamas and other militants.

The conflict devastated some Gaza districts and killed more than 2,100 Palestinians, mostly civilians, according to the Gaza health ministry. Sixty-seven Israeli soldiers and six civilians in Israel were also killed.

(Additional reporting by Parisa Hafezi in Ankara, Michelle Moghtader in Dubai and Arshad Mohammed and Matt Spetalnick in Washington; Editing by Andrew Hay, Grant McCool and Lisa Shumaker)

• Politics & Government
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• Benjamin Netanyahu
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• United Nations

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Recovery of Japan volcano victims suspended amid signs of rising activity

By Elaine Lies

TOKYO (Reuters) - Search and recovery efforts for at least two dozen victims of Japan's worst volcanic eruption in decades were called off on Tuesday due to worries about rising volcanic activity, including the chance of another steam explosion.

Hundreds of military searchers had been preparing to enter Mount Ontake by foot and helicopter to resume recovery of at least 24 people caught in a deadly rain of ash and stone after the peak erupted without warning on Saturday when it was crowded with hikers, including children.

Twelve bodies have been recovered from the 3,067-metre (10,062 feet) peak but at least 36 are feared to have died, with recovery hampered by high levels of toxic gas and ash piled hip-high in places on the still-erupting mountain. At least 69 people have been injured, 30 of them seriously.

"I just want to know something soon," said Kiyokazu Tokoro to Japanese media. His 26-year-old son was on the mountain with his girlfriend and has yet to be found.

Increasingly strong volcanic tremors on Tuesday morning have raised fears that the peak could spew out more rock or even be heading towards another steam explosion, an official at Japan's Meteorological Agency, which monitors volcanoes, told Reuters.

"The strength of the tremors increased late last night, diminished and then rose again early this morning. There's the chance things could get even worse, so caution is needed," said Yasuhide Hasegawa, at the agency's Volcano Division, adding the chance of an explosion like Saturday's was small but could not be rule out.

"This points to possibly increasing pressure due to steam inside the volcano, and if it exploded rocks could be thrown around, endangering rescuers," he added.

The weekend explosion may have propelled rocks so violently they could have reached the speed of an airplane, said Kazuaki Ito, a volcanologist who surveyed Ontake after it erupted in 1979, its first eruption in recorded history.

"It is hard to know how the victims died. They may have been struck by rocks or inhaled ash," he told NTV.

More than 800 rescuers were standing by and would head up into the mountain later in the day if things calmed down, said a firefighter waiting at rescue headquarters in the foothills as the peak spewed smoke and ash some 400 meters into the sky.

Hazards on the peak, transformed into an eerie moonscape by gray ash, are already numerous, ranging from ash flung up by helicopter blades to loose stones that make footing dangerous and toxic gas.

Most of the victims appear to have been found near a shrine at the narrow, rocky top of the peak, Japanese media said. They may include 11-year-old Akari Nagayama, who reached the summit earlier than the rest of a group that included her mother.

Japan is one of the world's most seismically active nations. In 1991, 43 people died in a pyroclastic flow, a superheated current of gas and rock, at Mount Unzen in the southwest.

Ontake, Japan's second-highest active volcano, last had a minor eruption seven years ago.

(Reporting by Elaine Lies; Editing by Michael Perry)

• Natural Phenomena
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Hong Kong democracy protesters defy tear gas, baton charge in historic standoff

By James Pomfret and Yimou Lee

HONG KONG (Reuters) - Riot police advanced on Hong Kong democracy protesters in the early hours of Monday, firing volleys of tear gas after launching a baton-charge in the worst unrest there since China took back control of the former British colony two decades ago.

Some protesters erected barricades to block security forces amid chaotic scenes still unfolding just hours before one of the world's major financial centers was due to open for business. Many roads leading to the Central business district remained sealed off as thousands defied police calls to retreat.

Earlier, police baton-charged a crowd blocking a key road in the government district in defiance of official warnings that the demonstrations were illegal.

Several scuffles broke out between police in helmets, gas masks and riot gear, with demonstrators angered by the firing of tear gas, last used in Hong Kong in 2005.

"If today I don't stand up, I will hate myself in future," said taxi driver Edward Yeung, 55, as he swore at police on the frontline. "Even if I get a criminal record it will be a glorious one."

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A protester (C) raises his umbrellas in front of tear gas which was fired by riot police to disperse …

White clouds of gas wafting between some of the world's most valuable office towers and shopping malls underscored the struggle that China's Communist Party faces in stamping its will on Hong Kong's more than 7 million people.

China took back control of Hong Kong from Britain in 1997.

Eight years earlier, Beijing's bloody crackdown on pro-democracy students in Tiananmen Square in 1989 had sent shockwaves through Hong Kong as people saw how far China's rulers would go to maintain their grip on power.

Thousands of protesters were still milling around the main Hong Kong government building, ignoring messages from student and pro-democracy leaders to retreat for fear that the police might fire rubber bullets.

Australia and Italy issued travel warnings for Hong Kong, urging their citizens to avoid protest sites. Some financial firms in the business district advised staff to work from home or from another location.

The U.S. State Department said in a statement on Sunday that Washington supported Hong Kong's well-established traditions and fundamental freedoms, such as peaceful assembly and expression.

PEPPER SPRAY, TEAR GAS

The protests fanned out to the busy shopping district of Causeway Bay and across the harbor to Mong Kok, posing a greater challenge for authorities to contain, local media reported. The protesters brought traffic to a halt and called on Hong Kong leader Leung Chun-ying to step down.

Police, in lines five deep in places, earlier used pepper spray against activists and shot tear gas into the air. The crowds fled several hundred yards (meters), scattering their umbrellas and hurling abuse at police they called "cowards".

Britain returned Hong Kong to Chinese rule under a formula known as "one country, two systems" that guaranteed a high degree of autonomy and freedoms not enjoyed in mainland China. Universal suffrage was set as an eventual goal.

But Beijing last month rejected demands for people to freely choose the city's next leader, prompting threats from activists to shut down the Central business district. China wants to limit elections to a handful of candidates loyal to Beijing.

Communist Party leaders in Beijing are concerned that calls for democracy could spread to cities on the mainland.

In a move certain to unnerve authorities in Beijing, media in Taiwan reported that student leaders there had occupied the lobby of Hong Kong's representative office on the island in a show of support for the democracy protesters.

