Tunisian dissident lawyer and writer Mohamed Abbou was arrested in March 2005 and jailed for three and a half years for his internet expose of torture in Tunisian prisons. This is his first major published commentary on the state of Tunisian human...
It hasn’t been a good few days for ‘halfpint’, ‘ian’ and ‘vaughan’, three Sheffield Wednesday supporters who took advantage of the apparent anonymity provided by their usernames to post seriously nasty comments about the club’s directors on the...
Truth, notoriously, is the first casualty of war. The truth about the fate of Armenians living under Ottoman rule in 1915 may not be dead yet, but it has certainly wilted in the glare of Washington lobby politics. What should be the subject of...
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...