Dealing with climate change is a moral issue on a par with ending slavery, the world's most celebrated climate scientist, James Hansen, of Nasa, believes.

Groundbreaking production about women forced into prostitution opens in Liverpool this week

Anyone who has ever heard Jeffrey John preach, read his poetry or met him knows that he is a man of immense spirituality who should have been made a bishop years ago.

In 1992, Barry Unsworth's fast-flowing epic of the slave trade and resistance to it, Sacred Hunger, jointly won the Booker Prize. It has taken almost 20 years for a sequel to sail into port from Britain's master-builder of historical fiction. The Quality of Mercy acts as coda and retrospect for the earlier story, at the same time as it sets a new course. Although the book can stand alone, a prior reading of Sacred Hunger will sharpen your appreciation.

A Russian soldier who says he escaped after spending the past 11 years as a slave in the North Caucasus, could face charges of desertion from the Russian army in a case that has shocked the country.

The 150th anniversary of the American Civil War offers visitors an ideal opportunity to forsake the conventional tourist trail, says Suzanne Cadisch

A second major league US sport shut down yesterday, as National Basketball League team owners imposed a lockout on players after talks on a new labour contract broke down – making it likely that some, if not all, of the 2011-12 NBA season due to begin in October will be lost.

They're incredibly easy to grow and at their most delicious fresh from the plant. So why do we buy unripe, flavourless tomatoes that have been sourced in unsavoury ways? Guy Adams gets to the root of the problem

If the thousands of historians who have written about Atlantic slavery and its abolition, only a handful have ever given us a really original perspective on that vast subject. Even fewer have proposed a satisfying, or stimulating, general theory about it, an attempt at explaining the rise, fall and enduring consequences of the entire New World slave system across the centuries and continents. Robin Blackburn is prominent – even pre-eminent – among those few. He has tackled the task in a formidable body of work beginning in the late 1980s; but in a rather idiosyncratic way.

When Baroness Cox takes up a cause, she invariably courts controversy. Her latest – a campaign against sharia law – is no exception. Jerome Taylor meets her

Four Nigerian women "held in slavery" after being illegally trafficked into the UK were awarded a total of £20,000 damages today by a High Court judge who concluded that police had breached their human rights by failing to investigate complaints.

A desolate, affecting first flight

The strained relations between the two Coalition parties over electoral reform took another nosedive yesterday when the Liberal Democrat president attacked both Margaret Thatcher and David Cameron.

At 4.30 on the morning of April 12 1861 – 150 years ago this week – the newly-formed Confederate States of America opened fire on Fort Sumter, located near the entrance to Charleston Harbor, South Carolina and held by troops loyal to the Union. This was the spark for conflict, the scale of which was glimpsed by virtually no-one in 1861. By war's end four years later, some 620,000 Americans would be dead.