Hong Kong leader Leung had earlier pledged "resolute" action against the protest movement, known as Occupy Central with Love and Peace.

"The police are determined to handle the situation appropriately in accordance with the law," Leung said, less than two hours before the police charge began.

"NEVER GIVE UP"

Police had not used tear gas in Hong Kong since breaking up protests by South Korean farmers against the World Trade Organisation in 2005.

"We will fight until the end ... we will never give up," said Peter Poon, a protester in his 20s, adding that he may have to retreat temporarily during the night.

Police denied rumors that they had used rubber bullets.

A spokesperson for China's Hong Kong and Macau Affairs Office said the central government fully supported Hong Kong's handling of the situation "in accordance with the law".

Such dissent would never be tolerated on the mainland, where the phrase "Occupy Central" was blocked on Sunday on Weibo, China's version of Twitter. It had been allowed earlier in the day.

A tearful Occupy organizer, Benny Tai, said he was proud of people's determination to fight for "genuine" universal suffrage, but that the situation was getting out of control, local broadcaster RTHK reported. He said he believed he would face heavy punishment for initiating the movement.

Protesters huddled in plastic capes, masks and goggles as they braced for a fresh police attempt to clear them from the financial district before Hong Kong re-opens for business. The city's financial markets are expected to open as usual on Monday. [ID:nL3N0RT0KT]

"WE WILL WIN WITH LOVE AND PEACE"

Publishing tycoon Jimmy Lai, a key backer of the democracy movement, joined the protesters.

"The more Hong Kong citizens come, the more unlikely the police can clear up the place," said Lai, also wearing a plastic cape and protective glasses. "Even if we get beaten up, we cannot fight back. We will win this war with love and peace."

Pro-democracy Hong Kong lawmaker Lee Cheuk-yan said three fellow legislators were among a small group of activists detained by police, including democratic leaders Albert Ho and Emily Lau.

Organizers said as many as 80,000 people thronged the streets in Admiralty district, galvanized by the arrests of student activists on Friday. No independent estimate of the crowd numbers was available.

A week of protests escalated into violence when student-led demonstrators broke through a cordon late on Friday and scaled a fence to invade the city's main government compound.

Police used pepper spray to disperse the crowd. The Hong Kong Federation of Students has extended class boycotts indefinitely and called on the city's leader to step down.

Police have so far arrested 78 people, including Joshua Wong, the 17-year-old leader of student group Scholarism, who was dragged away after calling on protesters to charge the government premises.

Wong was released without charge on Sunday night. He told reporters he planned to return to the protest site after resting. Student leaders Alex Chow and Lester Shum have also been released.

(Additional reporting by Donny Kwok, Charlie Zhu, Venus Wu, Diana Chan, Kinling Lo, Stephen Aldred, Farah Master, Twinnie Siu, Bobby Yip and Lisa Jucca; Writing by Greg Torode and Anne Marie Roantree; Editing by Mark Trevelyan and Mark Bendeich)

• Unrest, Conflicts & War
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Air strikes said to hit Islamic State oil refineries in Syria

By Mariam Karouny and Ayla Jean Yackley

BEIRUT/ISTANBUL (Reuters) - Air raids believed to have been carried out by U.S.-led forces hit three makeshift oil refineries in northern Syria on Sunday as part of a campaign against Islamic State, a human rights group said.

The United States has been carrying out strikes in Iraq since Aug. 8 and in Syria, with the help of Arab allies, since Tuesday, with the aim of "degrading and destroying" the militants who have captured large areas of both countries.

U.S. President Barack Obama has been seeking to build a wide coalition to weaken Islamic State, which has killed thousands and beheaded at least three Westerners.

In a potential boost for the United States, a jihadist Twitter account said the leader of an al Qaeda-linked group had been killed in a U.S. air strike in Syria, the SITE service said.

A U.S. official said on Sept. 24 that the United States believed Mohsin al-Fadhli, leader of the Khorasan group, had been killed in a strike a day earlier, but the Pentagon said later it was still investigating.

But in a tweet on Sept. 27, a jihadist offered condolences for the death of Fadhli, SITE, a U.S.-based organization that monitors militant groups online, said on Sunday.

In Washington, Tony Blinken, deputy White House national security adviser, said on Sunday that officials could not yet confirm the death.

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The remnants of a rifle is seen at a damaged base of the al Qaeda-linked Nusra Front, that was targe …

U.S. officials have described Khorasan as a network of al Qaeda fighters with battlefield experience mostly in Pakistan and Afghanistan that is now working with al Qaeda's Syrian affiliate, the Nusra Front.

The head of the Nusra Front said the air strikes would not eliminate Islamists in Syria and warned that the group's supporters could attack inside Western countries.

In an audio message posted on jihadi forums, Abu Mohamad al-Golani urged European and U.S. citizens to denounce the strikes, which he said could trigger retaliation from Muslims.

The Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said the latest air strikes in northern Syria occurred shortly after midnight in Raqqa province.

Rami Abdelrahman of the Observatory said that destroying the makeshift refineries has led to a sharp increase in the price of diesel, adding that in Syria's northern Aleppo province the price has more than doubled.

"The price went up from 9,000 Syrian pounds to 21,000 in Aleppo. Hitting these refineries has affected ordinary people, now they have to pay higher prices," he told Reuters.

A medium-sized makeshift refinery, mounted on trucks, can refine up to 200 barrels of crude a day into fuel and other products.

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Still image taken from black and white video from a plane camera shows smoke rising after a strike n …

RIVAL GROUPS

But the impact of the strikes on Islamic State (IS) was not immediately clear. IS has gained support among Islamists following the attacks, including from rival groups. Scores of fighters have left al Qaeda's Nusra Front and other Islamist groups in Syria to join IS since the strikes started.

The air strikes have failed so far to stop the advance of Islamic State fighters on the Syrian Kurdish town of Kobani near the border with Turkey which the group has sieged from three sides, triggering an exodus of more than 150,000 refugees.

In Washington, U.S. lawmakers stepped up calls for congressional authorization of Obama's war against Islamic State, amid signs the United States and its allies face a long fight.

U.S. House Speaker John Boehner told ABC's "This Week" that he believed Obama had the legal authority for strikes against Islamic State, but would call lawmakers back from their districts if Obama sought a resolution backing the action.

"I think he does have the authority to do it. But ... this is a proposal the Congress ought to consider," Boehner said.

Obama and other U.S. officials have said they believe no further vote to authorize force is needed.

