Mike F

Torture has written some of the bloodiest lines of history. The heretic’s fork, the Judas cradle and other medieval devices might be museum curios now, but Amnesty has evidence of torture in 141 countries during the last five years. It...

Cupid is especially busy on Valentine’s Day, but his methods leave much to chance. The mischievous love god blindfolds himself before firing his arrow through a new lover’s heart. An indiscriminate approach, but those arrows are pretty...

Who saw that coming? Last month, Presidents Barack Obama and Raúl Castro appeared on TV, in carefully orchestrated, simultaneous broadcasts, to announce a prisoner swap. This was the start of a new era of rapprochement after more than...

World Press Freedom Day on 3 May spotlights Article 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights: "Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to...

Today's World Book Day celebrates and encourages reading. What will you pick up today? Some Shakespeare, a classic fairy tale such as Puss in Boots perhaps, or something weightier like Dostoyevsky’s Crime & Punishment ? For Guantánamo...

Huber Matos, who was Amnesty’s first Cuban prisoner of conscience, has died aged 95. Matos was a schoolteacher who became an army commander in the revolutionary forces fighting to overthrow the Batista government. However, he disagreed...

“ It wasn't what he said exactly that changed my worldview. It was the example he was setting with his life. How his words in general showed that he was a stellar American. There was no question in my mind that my government was...