Born on this day in 1931, the heroic revolutionary faces a dangerous new wave of White House aggression. We must treat his birthday as a rallying cry to resist the illegal siege of Cuba, writes ROGER McKENZIE
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Tyranny of the crowd: how the tables were turned on London’s witch-hunting mobs
JOHN CALLOW tells the story of the innovative but little-known judge, Sir John Holt (1642-1710), and his influential judgements on witch trials
RAMZY BAROUD decries the rats of Gaza, the rodent and human type. Both abound as profiteering from tragedy reaches obscene levels
When gas company bosses gorged on assets, the GMB union fought back with the help of a 20-stone saddleback sow. MAT COWARD tells the story
JOHN REES looks at why the June 20 international anti-war conference is such a vital initiative
ROGER McKENZIE highlights how health workers in DRC are struggling to contain a deadly Ebola outbreak in a region already suffering conflict, aid cuts and a legacy of imperialist degradation
Associate Professor BUI QUANG TUAN explains how modernisation and growth are helping to unlock new foreign investment in the Vietnamese economy
BY THE 1680s, the law lay bleeding in England. City charters had been withdrawn and rewritten, political trials had broken the opposition to the Stuart crown, and a vast standing army was assembled upon Hounslow Heath in order to keep London down.
A new generation of young and highly ambitious lawyers, schooled in the ultra-royalism of the civil wars, had risen to prominence in the service of the restored monarchy and had offered their skills and rapier-like intelligences in the achievement of spectacular political gains through the control of the legislature and the law courts.
Foremost of these was Judge Jeffreys, who rose to become lord chancellor and whose name still resonates with cruelty in the West Country, whose rebels he hanged or transported as slaves to the Americas and the West Indies.
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A remarkable excavation in the Netherlands has raised hopes of locating the grave of Louis XIV’s famed captain of the King’s Musketeers. JOHN CALLOW introduces the real figure behind the hero of Dumas’s novels
The heroism of the jury who defied prison and starvation conditions secured the absolute right of juries to deliver verdicts based on conscience — a convention which is now under attack, writes MAT COWARD
ANSELM ELDERGILL examines the government’s proposals to further limit the right of citizens to trial by jury
ANSELM ELDERGILL examines the legal case behind this weekend’s Tolpuddle Martyrs’ Festival and the lessons for today