UN panel 'rules in Julian Assange's favour'
A UN panel considering the alleged "unlawful detention" of Wikileaks founder Julian Assange has ruled in his favour, the BBC understands.
He took refuge in London's Ecuadorian embassy in 2012 to avoid extradition to Sweden over sexual assault claims.
In 2014 he complained to the panel he was being "arbitrarily detained" as he could not leave without being arrested.
A warrant for his arrest remains in place and UK police said he will be arrested if he does leave the embassy.
The UN's Working Group on Arbitrary Detention is due to announce the findings of its investigation into Mr Assange's case on Friday.
A new Shenzhen? Poor Pakistan fishing town's horror at Chinese plans
Mega-port will bring five-star hotels and Chinese access to Arabian Sea, as residents in conflict-torn province contend with lack of water and food
Gwadar is poor. When a house was recently burgled in the fishing settlement on Pakistan’s desert coast, the only items stolen were cans of fresh water – a staple that has soared in value since reservoirs dried up. It lies in Balochistan, a province in the grip of a long-running separatist insurgency and Pakistan’s most neglected.
Yet local officials dream of a future where Gwadar becomes a second Shenzhen, the Chinese trade hub bordering Hong Kong. Visitors are told that with Chinese investment the small settlement will become a major node of world commerce boasting car factories, Pakistan’s biggest airport and a string of five-star resort hotels along Gwadar’s sparkling seafront.
But residents are aghast, and not just because the fishing community, long settled on the neck of the peninsula, will be moved to new harbours up to 40km away.
“This is all being done for China, not the people,” said Elahi Bakhsh, a fisherman bewildered by the plans to turn Gwadar into China’s deepwater access point to the Arabian Sea.'Saudi Arabian women banned from Starbucks after collapse of gender segregation wall'
Women require male permission to work and travel outside of their homes and cannot drive or open bank accounts in Saudi Arabia
Women were banned from entering a Starbucks in Saudi Arabia after a ‘gender barrier’ wall collapsed, it has been claimed.
A sign posted on the window of a Riyadh store of the coffee chain, in Arabic and English, reportedly read: “Please no entry for ladies only. Send your driver to order. Thank you.”
One woman who said she was refused service at the café wrote on Twitter: “Starbucks store in Riyadh refused to serve me just because I’m a woman and asked me to send a man instead.”
According to the Arabic language daily newspaper Al Weaam, the country’s religious police – the Committee for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice – ordered the coffee shop’s management to ban women from the establishment after it found that a ‘segregation wall’ inside the store had given way during a routine inspection around a market in the capital city.Chinese journalist Li Xin in custody in China after being repatriated from Thailand: wife
Philip Wen
China correspondent for Fairfax Media
Beijing: A Chinese journalist and activist who disappeared while seeking refuge in Thailand has re-emerged in China, telling his wife by telephone that he is being held by police.
Li Xin, 37, disappeared near Thailand's border with Laos last month, sparking fears for his safety and speculation that he had become the latest Communist Party critic deported or coerced into returning to mainland China by Thailand's military government.
Mr Li was a journalist with the Southern Metropolis Daily, a popular Guangzhou-based newspaper with a reputation for pushing the boundaries of government censorship. He fled China in October fearing persecution after revealing security agents had forced him into spying on fellow journalists and activists and for criticising censorship in the mainland's state-run media.
How the structure of global oil markets fuels authoritarianism and war
Updated by Zack Beauchamp
Almost every day, even if you don't own a car, you probably buy something made from oil. Usually we don't think about where that money goes — because the answer, at least some of the time, is that it ends up lining the pockets of some of the world's deadliest people.
The problem, in fact, may be bigger than we think. According to a new book by Leif Wenar, the chair of philosophy and law at King’s College London, the way the global oil trade is set up means that oil isn't just passively funding bad guys — it actively encourages them.
In his book Blood Oil, Wenar sets out to explain a striking fact: Much of the world has seen a decline in authoritarianism and war, but oil-rich countries have been left behind. Wenar blames the oil itself: Its profits allow authoritarian states to more effectively repress dissent than non-oil states, and helps militant groups fund their war machines.
French police 'abuse' Muslims under emergency laws
Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International report physical and psychological abuse as raids target Muslim minority.
France has carried out abusive and discriminatory raids and house arrests against Muslims under its current state of emergency, traumatising and stigmatising those targeted, including children and the elderly, human rights groups said.
Human Rights Watch (HRW) and Amnesty International published separate research on Wednesday, pointing to cases where excessive force had been used, leading to human rights violations including violence.
Those targeted said the police burst into homes, restaurants, or mosques; broke people's belongings; threw Qurans on the floor; terrified children; and placed restrictions on people's movements so severely that they lost jobs and income, or suffered physically.
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