Press release me, let me go

I’m conscious that in the course of the scores of posts I’ve made on the Amnesty media blog so far this year, not a lot of them have exactly been cheerful (despite my crap jokes and strained sarcasm). You could say: so what? Amnesty’s...

What a strange story! First a Wikipedia entry about the album cover from a (mostly) forgotten 1970s German heavy rock band is, apparently out of nowhere, censored . It’s all over the national (and international) media for two days then...

Ever been to a party where one guest is determined to pour cold water on the fun and frolics? Well the Daily Mail has certainly sought to do that by attacking the Human Rights Act – on the week the world gears up to celebrate the 60th...

Flicking through the news this morning I came on this horrific report of the gang rape of a teenage girl by seven teenage boys, mostly known to her, in east London. Staggering. Sickening. I can’t believe this happened close to where I...

The closure of Guantánamo Bay will probably come not with a bang, but with a whimper. But come it will (says president-elect Barack Obama), only we don’t know when or how. The Guardian’s G2 today splashed on the “toxic legacy”...

How many ways can torturers find to hurt people? You’d maybe think that there’s a sort of limited number. Half a dozen. A dozen. Whatever. Actually, the more Amnesty stuff I read over the years the more I realise – chillingly enough –...

What complete chaos Thailand has become. The whole situation seems to increasingly resemble a south-east Asian version of a heavyweight boxing match. In the yellow corner, we have the yellow-shirted People’s Alliance for Democracy (PAD...

Clearly 2008 has not been a good year for the people of Zimbabwe. Intense hunger for millions, instability, violence and serious human rights abuses have ravaged much of the country this year. And now with an outbreak of cholera...

Understandably, yesterday’s news was dominated by the appalling and sadly ongoing scenes from Mumbai, with gun battles in the streets and flames licking from the windows of luxury hotels. But an historic piece of news was somewhat...

The Mumbai attacks and Thailand’s state of emergency on its airports are definitely the stories catching today’s media glare. Meanwhile, life for thousands of people in eastern Congo remains turbulent, volatile and pretty desperate...

To paraphrase John Lennon, you may call me a dreamer but I can imagine the Democratic Republic of Congo without war. Just. Shockingly, after a decade or more of continuous violence it’s actually now difficult to envisage a peaceful...

Empty gesture from “jam makers”, or an important move to help tackle sexual slavery? Today’s news that those former barrackers of Tony Blair the Women’s Institute are going to start monitoring the local press for classified ads...

I was surfing the TV channels last night and found myself watching one of those dreadful programmes that follow police around a town centre on a Friday night. It elicited a mixture of depression and terror: scores of boozed-up Brits...

Looking forward to Obama sweeping into office and making his first action the closure of Guantanamo? Well maybe the courts will get there first. Yesterday a judge in Washington yesterday ruled that five Algerian men who have been held...

I caught the end of The Today Programme’s interview with Lord Malloch-Brown from Rwanda this morning, in which he talked about the ‘beginnings of a strategy’ forming on the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). It did make me wonder...

Occasionally in the Amnesty press office we get random calls asking ‘what’s the worst crisis right now that no one’s reporting?’ (and another favourite, ‘do you know where any war criminals are hiding? can I have their addresses?’)...

What were you doing on Friday 8 August? As it happens, I can remember because that’s when I was working for Amnesty at the Edinburgh Festival. Why do I ask? Because this was when the astonishing news broke that Georgia and Russia were...

I understand there was also quite a bit on planning for the presidential pooch, but Barack Obama’s big US television interview commitment to close Guantánamo, end torture and “regain America's moral stature in the world" has definitely...

I was at the British Film Institute on London’s South Bank yesterday evening. Not to see a movie but for the Rory Peck Awards , which recognise the work of freelance cameramen and camerawomen in TV newsgathering and current affairs...

The title is a popular saying in Armenia, subject of a new Amnesty report on violence against women, released today. Our researcher and my international press office colleague Lydia were in the capital Yeravan this morning to launch...