Bertrand Audoin
: From Paris, With Hope
Maria Miller
: Equal Marriage Will Preserve the Institution of Marriage
Mehdi Hasan
: As a Muslim, I Struggle With the Idea Of Homosexuality - But I Oppose Homophobia
Damian Collins
: Freedom Cuts Both Ways in the Gay Marriage Debate
David Burrowes MP
: It Is Time to Support the British Traditions of Free Speech, Tolerance - And Marriage
In the second half of my interview with Peter Gatehouse of the Rickshaw Circus, we discuss his experiences spreading the joy of the circus to some of the most deprived areas of the Middle East.
Peter is an unfathomably tall and lean individual, so much so that he confounds machines that measure your body-mass index. As an accomplished circus performer, he is one of the best fire-performers and poi-spinners in the UK. He is also exhausted.
An Edinburgh woman killed by a suicide bomber in Afghanistan sent a poignant tweet on the day she returned to the country's capital, wondering what wa...
A female suicide bomber detonated as a minibus full of foreigners in Kabul stopped to refuel on the major road leading to the airport, killing around ...
Selling trinkets, scarves and chewing gum, child street sellers cluster around the NATO buildings in Kabul to help support their families. One Sat...
Afghan officials have said a suicide bomber, who killed six outside NATO headquarters in Kabul, four of them children, could have been as young as 12....
The firm behind the Olympic Games security fiasco has reportedly extended its deal to protect the British embassy in Afghanistan's capital, Kabul. ...
I have, this past few years spent quite a lot of time scratching my testicles at 38,000 feet - what else to do. There is an acquired rhythm to these things, long haul air travel has fleshed out the perfect deal between airline and passenger, and in the most part it works.
I'd been in Kabul four weeks and still couldn't decide if I was completely mad. It was certainly a captivating environment to work in, so incredibly different, such an insight into a torn and troubled country.
There is one area of frequent enquiry that streams my way, where I feel that I am not ideally qualified to comment. Doctors in Afghanistan are at best soothsayers, at worse fraudsters.
All of my friends here come from far-flung places, a broader horizon that dispenses the notion that your own place of birth is best. Each fizzes your blood with unique cultural facets, we are simply part of something bigger.
I think I may have been living in a war zone for too long, and it is taking its toll. Before Christmas I was talking with a friend who had been working in regions of conflict exclusively for 10 years and he described that there are something like 59 symptoms of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, and he exhibited 43 of them.
Eight civilians, including a woman and six children, have been killed by an Nato airstrike in the Paktia province of Afghanistan, local officials have...
My name is Martin Middlebrook. The 12 of you who read this regularly know this of course, but by other countries other conventions apply. So depending upon relative status or affection, my moniker here is either Kaakaa Martin, Mr Martin, or Martin Jan.
There is nothing 'soft' about the UK's arts and creative industries, two of our biggest economic assets. Neither is there anything soft about our continuing work through the recent unrest in the Arab world and the British Council remaining on the ground during the last decade in Burma, Iraq and Afghanistan.
As NATO troops prepare to withdraw, we must recognise that the real work in Afghanistan and Pakistan has just begun.
Strangely enough I felt on a real high from the moment I landed on the tarmac. I thoroughly enjoyed being in Afghanistan. I loved the heady difference, the gripping change of scenery, the break from five years of deep emotional wrangling within the wider family dynamic, the food, the work, the appreciation of your efforts from Afghan colleagues.
My westernised nephew said this to his father recently. "Men rule the world dad, but women control men, so really women rule the world". Very smart and intuitive, and quite possibly true in some households. But in Afghanistan women are the missing and beaten half of humanity.
Since my brush with death at the Ashura bombing in Kabul, and my crack on the head, I have developed a disturbing ability. In the same way that bats can locate moths by echolocation, I have discovered that I can locate furniture with my shins. We never stop learning it seems. It started in Dubai when I jammed my foot into a table and sliced my toe open.
AFP photographer Massoud Hossaini has been awarded the 2012 Pulitzer Prize for his heartbreaking image of a girl crying in fear after a suicide bomber...
William Hague has condemned Taliban attacks on diplomatic targets in Afghanistan's capital city Kabul including the British embassy. After multiple...
This week I have spent time in Mazar e Sharif in the north of Afghanistan, and as we drove back yesterday I said to my translator, "something big will hit Kabul soon, it's been too quiet for too long, the city is too calm:. He replied "do you think so boss?" "Of course" I said.
A series of explosions and gunfire rocked the Afghan capital on Sunday as the Taliban launched a coordinated attack on Western embassies, the Afghan p...
On my final night in Beirut, we went out to dinner at a restaurant that specialises in Chocolate dishes. If your sole intake of chocolate for three months has been Ferrero Rocher, then you are to endorphins what insomnia is to sleep - utterly deprived.
War pays I can tell you. Kabul is a building site and the construction industry is booming off the back of reconstruction. Now Mr David Cameron of the swept back hair and boyish looks, you're a clever man, just this week you flew over Afghanistan, did you perchance bother to look out of the window? If you had you would have seen how capitalism really works.
