UN anger after Thailand deports 'Chinese dissidents'

The United Nations has criticised Thailand for deporting two people who had been given refugee status by the organisation.

The two are thought to be the Chinese dissidents, Jiang Yefei and Dong Guangping, who had fled to Thailand with their families.

The pair had previously been in jail in China for criticising the communist government.

Both were in detention in Thailand for illegally entering the country.

The UN Refugee Agency said: "This action by Thailand is clearly a serious disappointment and underscores the long-standing gap in Thai domestic law concerning ensuring appropriate treatment of persons with international protection need."

Remembering Tiananmen

According to the rights group Amnesty International, Mr Jiang was detained for two brief periods in 2008 after complaining about the official response to the earthquake in Sichuan province that year.

He fled to Thailand shortly afterwards with his wife.

Mr Dong was released in February this year after spending 10 months in jail in China for taking part in an event to remember people killed following protests in Tiananmen Square in Beijing in 1989.

He arrived in Thailand with his wife and daughter in September.

Both Chinese dissidents, who were due to be settled in a third country by the UN, were recently fined for breaking Thai immigration rules.

Amnesty International said that while the two were in jail and waiting to be resettled abroad, their fines we paid by someone not known to either man. It appears they were then transferred to an immigration detention centre before being deported over the weekend.

Amnesty believes the two men have been returned to China and are "at risk of torture and other ill treatment".

Critical books

Three other people are thought to have been deported with the two dissidents.

There is speculation that one of them is Hong Kong-based publisher Gui Minhai, who has not been heard from since arriving last month in the Thai resort of Pattaya, where he owns a holiday home.

Mr Gui had published books that were critical of the Chinese government.

Thailand faced criticism earlier this year when it sent back to China more than 100 Uighur Muslims, who had been detained as part of a larger group the previous year.

Many Uighurs complain of repression in the Chinese region of Xinjiang where they live, and at least some of those who arrived in Thailand had been trying to get to Turkey.

Thailand is currently governed by the military, which took power in a coup last year.

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Paris attacks: Police search suspects' premises

Police probing Friday's attacks in Paris have been searching premises they believe were used by the attackers.

A car rented by Salah Abdeslam, the suspected eighth gunman who is now the subject of an international manhunt, is also being inspected.

He or his brother Brahim, named as another attacker, are thought to have rented a flat and two hotel rooms.

The so-called Islamic State (IS) group says it carried out the multiple attacks in which 129 people died.

Officials say that 117 of the victims have now been identified.

A Belgian-registered black Renault Clio was found parked near Montmartre in northern Paris. After police sealed off the area and ensured there was no booby-trap, the vehicle was towed away for forensic examination.

Investigators believe the car may have been used to bring the attackers to and from Belgium, from where French authorities say the attacks were organised.

Images on French media of one of the hotel rooms being examined show syringes and tubes which could be bomb-making equipment.

European countries are on high alert. On Tuesday, a football friendly between Germany and the Netherlands was cancelled shortly before kick-off and the stadium in Hanover evacuated for security reasons.

Follow the latest live updates

Salah Abdeslam is believed to have fled across the border to his native Belgium. Belgian police have released more pictures of him.

Salah and Brahim's brother Mohamed Abdeslam gave an interview to a French TV station in which he called on Salah to turn himself in.

French media reports say that police are hunting for a second fugitive in connection with the attacks, but this has not been confirmed by officials.

On Tuesday French media reported that a French jihadist, Fabien Clain, had been identified as the voice in a recording issued by Islamic State in which it said it had carried out the attacks.

In an effort to prevent more attacks, France has mobilised 115,000 security personnel, according to Interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuve.

Mr Cazeneuve said 128 more raids on suspected militants had been carried out. French warplanes also carried out fresh strikes against the IS stronghold of Raqqa in northern Syria, the army general staff reported, destroying a command centre and training centre.

Russia has stepped up its attacks on IS targets in Syria, dispatching long-range bombers and firing a volley of cruise missiles.

The strikes follow a statement by Russia's security chief that a bomb brought down a Russian airliner over Egypt last month, killing all 224 people aboard.

Meanwhile, Belgium's government has raised its terror threat level because of the failure so far to arrest Abdeslam. Tuesday's football match between the national team and Spain has been cancelled as a result.

Initial reports said seven arrests near the German city of Aachen, on the Belgian border, were linked to the Paris operation but all those arrested were later released.

Also on Tuesday, France invoked a previously unused clause in the Treaty on European Union obliging other member states to provide it with "aid and assistance by all means in their power".

