World/Nation
• Ebola patient's temperature spiked during first ER visit
DALLAS - Thomas Eric Duncan's temperature spiked to 103 degrees during the hours of his initial visit to an emergency room - a fever that was flagged with an exclamation point in the hospital's record-keeping system, his medical records show.
Despite telling a nurse that he had recently been in Africa and displaying other symptoms that could indicate Ebola - fever, sharp headache and abdominal pain - the Liberian man who would become the only person to die from the disease in the U.S. underwent a battery of tests and was eventually sent home.
Duncan's family provided his medical records to The Associated Press - more than 1,400 pages in all. They chronicle his time in the ER, his urgent return to the hospital two days later and his steep decline as his organs began to fail.
In a statement issued Friday, Texas Health Presbyterian Hospital said it had made procedural changes and continues to "review and evaluate" the decisions surrounding Duncan's care.
Duncan carried the deadly virus with him from his home in Liberia, though he showed no symptoms when he left for the United States. He arrived in Dallas on Sept. 20 and fell ill several days later.
• Youth and adult membership in Girl Scouts drops sharply
NEW YORK - For the second straight year, youth and adult membership in the Girl Scouts has dropped sharply, intensifying pressure on the 102-year-old youth organization to find ways of reversing the trend.
According to figures provided to The Associated Press, the total of youth members and adult volunteers dropped by 6 percent over the past year - from 2,994,844 to 2,813,997. Over two years, total membership is down 11.6 percent, and it has fallen 27 percent from a peak of more than 3.8 million in 2003.
While the Girl Scouts of the USA have had an array of recent internal difficulties - including rifts over programming and serious fiscal problems - CEO Anna Maria Chavez attributed the membership drop primarily to broader societal factors that have affected many youth-serving organizations.
"Parents and families are less financially stable, frequently working two jobs or more, leaving little time to volunteer or take their children to extracurricular activities," she said.
In hopes of stemming the decline, the Girl Scouts are revamping their online platforms with new toolkits. One is aimed at streamlining the process of joining the Girl Scouts; another seeks to help volunteer troop leaders plan an entire year of meetings and activities with a single online visit.
• Rain dampens start of police shooting weekend protests
CLAYTON, Mo. - A cold, steady rain dampened the start of widespread weekend protests over the two-month-old death of Michael Brown and other fatal police shootings in the St. Louis area and elsewhere that demonstrators say are racially motivated.
Organizers of the four-day Ferguson October events expected 6,000 participants from the local area and across the country, but the initial protest Friday outside the St. Louis County prosecutor's office in Clayton didn't draw nearly that amount.
Protesters huddled beneath umbrellas, raincoats and ponchos as they renewed their call for county prosecutor Bob McCulloch to charge Darren Wilson, a white Ferguson officer, in the Aug. 9 death of the unarmed Brown, who was black. A grand jury is reviewing the case, and the U.S. Justice Department has opened a civil rights investigation into Brown's death and a broader inquiry into the Ferguson police force.
"We are here to demand the justice that our people have died for," chanted protest organizer Montague Simmons of the local group Organization for Black Struggle. "We are here to bring peace, to bring restoration, to lift our banners in the name of those who've been sacrificed."
Police in Clayton reported no arrests, and officers escorted the several hundred demonstrators through the suburb's downtown as they marched past high-end restaurants, jewelry stores, banks and law offices.
• UN envoy to Syria warns of massacre in Syrian town
MURSITPINAR, Turkey - In a dramatic appeal, a U.N. official warned that hundreds of civilians who remain trapped in the Syrian Kurdish town of Kobani near the border with Turkey were likely to be "massacred" by advancing extremists and called on Ankara to help prevent a catastrophe.
Staffan de Mistura, the U.N. Syria envoy, raised the specter of some of the worst genocides of the 20th century during a news conference in Geneva to underscore concerns as the Islamic State group pushed into Kobani from the south and east.
"You remember Srebrenica? We do. We never forgot. And probably we never forgave ourselves for that," he said, referring to the 1995 slaughter of thousands of Muslims by Bosnian Serb forces.
He spoke to reporters at a press conference in Geneva where he held up a map of Kobani and said a U.N. analysis shows only a small corridor remains open for people to enter or flee the town.
His warning came as the Islamic State group seized the so-called "Kurdish security quarter" - an area where Kurdish militiamen who are struggling to defend the town maintain security buildings and where the police station, the municipality and other local government offices are located.
• White House records touch on painful subjects for Hillary Clinton
WASHINGTON - The White House plotted strategies to defend President Bill Clinton against the political fallout of his affair with intern Monica Lewinsky and other scandals, according to documents released Friday by the National Archives that delve into painful chapters in Hillary Rodham Clinton's life as she ponders another bid for the presidency.
The papers include lists of talking points, questions prepared for media interviews and efforts to defend the president against impeachment, part of 10,000 pages of records being released from the Clinton administration. The documents did not appear to reveal any new information that might affect a potential Hillary Clinton campaign.
Many records involving Lewinsky are redacted, but one document sheds light on her job: Lewinsky sent an official request to hang a picture of Clinton, signing a telecommunications bill, in a White House legislative affairs office.
- The Associated Press