Yesterday the Times columnist Melanie Reid gushed that the killing of Mahmoud al-Mabhouh in Dubai was like the film Ocean's 11. (I think, by the way, she meant an exciting Hollywood crime caper … as opposed to a useless star-vehicle...

It’s probably a generational thing, but a lot of conversations I have with my parents these days consist of whether “things are getting better … or worse”. Not exactly an easy topic to pin down! There’s always a danger that these...

I’ve railed against the secrecy reflex of the UK state before, but today, for once, I’m pleased that knee-jerk secrecy has been set aside in today’s Court of Appeal ruling on the Binyam Mohamed case. The supposedly US relationship...

Never work with children or animals, my mother always used to tell me, and in the main I’ve tended to follow her advice. However, here at Amnesty, we like to stage the odd demonstration and it’s a proven fact that if you want to do...

…. at least according to my fellow Warwickshire man William Shakespeare, it is, and that’s good because there are several theatrical things getting a mention in this post. First off, there’s “Mums” at the Soho Theatre in … er, Soho...

Perhaps we’d better get Noel Edmonds in …. all this talk of deals with the Taleban is starting to take on an air of unreality. Ahead of today’s big Afghanistan conference in London, Gordon Brown and Hamid Karzai have been speaking –...

As I was saying the other day , Obama’s promise to close Guantánamo within a year falls due, so to speak, today. It hasn’t happened. Instead, in a pale reflection of what was promised, we’ve seen just 46 of 242 prisoners transferred...

What were you doing exactly one year ago? Can’t remember? Well, chances are that at some time during 20 January 2009 you glanced at the TV news about Barack Obama being inaugurated as 44th president of the USA. (You didn’t! Well, OK...

This time a year ago the world was reeling at the scenes of devastation coming out of Gaza. Now we’re reeling at the scenes of devastation coming out of Haiti. Plus ça change. Except … Gaza was man-made, Haiti was not. Yes, the death...

Incredibly, it’s now eight years since the first shackled and orange-jump-suited prisoners were taken to the notorious prison camp at Guantánamo. Eight years. This is a long time if you’ve been found guilty of a crime and sent to...

Reports that the attorney general Lady Scotland will effectively give the Israeli authorities an assurance that none of its leaders will ever face arrest in the UK are … troubling. On what basis are the UK authorities even promising...

If the alleged would-be Detroit bomber Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab was indeed “trained” by al-Qai’da in Yemen it’s not exactly surprising that Yemen is now on everyone’s lips. But how to react? Closing embassies and talking about Yemen’s...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...