Within minutes, EU foreign policy chief Federica Mogherini said all 28 member states had agreed.

More on the Paris attacks

• What happened in Paris? How events unfurled on Friday evening in the French capital
• Hollande upstages opposition - French president's tougher line on counter-terrorism
• Who were the victims? Details of some of the 129 people killed
• The fight against Islamic State Can a modern, open Western capital ever be totally secure?
• Most wanted: Alleged mastermind Profile of key suspect Abdelhamid Abaaoud

Special report: In-depth coverage of the attacks and their aftermath

The measures came as US Secretary of State John Kerry visited Paris.

After meeting French President Francois Hollande, he said everyone understood that after Paris and other recent attacks "we have to step up efforts to hit them at the core" and improve border security.

He added that Syria was weeks away from a "big transition" after international talks in Vienna at the weekend.

Mr Hollande is due to fly to Washington and Moscow next week for talks with US and Russian leaders.

In a speech to a joint sitting of both houses of parliament on Monday, President Francois Hollande suggested the following measures to combat the threat:

• Extension of state of emergency by three months
• Changes to the constitution to allow the government to revoke citizenship of any convicted terrorists of dual nationality. Currently only those born outside France and naturalised can lose their citizenship
• Measures to speed up expulsion of foreign nationals considered a threat to public order
• Budget increases and extra recruitment to security forces and judiciary

The attacks in Paris - which also left more than 400 people wounded, with 221 still in hospital, among them 57 in intensive care - have galvanised Western countries in their campaign against the so-called Islamic State.

UK Chancellor George Osborne said in a speech that IS was trying to develop the ability to launch deadly cyber-attacks on the UK, and announced a doubling of the UK's investment in fighting cybercrime.

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India's Chennai hit by rain and deadly flooding

More than 70 people have been killed as incessant rains continue to batter the southern Indian city of Chennai, media reports say.

Most of the main streets are waterlogged, bringing the city to a standstill.

Many offices, schools and colleges have been shut due to rains in the past week.

The rains have also affected at least 80,000 people in northern parts of neighbouring Sri Lanka.

A depression formed in the Bay of Bengal has triggered rains in coastal areas of India's Tamil Nadu state and Sri Lanka.

Government officials said around 10,000 people had been evacuated from their homes in Chennai, the Reuters news agency said.

The National Disaster Response Force and the army are also helping in ongoing rescue work.

The Chief Minister of Tamil Nadu, J Jayalalitha, has announced a 5bn-rupee ($75m; £49m) relief fund for flood-affected areas.

"The rain that was meant to be spread out over the monsoon months has poured in just a few days," she said.

"No precautionary measures would have managed to prevent water logging and damages. In areas where flooding and damage have been caused, relief, rescue and repair works are being taken up on a war footing," she added.

Images from Chennai show the difficulties people have been facing to access essential services.

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Large shark stalks dead sperm whale off Australian shore

Swimmers have been warned to stay out of the water off far east Gippsland in Victoria, Australia, after a large shark was spotted stalking a whale carcass that washed up on the shore.

The state parks authority tweeted images of what appears to be a 4m (13ft) white pointer at Salmon Rocks.

Parks Victoria worker Mike Irvine said he was surprised to spot the shark heading towards the beached whale.

Authorities said the whale probably died of natural causes.

They said they were monitoring it but hoped the carcass would wash out to sea with the tide.

"It was in knee-deep, waist-deep water, a decent-sized shark thrashing around every time it got in the shallows and got back out to deeper water and cruised back and forward then had another go," Mr Irvine told the Australian Broadcasting Corporation.

"It's a natural thing for whales to die and sharks to come in and clean up the mess."

"I grabbed my daughter's hand pretty tightly a couple of times and said 'don't go in the water'."

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Australia's first Muslim Party aims for senate seats

Australia's first party representing Muslims intends to contest senate seats at the next federal election.

Launching the party in Sydney, founder Diaa Mohamed told Fairfax he wanted a louder voice for Muslims.

"There are a lot of parties out there to specifically oppose Islam and Muslims, yet Muslims don't have any official representation," he said.

Australia has a number of anti-Islam parties, including one backed by Dutch MP Geert Wilders.

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Analysis: Jon Donnison, Sydney correspondent, BBC News

Australia is not short of political parties. From today you can add another to the list: the Australian Muslim Party.

But its chances of winning a senate seat are slim. Even in the parliamentary constituency with the highest proportion of Muslims, just over 20% of people follow the Islamic faith.

