Press release me, let me go

No, I don’t suppose you do. I’ve seen this grim question around a few times, one of those reel-in-the-curious-punter tags on the internet that get people clicking on commercial horoscope sites or whatever. Leaving aside a few specific...

Liu Xianbin was jailed this week , for 10 years. Guess what the offence was? Something heinous, something violent, something depraved, I hear you cry. Close, but no cigar. He wrote an essay. He actually wrote a number of articles which...

Watching George Osborne deliver the Budget yesterday reminded me how it’s been nearly a year since we were gripped by the uncertainty of the outcome of a general election here in the UK. Living in a country without a formed government...

Today’s revelation from Amnesty that women protesters in Egypt were detained and subjected to forced ‘virginity tests ’, after being strip-searched as male soldiers looked on taking photographs, shows the extent of the challenges...

"In his compound", "human shields", "mandate for attacks", "strategic assets": when the world's media is using this language it can easily feel like we're back in the early days of the Iraq invasion in March 2003. But this is Libya...

With air strikes in Libya (see the Sun and the BBC ), mass demonstrations across North Africa and the Middle East ( Mail and the Independent ) and the natural and nuclear disasters in Japan ( Telegraph and Express ) dominating the news...

I've seen a lot of commentators in the media saying that they genuinely don't know whether a UN-authorised military intervention in Libya is a good or a bad idea. There appears to be genuine uncertainty. To use Simon Tisdall's...

It’s bad enough that the Bahraini security forces have been using shotguns, tear gas and even high-powered rifles to attack peaceful demonstrators in Manama’s Pearl Roundabout and numerous other locations in Bahrain. But to also attack...

A new report (and video ) just released from Amnesty shows how Roma people within the EU are being discriminated against, leaving them forced to live in cramped, dirty housing without clean water or electricity. The report looks at...

Can you remember what you were doing in February 2000? I’ve been racking my brains and I really haven’t a clue. Gabrielle was at Number one in the charts with ‘Rise’, apparently – any idea how that goes? And do you remember Finland’s...

A nudge is as good as a wink to a blind bat, as Monty Python’s Eric Idle once said . And I think I know what he means. So, when former Pakistani president Pervez Musharraf pops up on TV to talk about how as a national leader you need...

Governor Pat Quinn’s decision to abolish the death penalty across Illinois couldn’t have come a moment too soon. Particularly for the 15 men who were on death row across the US state. The mid-western state – for which President Obama...

Amnesty has been campaigning for Eynulla Fətullayev , a wrongly-imprisoned newspaper editor from Azerbaijan, for some time now. Today his father – who has received death threats after campaigning for his son’s release issued an...

Charge or release. Them’s your options. We have heard it before. In fact, if word documents had predictive text, that might well be our default sentence here at Amnesty. When you hear about people currently being held in detention, in...

Happy 100th International Women’s Day! A day when the world both celebrates the economic and social progress of women and girls globally, and stops to consider whether gender equality has been achieved. According to today’s Daily Mail...

As the financial markets fret increasingly about the impact of Middle East protests on Saudi Arabia and the knock-on effects on oil supply and western diplomacy in the region, it’s important to remember that the country has people as...

Next week Tuesday marks the 100th anniversary of International Women’s Day and already, we’re seeing various media outlets are giving a nod to this day of celebration. Online site Femalefirst.co.uk has reported on a great selection of...

Nice “lookalikey” spot in the Guardian today in their story about who might be in the film about WikiLeaks. Xan Brooks says there’s jokey stuff going around about how Javier Bardem should play Guardian journalist David Leigh . Yes, I...

Members of minority groups in Pakistan lost a brave advocate, when the minister for minorities, Shahbaz Bhatti, was murdered by three gunmen on his way to work today. He foresaw his own murder, and said he was prepared to face that...

The cover of a new Amnesty report (out today) on Tunisia features a photo (above) of a huge crowd in Tunis on 14 January, the day the president Zine El Abidine Ben Ali exited the country for his bolt-hole in Saudi Arabia. Apart from a...