But Senator Chris Murphy, a Connecticut Democrat and member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, told CNN that Congress should debate the issue because of uncertainty about how long the U.S. military would remain engaged in Syria.

Obama meanwhile said U.S. intelligence agencies had underestimated Islamic State activity in Syria, which has become "ground zero" for jihadists worldwide.

He said in a CBS television interview that Islamic militants went underground when U.S. Marines quashed al Qaeda in Iraq with help from Iraq's tribes.

"But over the past couple of years, during the chaos of the Syrian civil war, where essentially you have huge swathes of the country that are completely ungoverned, they were able to reconstitute themselves and take advantage of that chaos," Obama said.

"And so this became ground zero for jihadists around the world."

(Writing by Giles Elgood; Editing by Susan Fenton)

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Militants kill 20 in two separate Yemen attacks: sources

SANAA (Reuters) - A suicide bomber linked to al Qaeda drove a car laden with explosives into a hospital used as a base by Yemen's Shi'ite Muslim Houthi movement on Sunday, killing at least 15 people, and five more died in an ambush in the south of the country.

Militants, tribal and local sources said the first attack took place in the town of Majzar in Maarib province, east of the capital Sanaa, while local officials said the second occurred on Sunday night in the southern al-Bayda province.

Houthi fighters seized Sanaa on Sept. 21 after four days of fighting with soldiers loyal to the Sunni Muslim Islah party. They have since refused to quit the capital, despite an agreement they signed with President Abd-Rabbu Mansour Hadi to make them a part of the government.

Instability in Yemen is a worry for the United States and its Gulf Arab allies because of its position next to Saudi Arabia and shipping lanes which run through the Gulf of Aden.

Saudi Foreign Minister Prince Saud al-Faisal told the U.N. General Assembly on Sunday that the situation there posed a threat to international security.

"Dozens of dead and wounded from the rejectionist Houthis in a martyrdom operation by Ansar al-Sharia using a booby-trapped car in Maarib," the militant group, a branch of Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP), said in a statement on its Twitter account.

The group said the target was al-Jafra hospital, which had been turned by the Houthis into a base for their operations in the area. Local tribesmen said at least 15 people were killed in the attack and more than 50 were wounded.

In the second attack, local officials said al Qaeda militants ambushed a car used by Houthi fighters, killing five of them. An al Qaeda statement put the Houthi death toll in the attack at six.

There was no immediate word from the Houthi, who are named after the tribe of their leader and founder.

Ansar al-Sharia had previously carried out numerous attacks on military and civilian installations of the U.S.-allied Yemeni government. But the group, which adheres to an austere brand of Sunni Islam which views Shi'ites as heretics, has turned its attention to the Houthis after they captured Sanaa.

Last week, they said they carried out a similar attack on the Houthis in their northern stronghold of Saada province, in which dozens were killed or wounded.

The Houthis captured Sanaa after overrunning an army brigade affiliated to the moderate Islamist Islah party, making them effectively the power brokers in the country.

Their Zaydi Shi'ite sect is related to, but separate from, the sect that rules Iran. They make up 30 percent of Yemen's population of 25 million and ruled a kingdom there for 1,000 years. But they have complained of being marginalized since their last king in Sanaa was overthrown in a 1962 revolution.

(Reporting by Mohammed Ghobari, Writing by Sami Aboudi and William Maclean, Editing by Mark Trevelyan)

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At least 31 feared dead near peak of Japanese volcano

By Elaine Lies

TOKYO (Reuters) - Thirty-one people were presumed dead on Sunday near the peak of a Japanese volcano that erupted a day earlier, catching hundreds of hikers unawares as it belched out clouds of rock and ash.

The deaths on Mount Ontake, 200 km (125 miles) west of Tokyo, were the first from a Japanese volcanic eruption since 1991.

Police said the 31 were found in "cardio-pulmonary arrest", but declined to confirm their deaths pending a formal examination, as per Japanese custom. Public broadcaster NHK and the Kyodo news agency later reported that four, all male, had been confirmed dead.

An official in the area said rescue efforts had been called off due to rising levels of toxic gas near the peak, as well as approaching nightfall.

Hundreds of people, including children, were stranded on the mountain, a popular hiking site, after it erupted without warning on Saturday, sending ash pouring down the slope for more than 3 km (2 miles.)

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Volcanic smoke rises from Mt. Ontake, which straddles Nagano and Gifu prefectures, central Japan, in …

Most made their way down later on Saturday but about 40 spent the night near the 3,067 meter (10,062 feet) peak. Some wrapped themselves in blankets and huddled in the basement of buildings.

"The roof on the mountain lodge was destroyed by falling rock, so we had to take refuge below the building," one told NHK national television. "That's how bad it was."

More than 40 people were injured, several with broken bones.

Earlier, the Fire and Disaster Management Agency had said authorities were trying to confirm the whereabouts of 45 people.

It was not clear whether those 45 included the 31 people found in cardio-pulmonary arrest.

The volcano was still erupting on Sunday, pouring smoke and ash hundreds of meters into the sky. Ash was found on cars as far as 80 km (50 miles) away.

Volcanoes erupt periodically in Japan, one of the world's most seismically active nations, but there have been no fatalities since 1991, when 43 people died in a pyroclastic flow, a superheated current of gas and rock, at Mount Unzen in the southwest of the country.

Ontake, Japan's second-highest volcano, last erupted seven years ago. Its last major eruption was in 1979.

Satoshi Saito, a 52-year-old hiker who climbed Ontake on Saturday and descended less than an hour before the eruption, said the weather was good and the mountain, known for its autumn foliage, was crowded with people carrying cameras.

"There were no earthquakes or strange smells on the mountain when I was there," Saito, who usually climbs Ontake several times a year, told Reuters. He also said there were no warnings of possible eruptions posted on the trail.

"But a man who runs a hotel near the mountain told me that the number of small earthquakes had risen these past two months, and everyone thought it was weird," Saito said.

ENVELOPING BLACKNESS

Video footage on the Internet showed huge grey clouds boiling towards climbers at the peak and people scrambling to descend as blackness enveloped them. NHK footage showed windows in a mountain lodge darkening and people screaming as heavy objects pelted the roof.

"All of a sudden ash piled up so quickly that we couldn't even open the door," Shuichi Mukai, who worked in a mountain lodge just below the peak, told Reuters. The building quickly filled with hikers taking refuge.

