British Airways cabin crew to hold two weekend walkouts in March over staff cuts, Unite says • How would the strike affect you? British Airways cabin crew will stage a series of strikes over two consecutive weekends this month, beginning with a three-day walkout on 20 March and followed by a four-day action from 27 March. The first strikes by BA cabin crew in nearly 13 years have been called by the Unite trade union after a breakdown in talks over staffing cuts.

The foreign secretary is wrong: Britain’s soft power in the Middle East has much greater influence than its show of force in Iraq There is a common ritual that I, like most Britons, have regularly encountered when riding a taxi in Damascus, Amman or Cairo over the past seven years. Talkative and curious, most cabbies will immediately ask where you are from and, on hearing London, raise the usual questions about Tony Blair and Iraq

Michael Moore, Liberal Democrat spokesman on international development, will be live online on the Katine Chronicles blog at 11am (GMT) on Tuesday, 16 March, to answer your questions about aid and development.

On Tuesday, 16 March, the Liberal Democrat spokesman on international development, Michael Moore, will be live online to answer readers’ questions.

British IT expert held captive for more than two years after Baghdad kidnap laments not trying to escape Watch the GuardianFilms investigation into how the hostages were taken to Iran Peter Moore, the British IT expert who spent 31 months in captivity after being kidnapped in Iraq, has revealed how he thought he was about to be killed on the day of his release, spent his ordeal unable to see clearly without his glasses, and played table-tennis with a guard. Moore said he regretted not trying to escape during the early days of his detention when the captives had the opportunity to kill a guard. The computer consultant from Lincoln said he had had a chance to flee when one of the two men watching over him fell ill

The Conservative party’s calls for immediate cuts to the economy have been met by a growing chorus of criticism, warning that this risks sending the economy back into recession ( Report , 8 March). The government was right to stimulate the economy with a variety of measures last year and so offset some of the worst effects of the recession. Yet, as some of the world’s leading economists have pointed out , the fragile nature of the recovery means that fiscal stimulus is still required

The conditions exist for a settlement, which would limit Taliban influence to the south, preserve advances and cut corruption Two thoughtful speeches this week dealt with the challenging legacy of America’s war on terror. The first was given in London by Eliza Manningham-Buller , the former head of MI5. She spoke about the use of torture by American intelligence.

Timeline of what the former MI5 chief Dame Eliza Manningham-Buller and her colleagues knew Dame Eliza Manningham-Buller, the head of MI5 throughout most of the years of the so-called war on terror, insisted yesterday that she had not known that Khalid Shiekh Mohammed was being waterboarded. In a response to the appeal court’s judgment that MI5 officers had a “dubious record” on torture, she sought to blame the US and maintained that only after she retired in 2007 did she discover that the alleged mastermind of the 9/11 attacks had been waterboarded 160 times. “The Americans were very keen that people like us did not discover what they were doing,” she said.

It’s scandalous that a Labour government is unwilling to tackle the practice of blacklisting trade union members Mick Dooley is a blacklisted construction worker, whose status came to light following the exposure last year of a blacklist kept by a company called the Consulting Association (CA). Construction companies paid the CA to conduct trade union checks on job applicants and other workers; those whose name appeared on the CA’s secret list were refused employment or dismissed.

Arbiter rules taxpayer must fund Tube Lines’s additional costs for improvements on the London Underground Boris Johnson must make cuts to London’s public transport network or postpone improvements to one of the capital’s busiest underground lines after he was told to plug a £460m funding gap in a controversial public-private partnership. The London mayor said taxpayers were being asked to “write a blank cheque” to fund Tube Lines, the last surviving PPP contractor responsible for maintenance and upgrades on three tube routes: the Jubilee, Northern and Piccadilly lines. In a final ruling yesterday, the arbiter of the PPP contracts, Chris Bolt, said Tube Lines’s work programme over the next seven-and-a-half years should cost £4.46bn