Amnesty International urges the parliament of Catalonia not to ban the use of full-face covering veils in public:

"Any wide-ranging ban will violate the rights to freedom of expression and religion of those women who choose to wear a full-face veil as an expression of their identity or beliefs," said...
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In a report released yesterday, Human Rights Watch calls out France, Germany, and Britain for using intelligence obtained in other countries through torture:

"Berlin, Paris, and London should be working to eradicate torture, not relying on foreign torture intelligence," said Judith Sunderland, senior Western Europe researcher at Human Rights Watch....
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Joseph Waltz writes in the Monthly Review on the conversations that John Gerassi--son of a Spanish Republican general and author of The Premature Antifascists, on the Lincoln Brigade--had in the early 1970s with Jean-Paul Sartre:

“Wow,” Sartre replies, “you really want to put me on the spot today…OK...
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La mula, a new internationally-produced Spanish-language comedy set during the Spanish Civil War--co-written and directed by Michael Radford (Il Postino)--may never see the light of day, Variety reports:

Three of Europe's highest-ranking film executives -- U.K.'s John Woodward, Spain's Ignasi Guardans and Ireland's Simon Perry -- are battling to save...
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The official map of mass graves dating from the Civil War in Andalusia, released after a five years of research, offers an inventory of almost six hundred different unmarked burial sites.  The mass grave at the San Rafael cemetery in Málaga is assumed to contain more than four thousand bodies, making it the...
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Geoff Dyer, writing in The Guardian, reflects on recent war accounts from Iraq and Afghanistan (Sebastian Junger, David Finkel) and, more generally, on the strengths of fiction vs. non-fiction when it comes to transmitting the reality of warfare:

If there were ever a time when the human stories contained within...
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More coverage, this time in the Guardian, on the exhibit of Spanish Civil War friends Kati Horna, Remedios Varo, and Leonora Carrington (see earlier post). Includes video.
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The AP reports: In a written defence put forward by his lawyer, he requested that he be acquitted citing a legal precedent that prevents a trial taking place if it is opposed by the public prosecutor’s office. The precedent mentioned is the so-called “doctrina Botín,” named after Emilio Botín, the current CEO of the...
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Earlier this year Magnum, the photo agency founded by Henri Cartier-Bresson, Robert Capa, and "Chim" Seymour, sold its photojournalism archive (more than 185,000 prints) to a private investment company owned by Michael Dell, which in turn has handed it over to the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas in Austin. The HRC...
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Spain's dictator Francisco Franco, who won the Spanish Civil War in 1939 with significant help from Hitler Germany, repaid the favor two years later by handing the Nazi regime "a list of every Jew in his country in order to facilitate efforts to locate, deport and destroy them," today's Ha'aretz reports, based on...
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