"We were really packed in, maybe 150 people. There were some children crying, but most people were calm. We waited there in hard hats until they told us it was safe to come down."

Flights at Tokyo's Haneda airport suffered delays on Saturday as planes changed routes to avoid the volcano, but were mostly back to normal by Sunday, an airport spokeswoman said.

Japan lies on the "Ring of Fire," a horseshoe-shaped band of fault lines and volcanoes circling the edges of the Pacific Ocean, and is home to 110 active volcanoes.

One of these, Sakurajima at the southern end of the western island of Kyushu, is 50 km (31 miles) from Kyushu Electric Power's Sendai nuclear plant, which was approved to restart by Japan's nuclear regulator earlier in September.

The Nuclear Regulation Authority has said the chance of volcanic activity during the Sendai plant's lifespan is negligible, even though five giant calderas, crater-like depressions formed by past eruptions, are also nearby.

Kyushu Electric has said it will install new monitoring equipment around nearby calderas and develop plans to remove highly radioactive fuel to a safer site if the threat of an eruption is detected.

There are no nuclear plants near Ontake.

An official at the volcano division of the Japan Meteorological Agency said that, while there had been a rising number of small earthquakes detected at Ontake since Sept. 10, the eruption could not have been predicted easily.

"There were no other signs of an imminent eruption, such as earth movements or changes on the mountain's surface," the official told Reuters. "With only the earthquakes, we couldn't really say this would lead to an eruption."

(Reporting by Elaine Lies and Stanley White; Editing by Nick Macfie, Paul Tait and Mark Trevelyan)

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Japan resumes search for victims of volcanic eruption

By Elaine Lies

TOKYO (Reuters) - More than 500 rescuers in Japan resumed searching on Monday for victims of a volcano that erupted without warning at the weekend, leaving four confirmed dead and 27 presumed to have perished in a sudden rain of ash and stone.

Searchers headed for the summit of Mount Ontake, turned into an eerie moonscape by a thick layer of gray ash, where most of the victims of Japan's first fatal volcanic eruption since 1991 are believed to have fallen near craters spewing steam and ash.

"There's been absolutely no contact at all," one man waiting for news of a family member told NHK national television. "We're utterly exhausted."

Four men were pronounced dead late on Sunday, a day after the 3,067-metre (10,062-feet) volcano, a popular hiking spot crowded with climbers admiring the fall foliage, erupted in a massive cloud of ash and smoke. Forty people were injured.

The other 27 believed dead were described as having suffered cardiopulmonary arrest, a procedural formality followed in Japan in the absence of a medical examination to confirm death.

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Japan Self-Defense Force (JSDF) soldiers and firefighters climb up Mt. Ontake, which straddles Nagan …

Rescue efforts were abandoned on Sunday after the smell of sulfur strengthened at the peak, fanning fears of toxic fumes.

Japan is one of the world's most seismically active nations, but had suffered no fatalities in volcanic eruptions since 1991, when 43 people died in a pyroclastic flow, a superheated current of gas and rock, at Mount Unzen in the southwest.

Ontake, Japan's second-highest active volcano, 200 km (125 miles) west of Tokyo, last had a minor eruption seven years ago. Its last major eruption, the first on record, was in 1979.

Hikers said there was no warning of Saturday's eruption just before noon on a clear day on a peak crowded with visitors, including children. Hundreds were trapped for hours before descent became possible later in the day.

It was natural that Japan's Meteorological Agency, which monitors volcanic activity, might reconsider its surveillance system, said Chief Cabinet Secretary Yoshihide Suga.

"However, I believe that, given current levels of knowledge, they made the only judgment they could," he told a news conference.

Suga also said the eruption would have no impact on the restart of the Sendai nuclear plant in southwestern Japan, an area of active volcanic sites. The plant was just cleared to restart in early September.

Experts said it was hard to have predicted the eruption, despite tremors in the area this month, since there were no other changes in the mountain.

Also, the eruption appears to have resulted from a steam-driven explosion of a kind that is especially hard to forecast, said Toshitsugu Fujii, a volcano expert.

"They often occur quite suddenly and there is absolutely no guarantee that the earthquakes earlier this month were connected," he told a news conference on Sunday. "There is no guarantee of total safety when you're dealing with nature."

(This version of the story corrects date of eruption to Saturday in paragraph 9)

(Additional reporting by Kaori Kaneko; Editing by Clarence Fernandez)

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Islamic State defies air strikes by shelling Syrian Kurdish town

By Mariam Karouny and Jonny Hogg

BEIRUT/MURSITPINAR Turkey (Reuters) - New U.S.-led air strikes against Islamic State fighters failed to stop them from pressing their assault on a strategic Syrian town near the Turkish border on Saturday, hitting it with shell fire for the first time.

The U.S. Central Command (Centcom) said the air strikes destroyed an IS building and two armed vehicles near the border town of Kobani, which the insurgents have been besieging for the past 10 days.

It said an airfield, garrison and training camp near the IS stronghold of Raqqa were also among the targets damaged in seven air strikes conducted by the United States, Saudi Arabia, Jordan and the United Arab Emirates, using fighter planes and remotely piloted aircraft.

Three air strikes in Iraq destroyed four IS armed vehicles and a "fighting position" southwest of Arbil, Centcom said. Two British fighter jets also flew over Iraq, a day after the UK parliament authorized bombing raids against IS militants there, but used the mission to gather intelligence rather than carry out air strikes, the ministry of defense said.

Since capturing swathes of territory in both Syria and Iraq, Islamic State has proclaimed an Islamic "caliphate", beheaded Western hostages and ordered Shi'ites and non-Muslims to convert or die. Its rise has prompted President Barack Obama to order U.S. forces back into Iraq, which they left in 2011, and to go into action over Syria for the first time.

The U.S. military has been carrying out strikes in Iraq since Aug. 8 and in Syria, with the help of Arab allies, since Tuesday, in a campaign it says is aimed at "degrading and destroying" the militants.

Al Qaeda's affiliate in Syria, which lost scores of fighters in the first day of strikes there, accused Washington and its allies of waging "war against Islam" and said they would be targeted by jihadists around the world.

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A pair of U.S. Air Force F-15E Strike Eagles fly over northern Iraq after conducting airstrikes in S …

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a monitoring group that supports opposition forces fighting Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, said Saturday's air strikes set off more than 30 explosions in Raqqa.

