Press release me, let me go

Everyone loves a list. Shortlist and Stylist mazagine’s popularity are testimony to the success of the format. All the media are chock-a-block with end-of-year lists. And … well, not wanting to be left out, here’s my own end-of-year...

With only six days to go until his scheduled execution on 29 December, it’s a grim advent calendar counting down the days for the family of Akmal Shaikh, a British man on ‘death row’ in China. You can see an interview with his brother...

I’ve blogged before about how the Israeli ambassador to the UK Ron Prosor seems to like to slip in oddball references to things like The Muppets and foreign owners of English football clubs when he’s talking about the Middle East peace...

Cambodia today deported 22 Uighurs who had fled China to escape persecution, returning them, at Beijing’s behest, to an uncertain fate. It’s a sickening development. Despite the notoriety of the Chinese authorities when it comes to...

The murder of Tulay Goren by her own father would be shocking wherever it happened, and Amnestys work on Turkey, Iraq and several other countries clearly shows that honour killings are a deadly threat to women and girls in numerous...

Listening on the radio this morning to a Scottish man stranded in Lanzarote airport in the Canary Islands because of Flyglobespan’s collapse , I thought … this sounds familiar. Not just because the holiday-company-collapses-leaving...

You could be forgiven for missing news today on a report from Parliament’s prestigious Joint Committee on Human Rights on the impact of British business on human rights overseas. It is covered in the Financial Times , and there was a...

There was an excellent expose in The Times newspaper today. An investigation by the paper rubbished claims by the Sri Lankan government that a video of a Tamil Tiger fighter being executed during the recent conflict was fabricated. The...

As regular readers of this blog may know, I always weigh my words carefully. But today I’m weighing them with still greater care. Why? Well, I’m just wondering what it must be like to bash out 1,000 words and get paid a cool £90,000...

When I first heard a ghost-voiced Beth Gibbons from Portishead croaking “Give me a reason to love you / Give me a reason to be, a woman / I just wanna be a woman” on their debut album, I was …. impressed. Mid-90s hype around Britpop...

One of the stories the Anglo-Iranian comic Shappi Khorsandi tells is how Iran once sent hit men all the way to west London to murder her father, the poet Hadi Khorsandi. Thankfully they were bunglers and 25 years later Shappi plays it...

So now it’s the turn of British Transport Police to be given Tasers. Deploying electro-shock stun guns to the BTP’s response units is the latest move in the ever-increasing roll-out across British police, and has added to Amnesty’s...

Such is the perverted ingenuity of the human race, that yes, we’re great at finding more and more ways of killing each other. Take the case of Kenneth Biros , a man convicted of murder in the US state of Ohio. Because of an...

I can hardly believe that today is 7 December which means that there are now only 16 Christmas shopping days left. That's slightly concerning for me as so far I have bought neither cards nor a single present! When I do eventually get...

What’s the worst thing that can happen to a poor but self-sufficient community of indigenous people? The discovery, by others, that the land you’re living on is rich in mineral deposits – and therefore you are in the way. Amnesty has...

It could never, never, never happen here in Britain. No company would ever be allowed to operate in as negligent a way as Union Carbide did in Bhopal , India. And if there were ever a chemical disaster of a comparable scale here –...

Given the prevalence of the crime of rape and the disastrously low conviction rape (only about 6.5% of reported rapes currently lead to a rapist getting jailed), the creation of a special unit within the Metropolitan Police to...

The shocking outcome of Switzerland’s referendum to ban the building of minarets has dominated much of UK media today. As the Guardian points out, this result makes Switzerland the first country in Europe to attempt to curb the...

“Surely if you insist on lessons to teach small children it is wrong for men to hit women, then you are implying that all men are a potential menace. Won't the end result be the kind of moral indoctrination that teaches all infants how...

Planning permission, eh? The bane of developers, the saviour of green belt, the last resort of NIMBYs. But in Switzerland some people want to take things a step further. The country will vote this weekend on whether to change the Swiss...