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...

“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...

As I was hinting yesterday , the government has indeed announced new measures to tackle violence against women and girls in the UK. It’s something that Amnesty’s been campaigning over for several years, not least as part of the End...

Best leave it, Tone, its a domestic. The Sweeney-style outlook of the police to domestic violence in 1970s Britain is now notorious. It was a Dont get involved attitude because Theyll sort it out and Weve got real villains to catch. (...

What’s Obama up to with his 9/11 death penalty remarks? Rather than stoking it up with comments on the death penalty and 9/11 trials, shouldn’t the US president be talking calmly about justice for the victims of the 11 September...

Secrecy, it seem, begets secrecy. Seven former Guantánamo prisoners who are pursuing a case for compensation from the UK government for alleged complicity by the intelligence services in their detention and abuse are running up against...

I’ve blogged a lot about the death penalty in recent weeks – see here and here if you missed them and, hey, please feel to read ‘em! – so I’ll keep it (relatively)brief. The Guardian went big on the topic today, one of those...

I noticed that Twitter comment on Channel 4’s The Execution Of Gary Glitter last night was almost entirely negative but, to be honest, I didn’t see what the big problem was. Quite a few people complain the programme failed to add...

There was a song from my goth-punk youth called “Do You Believe In The Westworld?”, one of Theatre Of Hate’s finest, and to riff on that: do you believe in the death penalty? Strange question to ask a reader of a human rights blog...

A couple of posts ago, my colleague Steve B was talking about what it must be like to be walking down a street in Madrid when you get stopped by what turns out to be a violent gang of police officers …. … which made me think … about...

… is the hypothetical question posed by a Channel 4 drama coming out in November. I say posed , but what we’re getting, apparently, is a 90-minute feature-length drama – The Execution of Gary Glitter – “set in an imaginary Britain in...

Back in 2006 I took a day out from the Amnesty office to “job-swap” at the news desk of The Independent at their (then) office at Canary Wharf in east London. All very interesting. For one thing: what a studious atmosphere! More like a...

As the old Buzzcocks favourite puts it, “Noise annoys”, and at first glance there’s something almost comical about claims that music was used to torture “war on terror” prisoners. Loud music can be annoying , but it doesn’t actually...