Rami Abdulrahman, who runs the British-based Observatory, said 23 Islamic State fighters were killed. He said the heaviest casualties were inflicted in attacks on an airport.

But the monitoring group said IS was still able to shell eastern parts of Kobani, wounding several people. It said that IS fighters had killed 40 Kurdish militia in the past five days in their battle for the town, including some who were killed by a suicide bomber who drove into its outskirts in a vehicle disguised to look as though it was carrying humanitarian aid.

The insurgents' offensive against the Kurdish town, also known as Ayn al-Arab, has prompted around 150,000 refugees to pour across the border into Turkey since last week.

ERDOGAN SHIFT

Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan signaled a shift in Ankara's position by saying for the first time that Turkish troops could be used to help set up a secure zone in Syria, if there was international agreement to establish one as a haven for those fleeing the fighting.

Turkey has so far declined to take a frontline role in the U.S.-led coalition against IS, but Erdogan told the Hurriyet newspaper: "The logic that assumes Turkey would not take a position militarily is wrong."

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A Syrian Kurd pushes his motorcycle as he crosses into Turkey on the Turkish-Syrian border, near the …

He said negotiations were under way to determine how and by which countries the air strikes and a potential ground operation would be undertaken, and that Turkey was ready to take part.

"You can't finish off such a terrorist organization only with air strikes. Ground forces are complementary ... You have to look at it as a whole. Obviously I'm not a soldier but the air (operations) are logistical. If there's no ground force, it would not be permanent," he said.

Turkish officials near the Syrian border said IS fighters battling Kurdish forces for Kobani sent four mortar shells into Turkish territory, wounding two people.

One of the shells hit a minibus near Tavsanli, a Turkish village within sight of Kobani. A large hole was visible in the rear of the vehicle.

"Two people were injured in the face when the minibus was hit. If they'd been 3 meters (10 feet) closer to the car, many people would have died," said Abuzer Kelepce, a provincial official from the pro-Kurdish party HDP.

Heavy weapons fire was audible, and authorities blocked off the road toward the border.

"The situation has intensified since the morning. We are not letting anyone through right now because it is not secure at all. There is constant fighting, you can hear it," the official said.

Kobani sits on a road linking north and northwestern Syria. IS militants were repulsed by local forces, backed by Kurdish fighters from Turkey, when they tried to take it in July, and that failure has so far prevented them from consolidating their gains in the region.

COALITION WIDENS

Syria's government, which in the past accused its opponents of being Western agents trying to topple Assad, has not objected to the U.S.-led air strikes, saying it was informed by Washington before they began.

It too has carried out air strikes across the country, including in the east, and its ground forces have recaptured the town of Adra, northeast of Damascus, tightening Assad's grip on territory around the capital.

But Russia has questioned the legality of U.S. and Arab state air strikes in Syria because they were carried out without the approval of Damascus, Moscow's ally.

General Martin Dempsey, chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, said on Friday that this week's strikes in Syria had disrupted Islamic State's command, control and logistics capabilities. But he said a Western-backed opposition force of 12,000 to 15,000 would be needed to retake areas of eastern Syria controlled by the militants.

(Reporting by Mariam Karouny; Additional reporting by Michele Kambas; Writing by Mark Trevelyan; Editing by Jason Neely)

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Japanese troops head for volcano after eruption leaves missing, at least 40 injured

By Elaine Lies

TOKYO (Reuters) - More than 500 Japanese military and police set out on Sunday to search the peak of a volcano popular with hikers a day after its sudden eruption trapped hundreds on the mountain for hours, amid conflicting reports about missing and injured climbers.

Japanese media said seven people were reported to be unconscious, possibly buried in ash, as Mount Ontake continued to spew smoke and ash into the sky, while local officials said they were trying to confirm the whereabouts of 32 hikers.

Late on Saturday, Japanese media reported that one woman was dead but that was later withdrawn. At least 40 people were injured, including several with broken bones, officials said.

"It's very hard to know what's happening on the mountain now and things could change," said one official with the government of Nagano prefecture, one of two prefectures straddled by the 3,067 meters (10,062 feet) Ontake.

Hundreds of people, including children, were stranded on the peak after it erupted without warning just before noon on Saturday, sending ash pouring down the slope for more than 3 km (2 miles.) Most made their way down that evening but some 30 were still stranded on Sunday morning.

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Climbers descend Mt. Ontake, which straddles Nagano and Gifu prefectures, to evacuate as volcanic as …

Video footage posted on the Internet showed huge gray clouds boiling towards climbers at the peak and people scrambling to descend as blackness enveloped them.

"All of a sudden ash piled up so quickly that we couldn't even open the door," Shuichi Mukai, who worked in a mountain hut just below the peak, told Reuters. The hut quickly filled with hikers taking refuge.

"We were really packed in here, maybe 150 people. There were some children crying, but most people were calm. We waited there in hard hats until they told us it was safe to come down."

The mountain, some 200 km (125 miles) west of Tokyo, is a popular site to view autumn foliage, currently at its best.

Flights at Tokyo's Haneda airport suffered delays as planes changed routes to avoid the peak, which straddles Nagano and Gifu prefectures 200 km (125 miles) west of Tokyo, but were mostly back to normal by Sunday, an airport spokeswoman said.

Volcanoes erupt periodically in Japan, one of the world's most seismically active nations, but there have been no fatalities since 1991, when 43 people died in a pyroclastic flow, a superheated current of gas and rock, at Mount Unzen in southwestern Japan.

An official at the volcano division of the Japan Meteorological Agency said that, while there had been a rising number of small earthquakes detected at Ontake since Sept. 10, the eruption could not have been predicted easily.

"There were no other signs of an imminent eruption, such as earth movements or changes on the mountain's surface," the official told Reuters. "With only the earthquakes, we couldn't really say this would lead to an eruption."

(Editing by Paul Tait)

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Russia at U.N. accuses U.S., allies of bossing world around

By Louis Charbonneau

UNITED NATIONS (Reuters) - Russia used its annual appearance at the U.N. General Assembly on Saturday to accuse the United States and its Western allies of bossing the world around, complaining they were attempting to dictate to everyone "what is good and evil."

The speech by Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov to the 193-nation assembly was the latest example of the deteriorating relations between Moscow and Western powers, which have imposed sanctions on Russia over the conflict in neighboring Ukraine.

