When Czechoslovak student protester Jan Palach set himself alight in 1969, Jara Moserova-Davidova was one of the specialists who treated him. Now head of UNESCO in the Czech Republic she has lived under Nazi and communist oppression-and seen both systems collapse. She talks to Mary Lean.

Sheila Cassidy shot to fame when she was arrested and tortured for treating a guerrilla fighter in Pinochet's Chile. Now a specialist in the care of the terminally ill, she talks to Kenneth Noble.

My life was not satisfying but I felt it would get better once I got to the top. My feelings of fear and insecurity were but a price to pay on my way up.

On 14 August 1990 the Otis Bantum Correctional Center (OBCC) on Rikers Island, New York City, erupted in violence. Inmates turned on officers and on each other with handmade weapons. Correctional officers then blockaded the island's only access bridge for 36 hours to protest the administration's failure to hear their concerns.

I was not welcome in my mother-in-law's home.

As the bandwagon of rights rolls on its way, gratitude is the victim that falls most frequently beneath its wheels.

'Democracy starts with me' was the theme of MOral Re-Armament's 1991 conference at Caux, Switzerland. Over seven weeks 2,160 people attended its sessions. Michael Smith reports:

For long years I nurtured my children and protected them from trouble and suffering. Now that my family have grown up, my protective instinct won't lie down.

Jean-Jacques Odier offers a French perspective on an international movement to save the family.

I became disillusioned. When I left the classroom and saw the other side of the education system, I felt that I was on my own. I saw political in-fighting.