"Anyone can set up a political party," ABC's political analyst Antony Green told me.

"It doesn't mean you're going to get elected and it's far from clear how much community support he (Mr Mohammed) has."

Read more from Jon Donnison: Australian Muslim Party's tough road to representation

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Mr Mohamed, a 34-year-old businessman, also defended launching the party immediately after terror attacks in Paris this week.

"There are going to be a lot of questions raised in the coming days of the events recently, and this is the whole reason we created this party," he told the ABC's AM program.

"So it is as good a time as any to launch it."

Mr Mohamed condemned the attacks in Paris and said Islam strictly forbade the killing of innocent people.

But he said his party would never support the invasion of a Muslim country in response to an incident such as the attacks in Paris.

"Let's look at how well that's worked in the past. We've invaded Afghanistan … we've invaded Iraq, and we're in the mess we're in right now," he said.

"So would I support something that's never worked in the past? No."

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Frontal brain wrinkle linked to hallucinations

A study of 153 brain scans has linked a particular furrow, near the front of each hemisphere, to hallucinations in schizophrenia.

This fold tends to be shorter in those patients who hallucinate, compared with those who do not.

It is an area of the brain that appears to have a role in distinguishing real perceptions from imagined ones.

Researchers say the findings, published in Nature Communications, might eventually help with early diagnosis.

The brain wrinkle, called the paracingulate sulcus or PCS, varies considerably in shape between individuals. It appears in the brain only just before birth.

"It's a region that, although it's not fully developed by birth, whether or not it's going to be a particularly prominent fold - or not - is present in the brain at birth," said Jon Simons, a neuroscientist at the University of Cambridge, UK.

"It might be that if somebody is born with this particular property, a reduction in this brain fold, that might give them a predisposition towards developing something like hallucinations later on in life."

If further work shows that the difference can be detected in children, for example, Dr Simons said it might be possible to offer extra support to people who face that elevated risk.

But he stressed that schizophrenia is a complicated phenomenon. Hallucinations are one of the main symptoms, but some patients are diagnosed on the basis of other irregular thought processes.

"We've known for some time that disorders like schizophrenia are not down to a single region of the brain. Changes are seen throughout various different areas.

"To be able to pin such a key symptom to a relatively specific part of the brain is quite unusual."

Monitoring reality

Dr Simons and his colleagues used data from the Australian Schizophrenia Research Bank, including structural MRI scans revealing the detailed physical dimensions of 153 individual brains: 113 people with schizophrenia and 40 healthy controls.

Because this database includes other important information about the subjects, the team was able to choose its samples very carefully.

The schizophrenia patients, for example, were split into those with a history of hallucinations (79 people) and those without (34) - but the two groups were closely matched in other ways.

"We're selecting patients to put into each group such that those two groups are... as directly comparable as possible," Dr Simons told the BBC. Factors such as the individuals' age, sex and even whether they were left- or right-handed were all taken into account.

"So as close as we can get it, the only difference between those two groups is that one group experiences hallucinations and the other one doesn't."

In the brain scans, the team looked for differences in the PCS because they knew from a previous study that the length of this fold showed a correlation with people's "reality monitoring" ability.

And sure enough, this was reflected in the patients suffering hallucinations: on average, they had a PCS that was about 2cm shorter than the patients without hallucinations, and 3cm shorter than the healthy controls.

The study's first author, Jane Garrison, said that although other factors were certainly at play when a brain generates hallucinations, this was an important observation.

"We think that the PCS is involved in brain networks that help us recognise information that has been generated ourselves," she explained. "People with a shorter PCS seem less able to distinguish the origin of such information, and appear more likely to experience it as having been generated externally.

"Hallucinations are very complex phenomena that are a hallmark of mental illness and, in different forms, are also quite common across the general population.

"There is likely to be more than one explanation for why they arise, but this finding seems to help explain why some people experience things that are not actually real."

Stephen Lawrie, a professor of psychiatry at the University of Edinburgh, was not involved with the research but has studied brain structure in relation to schizophrenia and hallucinations.

He said the new findings were thoroughly researched and quite surprising - partly because, although schizophrenia is known to affect frontal parts of the brain like the PCS, hallucinations in particular are often associated with other areas that control perception and language.

"There's quite a strong literature showing that auditory hallucinations are related to dysfunction or structural disruption in language areas of the brain," Prof Lawrie told BBC News.