"The U.S.-led Western alliance that portrays itself as a champion of democracy, rule of law and human rights within individual countries ... (is) rejecting the democratic principle of sovereign equality of states enshrined in the U.N. Charter and trying to decide for everyone what is good or evil," he said.

"Washington has openly declared its right to unilateral use of force anywhere to uphold its own interests," Lavrov added. "Military interference has become a norm - even despite the dismal outcome of all power operations that the U.S. has carried out over the recent years."

Lavrov cited the 1999 NATO bombing of Yugoslavia during the Kosovo war, the 2003 invasion of Iraq, the war in Afghanistan, and the 2011 NATO intervention in Libya that led to the toppling and death of longtime Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi as examples of U.S. failures.

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Russia's Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov addresses the 69th United Nations General Assembly at th …

Moscow has also criticized the United States over airstrikes against Islamic State, an Islamist militant group often referred that has taken over large areas of Syria and Iraq and is blamed for brutal slayings of civilians.

Russia on Friday questioned the legality of U.S. and Arab airstrikes in Syria to target Islamic State because the action was taken without the formal approval and cooperation of Moscow's ally, Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.

He reiterated Moscow's view that the United States and European Union "supported the coup d'etat in Ukraine" and that they were therefore responsible for the current conflict there.

A war involving pro-Russian separatists in Ukraine has killed more than 3,000 people. Kiev and Western governments say Russia has been arming, training and encouraging the militants, and had sent its own troops to Ukraine to tip the balance against Kiev.

Russia, which opposes the pro-Western course of leadership in the ex-Soviet republic, has denied that its troops have participated in the war or provided arms to rebels.

Separately, Lavrov demanded information about the state of Libya's chemical weapons arsenals after the Libyan government asked the global chemical weapons watchdog to draw up plans to ship a stockpile of 850 metric tons of chemicals overseas because of deteriorating security.

"We understand that our NATO colleagues after they bombed out this country in violation of (U.N. Security Council) resolution would not like to stir up the mayhem they created," Lavrov said. "However, the problem of uncontrolled Libyan chemical arsenals is too serious to turn a blind eye."

Western countries reject Russia's allegations they violated the 2011 U.N. resolution.

(Reporting by Louis Charbonneau; Editing by Peter Cooney)

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Hong Kong clashes, arrests kick-start plans to blockade city

By James Pomfret and Yimou Lee

HONG KONG (Reuters) - Violent clashes between Hong Kong riot police and students galvanized tens of thousands of supporters for the city's pro-democracy movement and kick-started a plan to lock down the heart of the Asian financial center early on Sunday.

Leaders and supporters of Occupy Central with Love and Peace rallied to support students who were doused with pepper spray early on Saturday after they broke through police barriers and stormed the city's government headquarters.

"Whoever loves Hong Kong should come and join us. This is for Hong Kong's future," publishing tycoon Jimmy Lai, an outspoken critic of China's communist government who has backed pro-democracy activists through publications that include one of the city's biggest newspapers as well as donations, told Reuters.

Occupy demanded that Beijing withdraw its framework for political reform in the former British colony and resume talks.

Hong Kong returned to Chinese rule in 1997 under a formula known as "one country, two systems." that guaranteed a high degree of autonomy and freedoms not enjoyed in mainland China. Universal suffrage was set as an eventual goal.

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A protester reacts as she is dragged away by police after storming in government headquarters in Hon …

But Beijing last month rejected demands for people to freely choose the city's next leader, prompting threats from activists to shut down Central, Hong Kong's financial district. China wants to limit elections to a handful of candidates loyal to Beijing.

"It's high time that we really showed that we want to be free and not to be slaves ... we must unite together," Cardinal Joseph Zen, 82, formerly Catholic Bishop of Hong Kong, told Reuters.

This demonstration, which has drawn thousands of protesters armed with goggles, masks and raincoats in preparation for a violent confrontation with police, is one of the most tenacious acts of civil disobedience seen in post-colonial Hong Kong.

Roads in a square block around the city's government headquarters, located in the Admiralty district adjacent to Central, were filled with people and blocked with metal barricades erected by protesters to defend against a possible police crackdown.

Some of Hong Kong's most powerful tycoons have spoken out against the Occupy movement, warning it could threaten the city's business and economic stability.

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Student protesters fashion themselves in Kevlar helmets, goggles and masks against a possible confro …

The latest protests escalated after demonstrators broke through a cordon late on Friday and scaled perimeter fences to invade the city's main government compound in the culmination of a week-long rally to demand free elections.

Student leaders said about 80,000 people participated in the rally. No independent estimate was available.

TENSIONS ESCALATE

The clashes were the most heated in a series of anti-Beijing protests that underscore the central government's challenge to stamp its will on Hong Kong.

Some observers have likened the protests to those that culminated in the bloody crackdown on pro-democracy students in and around Beijing's Tiananmen Square in 1989.

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A protester holds up placards which reads "Occupy Central" (L) and "Civil Disobedienc …

Police arrested more than 60 people, including Joshua Wong, the 17-year-old leader of student group Scholarism, who was dragged away after he called on the protesters to charge the government premises. He was still being detained early on Sunday, along with fellow student leaders Alex Chow and Lester Shum.

His parents said in a statement the decision to detain him was an act of "political persecution".

Wong has already won one major victory against Beijing. In 2012, he forced the Hong Kong government to shelve plans to roll out a pro-China national education scheme in the city's schools when the then 15-year-old rallied 120,000 protesters.

Students issued rallying cries during the protests, calling for their leaders' release. But divisions between the students and Occupy quickly emerged as arguments broke out and some students accused the civil disobedience movement of hijacking their protest.

"I came here tonight to support the students, but now I feel like I've been used ... They made that decision without asking us," said Sharon Choi, 20.

Occupy organizers had previously indicated they planned to blockade the financial district on Oct. 1, China's National Day holiday. The rally will now take part in the Admiralty district to build on the momentum of week-long student rallies and protests in the area.

"Rather than encouraging the students to join, we are encouraged by the students to join," said Benny Tai, one of the three main organizers of the pro-democracy movement.

"We are touched and moved by the work of the students."

(Additional reporting by Stefanie McIntyre, Venus Wu, Diana Chan, Kinling Lo, Donny Kwok, Farah Master, Charlie Zhu, Twinnie Siu and Bobby Yip; writing by Anne Marie Roantree, editing by G Crosse)

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India's Modi jabs at Pakistan, encourages yoga in U.N. address

By Jonathan Allen

UNITED NATIONS (Reuters) - Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi said on Saturday he wants to hold bilateral talks with neighboring Pakistan "without a shadow of terrorism," a day after Pakistan's prime minister expressed frustration with stalled talks over Kashmir.

