10 February 2015 Last updated at 06:02
Human Rights Watch says workers subject to destitution, arrest and deportation if they complain about unsafe conditions in Abu Dhabi
Assad says Syria is 'informed on anti-IS air campaign'
Syria's President Bashar al-Assad says his government is receiving messages from the US-led coalition battling the jihadist group, Islamic State.
Mr Assad told the BBC that there had been no direct co-operation since air strikes began in Syria in September.
But third parties - among them Iraq - were conveying "information".
He also denied that Syrian government forces had been dropping barrel bombs indiscriminately on rebel-held areas, killing thousands of civilians.
Mr Assad dismissed the allegation as a "childish story", in a wide-ranging interview with BBC Middle East editor Jeremy Bowen in Damascus.
"We have bombs, missiles and bullets... There is [are] no barrel bombs, we don't have barrels."
Our correspondent says that his denial is highly controversial as the deaths of civilians in barrel bomb attacks are well-documented.
Migrants building UAE cultural hub 'risk abuse if they complain'
Human Rights Watch says workers subject to destitution, arrest and deportation if they complain about unsafe conditions in Abu Dhabi
Migrant workers building a multibillion-pound cultural hub in the United Arab Emirates, which includes new Guggenheim and Louvre museums, are subject to destitution, summary arrest and deportation if they complain about their squalid and unsafe conditions, an investigation by Human Rights Watch (HRW) has found.
Its new report on Saadiyat Island in Abu Dhabi found that some workers were subjected to conditions amounting to forced labour, having had their passports confiscated and been so poorly paid they struggled to pay off recruitment fees which were supposed to have been banned. Attempts to raise concerns about the workers’ mistreatment led to their wages being withheld, arbitrary police intimidation and their forcible removal from the country.
Bees in danger: Epidemic of colony collapses is linked to stressed out honeybees
Malaysia's Anwar Ibrahim found guilty in sodomy trial
Malaysia's top court has upheld sodomy charges against opposition leader Anwar Ibrahim, his sentencing is expected later on Tuesday. Anwar's supporters claim that the charges against him are politically motivated.
Federal Court Judge Arin Zakat read out Tuesday's verdict on behalf of a five-judge panel, saying that there was "overwhelming evidence" that Anwar had sodomized an aide.
The appeal was the opposition leader's last legal avenue available under Malaysian law. Sodomy, consensual or otherwise, is illegal in Muslim majority Malaysia, punishable by up to 20 years in prison.
Anwar's supporters have decried the trial as politically motivated, with his defense team arguing that semen samples taken from his aide had been tampered with by police.
China's schools warned: Beware of dangerous Western ideas
Dan Levin
Beijing: China's Education Minister, Yuan Guiren, has warned the nation's educational institutions of the threat of foreign ideas on the nation's college campuses, calling for a ban on textbooks that promote Western values and forbidding criticism of the Communist Party's leadership in the classroom.
"Young teachers and students are key targets of infiltration by enemy forces," he wrote on February 2 in the elite party journal Seeking Truth, explaining that "some countries", fearful of China's rise, "have stepped up infiltration in more discreet and diverse ways."
But the government's latest attempts to tighten controls over the nation's intellectual discourse have raised concerns – and elicited rare open criticism – among teachers and students who reject the idea that foreign pedagogy and textbooks pose a threat to the government's survival. Indeed, they note, one of the most vocal arguments against such controls earlier came from the Education Minister himself.
For Mugabe, term as African Union chief could salvage a tarnished legacy (+video)
The isolated Zimbabwean president's perch at the top of the AU could reengage him with Europe by easing a travel ban imposed in 2002, and give greater voice to his longstanding push for African economic self-sufficiency.
JOHANNESBURG, SOUTH AFRICA — When Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe took the helm of the Organization of African Unity (OAU) in 1997, he did so as a leading statesman — the venerable revolutionary who had guided one of Africa’s most triumphant post-colonial success stories. That year, his country boasted the fastest-growing economy on the continent, with surplus-producing farmland and national parks packed with tourists.
Almost two decades later, as Mr. Mugabe takes the chairmanship of the African Union, the OAU’s successor as Africa's governing body, the 90-year-old leader presides over one of the continent’s frailest states, blighted by more than a decade of violent land reclamation, hyperinflation, and Western sanctions.
Experts say his fiery anti-Western rhetoric and radical politics are unlikely to have a significant policy impact during his year-long stint. But for Mugabe himself, the largely ceremonial job could offer a major international soapbox from which to shape a deeply tarnished legacy.
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