"I think the value of this is that it probably helps us think slightly more broadly about hallucinations in schizophrenia, in terms of it not just being about language areas of the brain - but involving a more distributed network of regions, and implicating, in particular, cognitive control or higher-order cognitive functioning."

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Charlie Sheen confirms he is HIV positive

Hollywood star Charlie Sheen has confirmed he is living with HIV in a US television interview.

"I am here to admit that I am HIV positive," he said.
The former star of sitcom Two And A Half Men appeared on NBC's Today show, ending days of intense media speculation.
Sheen revealed to Matt Lauer he had paid "enough to take it into the millions" to keep people from going public about his illness.
"I have to put a stop to this onslaught, this barrage of attacks and of sub-truths," he said, adding he was diagnosed four years ago.

• Entertainment Live: Charlie Sheen reaction

'Bad decision'

He said when he revealed his HIV status to friends "the truth became treason", leading to "blackmail and extortion and a circle of deceit".
"I trusted them, they were in my inner circle and thought they could be helpful. My trust turned to their treason," he said, adding a prostitute took a picture of his medication and threatened to sell it to newspapers.
"I think I release myself from this prison today," he said.
He admitted that his use of drink and drugs was a "bad decision" but said it was "impossible" that he would have passed HIV on to anyone else.
The actor said he does not know how he contracted the virus but stressed he does not feel any stigma attached to the illness.



Speaking about the time prior to his diagnosis, he said: "It started with a series of cluster headaches and sweating - I was hospitalised. I thought I had a brain tumour - after tests they said this was the situation. It's a hard three letters to absorb."
Sheen appeared with his doctor, Robert Huizenga, who said his daily medication has suppressed the virus and he is "absolutely healthy".
"Charlie has an undetectable level of the virus in his blood," he said.
When asked to respond to rumours Sheen has Aids, Dr Huizenga said: "Charlie does not have Aids - that's when the virus suppresses the immune system. He is healthy."

'Shame and anger'

Sheen said he is taking prescribed drugs daily and despite his erratic tendencies, has never missed a day's medication.
He said he is no longer taking recreational drugs but admitted he still "drinks a bit".
Dr Huizenga said he did have concerns Sheen might omit to take his medication.
"We're petrified about him, we're so, so anxious that if he was overly depressed or abusing substances he'd forget to take a pill, but he's managed to take his medication," he said.
When asked if he would stop drinking, Sheen responded by saying: "Perhaps the freedom of today might lead to that as well."
Sheen said his "personal disbelief and shame and anger" at the initial diagnosis "led to a descent into substance abuse and fathomless drinking".
But now he feels he has "the responsibility to better myself and help a lot of other people. With what we're doing today, others may come up and say, 'Thanks Charlie, thanks for kicking the door open'."
He said he hoped the media pressure would ease now.
"You can never predict how the media will roll with something," he said. "I hope it's a lot more forgiving and supportive than a lot of the garbage I've read over the past few days - that I knew I had Aids and was intentionally spreading it.
"It's as far from the truth as can be."

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HIV facts by Michelle Roberts, Health editor, BBC website

There are many different ways that you might catch HIV, but the main ones are having unprotected sex or sharing needles or syringes.
HIV is transmitted via blood, not saliva, but it is possible to catch HIV through unprotected oral sex (although the risk is much lower than with vaginal or anal sex).
Once infected, the virus attacks the person's immune system, making them more prone to other infections and diseases.
There is no cure for HIV, but there are treatments that mean people with the virus can live a long and healthy life.
The best way to prevent HIV is to use a condom for sex and to never share needles or other injecting equipment.

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The actor rose to fame in the 80s with hit films including Platoon and Wall Street and, in 2011, was the highest-paid actor on TV thanks to his sitcom role.
But he has frequently struggled with drink and drug abuse.
The star, who played a hedonistic bachelor in Two And A Half Men, was fired from the show in 2011 after a downward spiral in his personal life, often played out in public.
Production had been suspended after he entered rehabilitation for reported drug and alcohol abuse.
The actor - the youngest son of West Wing star Martin Sheen and brother of actor Emilio Estevez - has also had a colourful personal life and has been married three times.
Sheen's first daughter, Cassandra was born to his former high school girlfriend.
His first marriage, to Donna Peele, ended after a year. His second marriage was to former Bond girl Denise Richards, with whom he has two daughters. They divorced in 2006 and he married Brooke Mueller, with whom he has twin sons.
He was then due to marry adult film star Scottine Ross, but the wedding was called off.
The actor said he had told Richards and Mueller and his oldest daughter about his diagnosis.

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