By David Cronin

A short while ago, I got up close and personal with Tony Blair.

As the former prime minister made his way into a packed committee room in the European Parliament, I stepped up to him and laid my hand on his arm. “Mr Blair, this is a citizen’s arrest,” I said.

By Asif Akhtar

This just in - a Dutch website reports with some fascination that a Muslim entrepreneur in Amsterdam has decided to open an online store for halal sex toys for Muslims.

By Dina Begum

The People’s Republic of Bangladesh has been sinking for as long as I can remember watching the BBC broadcasting yet another flood, cyclone and disaster in my country of birth. After a while you become desensitised to the women in cotton saris wading through chin-high water with a metal box or water carrier in hand, and the weeping old men who cry with their heads in their hands.

By David Cronin

Before I visited Gaza ten months ago, I continuously heard it being described as the world’s largest open-air prison. Yet it was only when I passed through Erez, the high-tech border crossing run by a private Israeli firm, that I grasped what the phrase meant. The debris of destruction wrought by ‘smart weapons’, the constant surveillance from warplanes overhead, the heavy air pollution, the grinding poverty, the absence of basic materials needed for reconstruction – all these factors combined to make me feel something akin to suffocation.