Foreign Office civil servant Derek Pasquill has begun the long trial process after being charged under the Official Secrets Act. He is accused of making six damaging disclosures of documents that came into his possession as a civil servant. These...
I don’t play video games myself. A combination of poor hand-eye coordination and absolutely zero patience put paid to my ambition of being king of the arcade back in the days of Wonder Boy. In subsequent years I would, of course, attempt to portray...
Unless the government has it in mind to ban the Bible, the new law announced by the government this week proposing to outlaw homophobic hate speech will be ineffective. The major source of homophobic hatred in our society is from religious groups....
September is a resonant time in Egyptian politics. It was then, 26 years ago, that an angry Anwar al Sadat - Egypt’s then president - sent over 1,500 journalists, intellectuals and politicians from across the political spectrum to jail without...
As Israelis tuned in to hear about what seemed, for a few terrible days, the opening shots in a long-anticipated war, reporters on the Knesset beat scrambled urgently for information. Ehud Olmert appeared in view, projecting his usual elastic...
An unprecedented coalition of British bloggers has come together over the last two weeks to fight an assault on freedom of speech from Russian oligarch Alisher Usmanov. Lawyers acting for the Uzbek billionaire, who recently bought a large stake in...
The press censorship laws in Burma are draconian to say the least. In its latest move the Burmese military junta has disconnected telephone lines of journalists, leading politicians and activists to curb free the flow of information to the world...
The dramatic wave of demonstrations inside Burma in 1988 (popularly known as the 8888 Uprising) took place amidst a virtual media vacuum. The dearth of real-time historical documentation of events clearly attests to this fact. The stories of those...
Sheikh Khalid bin Mahfouz, a Saudi-born Irish passport holder, and one of the richest men in the world, is no stranger to the UK libel courts. Since 2002, banker bin Mahfouz has used his considerable financial clout to garner apologies and damages...