Over the weekend Sky’s Tim Marshall tweeted from Egypt with the words “Burn like a fire in Cairo”, a line - as trainspotter-ish indie music types will tell you - that comes from The Cure’s “Fire In Cairo”, a song from their 1979 debut...

Lawrence Archer, the jury foreman from the famed ‘Ricin trial’ (also known as the ‘No Ricin trial’ – they never found any) spoke last night at a fascinating event here at Amnesty’s Human Rights Action Centre in London. Very timely too...

“We believe the Egyptian government is stable”, said the US State Department spokesperson PJ Crowley on the World Tonight last night. Crowley was audibly uncomfortable at being pushed to repeat Hillary Clinton’s view from Tuesday that...

Control Orders will be scrapped from December 2011, and replaced with the catchily-named “T-Pims”, Terrorism prevention and investigation measures – that’s the long-awaited news from Home Secretary Teresa May today. It comes as a...

Amnesty and Friends of the Earth have filed a joint complaint today with the OECD (Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development) accusing oil giant Shell of making misleading claims about the extent to which oil spills in the...

A late blog today as we’ve been busy preparing for the launch of The Whistleblower book which is being hosted at Amnesty's headquarters in east London tomorrow. It's a gripping read which exposes how some private military contractors...

There are some stories which I read and see which simply fill me with a sense of outrage and astonishment, and this is one of them. It’s the recent incident of the three unarmed men in Nairobi who were shot and killed by three police...

As a fly-by-night football fan (!) I couldn’t help but notice that there were two big football stories in the overnight news. First Eric Cantona has been appointed director of soccer at New York Cosmos. “Oh la la, it’s Cantona”, as the...

The media swarm over the first anniversary of the Haiti earthquake had begun to quell, when in waltzed the former dictator who had made a run for it 25 years ago amid the fierce protests which finally put pay to his tyrannical rule...

For the second day running, I’m kicking off a post with a @jrug (C4 News’ Jonathan Rugman) tweet (hey, he gives good tweet!), sent while covering the upheaval in Tunisia: “Israeli journo covering Tunis protests: ‘They shout Palestinian...

A momentous weekend, but what next in Tunisia? A weekend tweet from Channel Four News’ Jonathan Rugman ( @jrug ) from Tunis captured the sense of uncertainty very nicely. “Poster of Ben Ali being taken down to reveal a blank – who will...

The unrest across Ivory Coast may no longer dominate news headlines across the UK – in fact Tunisia’s unrest appears to be the ‘foreign news story of the day’ – but the Ivorian crisis is far from over. Just a few days ago, Amnesty...

My colleague Ann was on BBC Radio 4’s Woman’s Hour this morning, talking about Nasrin Sotoudeh , a human rights lawyer in Iran who was sentenced this week to eleven years in jail. Her conviction was for "acting against the national...

Brief one today - I'm in a big all-day media meeting with press officers from around the world (Alastair Campbell eat your heart out). So, my mini-reflection for the day is … it's not all gloom and doom coming out of the USA. In the...

Call me an inveterate numerologist, but with the date on the palindromic 11/1/11 I think it’s only right to take stock of the situation at Guantánamo in numerical fashion. First off, and most obviously, today is – almost unbelievably –...

A couple of years ago Amnesty starting warning of the dangers of a global economic downturn leading to a deterioration in human rights around the world. With recent “food and jobs” protests in Tunisia and Algeria, we seem to be getting...

There’s an arresting image in today’s Guardian Eyewitness – centrefold spread – of a Sudanese woman gathering rubbish on a landfill in Juba . Amidst all the media attention relating to Sunday’s referendum across Sudan, the image...

There’s an arresting image in today’s Guardian Eyewitness – centrefold spread – of a Sudanese woman gathering rubbish on a landfill in Juba . Amidst all the media attention relating to Sunday’s referendum across Sudan, the image...

It never rains, but it pours like hell. That must be the prevalent feeling in Haiti’s camps as the first-year anniversary of 2010’s devastating earthquake approaches. Oxfam released a report today blaming ‘dithering and aid confusion’...

If it had been the first day of April yesterday and not boring old 4 January (1/4 not 4/1) I don’t think many people would have believed that story about the vulture that was "arrested" in Saudi Arabia on suspicion of spying for Israel...