In his first address to the U.N. General Assembly since his resounding election victory in May, Modi also invoked India's Hindu and ascetic traditions, saying they might provide answers to climate change and called for an International Yoga Day.

Modi appeared to chastise Pakistan Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif, who had used his own General Assembly address on Friday to blame India for the collapse of the latest talks over Kashmir, the Himalayan region claimed in full by both countries.

"By raising this issue in this forum," Modi said in Hindi, "I don't know how serious our efforts will be, and some people are doubtful about it."

Last month, India announced it was withdrawing from the planned peace talks between the two nuclear-armed neighbors over Pakistan's plans to consult Kashmiri separatists beforehand.

India was willing to discuss Kashmir with Pakistan, Modi said, so long as those talks are in "an atmosphere of peace, without a shadow of terrorism."

India says Pakistan supports separatist militants that cross from the Pakistan-controlled side of Kashmir to attack Indian forces. Pakistan denies this, saying India's military abuses the human rights of Kashmiris, most of whom are Muslim.

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India's Prime Minister Narendra Modi gestures after laying a commemorative wreath at the site of …

Modi, India's first Hindu-nationalist prime minister in a decade, embraces a strain of politics that maintains India's culture is essentially Hindu, although his Bharatiya Janata Party says such a culture is welcoming to other religions.

He has said fears that he will favor India's Hindu majority over its large religious minorities, including some 170 million Muslims, are unfounded, and his comments on spirituality in his address are likely to be scrutinized for evidence of this.

Modi was the chief minister of Gujarat when days of religious riots raged across the northwestern state in 2002 after a Muslim mob set alight a train carrying Hindu pilgrims, killing 59 people. More than 1,000 people were killed in the riots, most of them Muslims.

Critics have accused Modi of allowing the riots to happen, but courts have found no evidence to indict him.

In his address on Saturday, Modi invoked the "ancient wisdom" of India's Vedic era, during which Hinduism's most sacred texts were written.

He also encouraged more people to take up yoga, the spiritual practice that predates the Islam's arrival in India.

"Yoga should not be just an exercise for us, but it should be a means to get connected with the world and with nature," Modi said as he called on the United Nations to adopt an International Yoga Day.

"It should bring a change in our lifestyle and create awareness in us, and it can help fighting against climate change."

On Saturday evening, Modi appeared on stage before some 60,000 people at the Global Citizen Festival in New York's Central Park, where performers including Jay Z, Sting, No Doubt, Carrie Underwood and The Roots, were backing a campaign to end global poverty and bring basic essentials such as sanitation to all - an effort the Indian leader is pushing at home.

Modi will get more rock star treatment on Sunday, when he is due to speak at Madison Square Garden, where a crowd of more than 18,000 is expected.

After his U.N. address, Modi met privately with the prime ministers of Nepal and Bangladesh and the president of Sri Lanka at his hotel. No talks were planned with Sharif or other Pakistani officials because they did not ask to meet, according to the Indian delegation.

While in New York, Modi is also due to receive visits from a parade of powerful political and business figures, including Bill and Hillary Clinton, New Jersey Governor Chris Christie, Israel Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as well as the chief executive officers of Boeing Co , BlackRock Inc , IBM and General Electric Co , among others.

Next week, less than a decade after the United States denied him a visa under a law barring entry to foreigners who have severely violated religious freedoms, Modi is due to meet with U.S. President Barack Obama at the White House.

His trip to the United States got off to an awkward start on Friday after a little-known human rights group filed a lawsuit against him in New York, alleging that he failed to stop the Gujarat riots. Washington and New Delhi brushed off the suit, saying it would not affect the visit.

(Additional reporting by Michelle Nichols, Sebestien Malo and David Brunnstrom; editing by Jason Neely and G Crosse)

• Politics & Government
• Unrest, Conflicts & War
• Narendra Modi
• Pakistan
• India

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Iraqi PM says Islamic State plans subway attacks in U.S. and Paris

By Arshad Mohammed and Jonathan Allen

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Iraq has "credible" intelligence that Islamic State militants plan to attack subway systems in Paris and the United States, the prime minister said on Thursday, but U.S. and French officials said they had no evidence to back up his claims.

Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi's comments were met with surprise by security, intelligence and transit officials in both countries. New York's leaders scrambled to ride the subway to reassure the public that the nation's largest city was safe.

Abadi said he received the information Thursday morning from militants captured in Iraq and concluded it was credible after requesting further details. The attacks, he said, were plotted from inside Iraq by "networks" of the Islamic State, also known as ISIS or ISIL.

"They plan to have attacks in the metros of Paris and the U.S.," Abadi told a small group of U.S. reporters while in New York for the annual meeting of the U.N. General Assembly. "I asked for more credible information. I asked for names. I asked for details, for cities, you know, dates. And from the details I have received, yes, it looks credible."

Some Iraqi officials in Baghdad questioned Abadi's comments. One high-level Iraqi government official told Reuters it appeared to be based on "ancient intelligence." Another called it "an old story." Both spoke on condition of anonymity.

Abadi did not provide further details. A senior Iraqi official traveling with him later said Iraqi intelligence had uncovered "serious threats" and had shared this information with its allies' intelligence agencies.

"A full assessment of the veracity of the intelligence and how far the plans have gone into implementation is ongoing," the official said.

Ben Rhodes, a deputy national security adviser to U.S. President Barack Obama, said the United States had "not confirmed any specific threat."

"What we've consistently said to the Iraqis is if they have information that is relevant to terrorist activity or terrorist plotting, that they can and should share that through our intelligence and law enforcement channels," Rhodes told reporters traveling with Obama on Air Force One from New York.

"We would certainly take seriously any information they are learning," he said.

French security services also said they had no information confirming Abadi's statement, a French government official said, speaking on condition of anonymity.

STRONGER TRANSIT SECURITY

New York Governor Andrew Cuomo, New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio and other local officials suggested they were unfazed, updating their public schedules on Thursday to add trips on the city's subway system to reassure millions of daily commuters.

"We are convinced New Yorkers are safe," de Blasio said at a press conference at a lower Manhattan subway station as he stood alongside New York City Police Commissioner Bill Bratton and George Venizelos, assistant director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

The New York Police Department's intelligence bureau found no specific, credible threat, de Blasio said.

