Progress can be achieved through open engagement without preconditions – and that includes Hamas I returned last week from a visit to Gaza as part of a parliamentary delegation from the Britain-Palestine All-Party Group. Knowing that no political delegations were getting in via the Erez border crossing (the Irish foreign minister was turned away last month), we opted for the longer route through Cairo and Rafah, entering from the Egyptian side. To smooth our passage we thought a letter from the Foreign Office (FCO) would assist.

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.

Unlawful killing verdict recorded for death of first British woman soldier to die in Afghanistan conflict and three colleagues Four soldiers who were killed when their Snatch LandRover was destroyed by a roadside bomb in Afghanistan were “inadequately trained” and poorly equipped when they died, the coroner at the inquest into their deaths said today. Sarah Bryant, the first British woman soldier to be killed in the conflict, and three colleagues died while helping to mentor police in Helmand province when their vehicle triggered a huge improvised explosive device. Their six-day inquest heard that their special forces unit was inadequately trained, had the wrong vehicles for the terrain they were working in and were having to deal with a shortage of metal detectors used to trace bombs

Sunni insurgency vowed to disrupt poll, but security dragnet and curfew keep away would-be suicide bombers Despite mortar attacks and low expectations, Iraqis have today voted in large numbers in a national poll that is widely being seen as a defiant attempt to shake free from four years of political torpor and the remnants of the American occupation. Up to 70% of registered voters in Baghdad were thought to have cast ballots for a new leader, despite the biggest surge in daily violence in more than two years, that killed at least 36 people and wounded dozens more. Early figures released by the Independent High Election Commission showed turnout was also solid in other areas of the country, especially in Sunni-dominated Anbar province, where more than 50% of voters turned up, reversing the mass boycott of the 2005 poll

Forget Billy Graham and Jimmy Swaggart – the most popular and influential pastor in the US is Joel Osteen. On the surface he is modest and quietly spoken, but his belief in the “prosperity gospel” is changing the way people pray The praise and worship brought me here,” says Natalie, sitting beside me in the fifth row of Houston’s Lakewood Church – a vast, converted stadium that seats 16,000.

Actress Golshifteh Farahani, exiled in Paris, reveals the pressures on Iran’s artistic community after anti-government film-maker is arrested Golshifteh Farahani knows how dangerous it is now to be an artist in Tehran. In 2008 she became the first Iranian-based actress in almost 30 years to appear in a Hollywood blockbuster.

Are fish sentient beings? Can invertebrates suffer pain? These are the questions that regularly exercise the world’s top animal lawyer, Antoine Goetschel When Patrick Giger, a 34-year-old angler from the Swiss village of Horgen, cast his baited line into Lake Zurich’s storm-swollen waters on an icy February morning last year, he could not have forecast the trouble he would end up reeling in alongside the 22lb pike which was soon to snare itself on his hook.

In 1982 the war with Argentina put the then-Labour leader in an awkward bind. Surely the islanders’ underdog arguments should still appeal to the left today Michael Foot’s death inevitably makes me think again of the Falklands war , though the islands have been in the headlines recently over the renewed Anglo-Argentinian row over the start of drilling for oil in south Atlantic Falklands waters. What should we think in 2010 about the respective Argentinian and British claims to sovereignty of this small landmass off the Argentinian coast, which has been disputed for a good 200 years?

The sense that these are mystical objects is made stronger by the mystery around their origin and purpose It is the moment treasure hunters dream of: the point at which a trowel, carefully sifting the earth, elicits a clink from below. But this isn’t how those who discovered the Wunmonije heads came across Africa’s greatest cache of medieval bronzes, in Ife, Nigeria, in 1938. Builders laying the foundations of a house made holes in the sides and backs of the sculptures with pickaxes before they realised what they had found – and these life-like figures, on show at the British Museum until June , still bear the scars

When a vivacious Norwegian woman was found raped and strangled in the basement of a London flat, suspicion fell on a fellow student. But two years on, the case remains unsolved