Bratton said in response to Abadi's comments that he sent more police to patrol subways and streets in the city which was already on high alert because of the U.N. meeting.

Joseph Sheehan, 44, from the city's Queens borough, learned about the threats from the web. "They were checking bags earlier at the Port Authority. Seems like they do that at times of heightened alerts," he said.

In Los Angeles, America's second most populous city, law enforcement officials said that while no specific threat had been made to the transit system, they were working with federal authorities to monitor the situation and urged residents to remain vigilant.

Officials in Chicago and Washington also said they knew of no threats to their transit systems.

The United States and France have both launched air strikes against Islamic State targets in Iraq as part of a U.S.-led campaign to "degrade and destroy" the radical Sunni militant group, which has seized a third of both Iraq and Syria.

Abadi disclosed the intelligence while making a case for Western and Arab countries to join that campaign. "We want to increase the number of willing countries who would support this," he said. "This is not military. This is intelligence. This is security. The terrorists have a massive international campaign. Don't underestimate it."

In the past, the United States had received threats that various militant groups were targeting transportation systems but there is no recent information about an imminent plan by Islamic State, one U.S. official said, speaking on the condition of anonymity.

Abadi also said that Iraq did not want to see foreign "boots on the ground," but stressed the value of providing air cover, saying Iraq's air force did not have sufficient capability.

He said Australia was "very interested" in participating, though he did not provide details. He also voiced optimism about a planned British parliament vote on Friday on the matter, saying "they reckon it will be successful."

Earlier on Thursday, France said it would increase security on transport and in public places after a French tourist was killed in Algeria, and said it was ready to support all states that requested its help to fight terror.

(Additional reporting by Mark Hosenball and Ian Simpson in Washington,; Frank McGurty, Steve Holland and Rodrigo Campos in New York, Dan Whitcomb in Los Angeles,; Nicolas Bertin in Paris and Ned Parker in Baghdad; Editing by Jason Szep, Lisa Shumaker and Peter Cooney)

• Politics & Government
• Unrest, Conflicts & War
• New York
• Iraq
• United States

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Ukraine president sets 2020 as EU target date, defends peace plan

By Richard Balmforth and Natalia Zinets

KIEV (Reuters) - President Petro Poroshenko proclaimed reforms on Thursday spanning all aspects of life to make strife-torn Ukraine fit for European Union membership, warning his people that without reform they would face a future "alone with Russia."

He also defended his plan to end a war with pro-Russian separatists that has killed more than 3,000 people and said he would meet again soon with Russian President Vladimir Putin, the pivotal player in a geopolitical tussle between Russia and the West over Ukraine's future reminiscent of the old Cold War.

Kiev and Western governments say it was direct Russian military intervention that tipped the battlefield balance in favour of rebels in eastern Ukraine and forced Poroshenko to call a ceasefire on Sept. 5 after big losses by government forces.

Russia, which opposes the pro-Western course of leadership in its fellow ex-Soviet republic, denies its troops have taken part in the war or provided arms to the rebels despite what Western governments and Kiev say is incontrovertible proof.

Poroshenko sought on Thursday to fix his people's attention on joining the European mainstream despite fierce Russian opposition. He laid out an ambitious reform package to enable Ukraine to apply in 2020 for accession to the 28-member EU.

Russia also steadfastly opposes Ukraine, a nation of some 46 million people, ever joining NATO. Both the 28-nation EU and NATO have said they have no plans to offer membership to Kiev.

The proposed reform package, Poroshenko said, would touch all walks of life and particularly aim to root out the endemic corruption that has warped Ukrainian public life since independence in 1991 and peaked under Poroshenko's ousted predecessor, the Moscow-backed Viktor Yanukovich.

Decentralisation and stronger law enforcement would also be important ingredients of the reform drive, he said.

"The whole state machine is geared today towards corrupt interests. Reform today can not overcome the bureaucrats," Poroshenko told a news conference in the capital Kiev.

Resisting reform, he implied, would only play into the hands of Russia, Ukraine's key supplier of energy which threatened Kiev with retaliatory trade measures if it enacted a political and trade pact with the EU. Parliament ratified it on Sept. 16.

"The aim of our ambitious reform is to achieve European standards of living and in the year 2020 make our application for EU membership," Poroshenko, a confectionary magnate, said. "The alternative is to remain alone with Russia."

BIRTHDAY BOY

The president, who will turn 49 on Friday, seemed in buoyant mood even though many inside the pro-Western establishment fear that his peace formula, by offering limited self-rule to the separatists for three years, could spawn a permanent zone of instability threatening Ukraine's hopes of EU integration.

Earlier, he told the Ukrainian judiciary that for the first time in many months there had not been a single person killed or wounded in the past 24 hours, something indicating that his peace plan was bearing fruit.

At the same time, though, he said neither he "nor the rest of the world" would recognise the validity of local elections called by the separatists in the east for early November and he hoped Russia would not either.

His peace plan envisages local elections in separatist-held areas in December under Kiev's supervision, though the rebels say they want no part of anything organised from Kiev.

Poroshenko, who has seen Putin in person only twice since the separatist revolt erupted in April, said he would meet him again in Europe somewhere over the next three weeks "in a multilateral format". He gave no further details.

The Ukrainian leader said that Kiev however would be seeking further financial help from the West and global lending institutions to help its economy survive a war that it says has cost $6 million a day.

Poroshenko pledged to do all he could to protect Ukraine's hryvnia currency, which has lost 40 percent of its value due to the upheaval. He said Kiev would seek a review of the present $17 billion loan programme with the International Monetary Fund.

Ukraine also required 1 billion euros of extra macro-financial aid from the EU and a further $1 billion in financial guarantees from the United States, he said.

After Yanukovich fled to Russia in February in the face of mass street protests, Moscow denounced a pro-Western "coup" against him, annexed Ukraine's Crimean Peninsula and subsequently backed the armed separatists in the heavily industrialised east in their drive for independence from Kiev.

The chain of events has provoked the worst crisis between Russia and the West since the Cold War. The United States and the European Union have imposed economic sanctions against Russia and Moscow has lashed back with its own measures.

(Additional reporting by Pavel Polityuk; Editing by Mark Heinrich)

• Politics & Government
• Petro Poroshenko
• Ukraine
• Russia
• European Union

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