Audio visual	Afghan landmine	Goodbye, Chiang Kai-shek	Afghanistan in pictures	Apache attack video	Kazakh steppe change

Selection
'He turned to the helicopter and sank to his knees, then I hit him with my rockets' Caught in the middle of the Helmand river, the fleeing Taliban were paddling their boat back to shore for dear life. Smoke from the ambush they had just sprung on American special forces still hung in the air, but their attention was fixed on the two helicopter gunships that had appeared above them.	Child victims of the battle to end a bloody civil war   LYING howling on a torn mattress, in a cot by a window overlooking the Sri Lankan ­capital, Colombo, the wounded toddler was a pitiful sight. A female relative fretted, trying to calm the girl down as the medics worked around her. The 18-month-old had been shot in the stomach in the final stages of the fighting in the north-east of the country and there was an ugly line of stitches across her abdomen where doctors had operated to remove the bullet.	Maoist guerrillas threaten Indian poll from their jungle lair   In Dantewada, in the heart of the world's biggest democracy, civil war is flaring, claiming nearly 1,000 lives in the past two years. Gethin Chamberlain reports from the jungle hideouts of the Naxal rebels who are ordering villagers to boycott the election - and whose increasing strength is straining the Indian security services to breaking point
Eyewitness to carnage   The young mother was standing by the side of the road, clutching her baby. The baby was dead. Damilvany Gnanakumar watched as she tried to make a decision. Around them, thousands of people were picking their way between bodies strewn across the road, desperate to escape the fighting all around them.	'We want to work in Hollywood- but God still hasn't fulfilled our dreams' It is raining, the water dripping from roofs of tin and plastic into the pale grey ooze of the drain running down the narrow lane between the shanties that make up Bombay’s Garib Nagar slum. Rubina Ali, Slumdog Millionaire starlet and precocious 10-year-old, is skipping from one concrete slab to another, trying to avoid the stinking puddles and the filth strewn all around. It is futile: the dirt is as much a part of the slum as are its 5,000 impoverished inhabitants.	India's generation of children crippled by uranium waste   Their heads are too large or too small, their limbs too short or too bent. For some, their brains never grew, speech never came and their lives are likely to be cut short: these are the children it appears that India would rather the world did not see, the victims of a scandal with potential implications far beyond the country's borders.
"My face and clothes were splattered with the blood of this boy. I never knew blood was warm." SOPIKA had only ever known war. It had always been there, part of the scenery, part of her very existence. Yet for the first nine of her 10 years, it had seemed to visit only those on the edges of her life. Now, as the bullet passed through the body of the young boy ahead of her on the edge of the lagoon on the north east coast of Sri Lanka where she and her family had sought refuge from the killing, it finally found her. In the darkness, she felt a sudden dampness on her face and on her clothes as the boy's blood splashed onto her.	Burning Bright SWAPAN Haldar had no inkling the tiger was there until it pounced, clamping its jaws around his head and dragging him backwards into the thick mangrove forest. It was the last time anyone saw him alive. “Don’t go,” his wife, Minati Haldar, had begged him. There seemed to be tigers everywhere and they were getting bolder and more aggressive. But Swapan would not be swayed. It was a Saturday morning in January when the crab fisherman set off. His companions returned with his body the following night.	Vedanta versus the villagers: the fight for the sacred mountain The ash spills out across the plain beneath the brooding bulk of Niyamgiri mountain, swamping the trees that once grew here, forming dirty grey-brown drifts around the stems of the now-dead scrub. Every day there is more ash, pouring out of the alumina refinery that squats among the steep-sided, jungle-clad hills of western Orissa, India. The dust hangs in the air and clings to the landscape, settling on the huts of the aboriginal Kondh tribes who call this place home, choking those who breathe it in.
Delhi sweeps streets of beggars as India prepares for Commonwealth Games THE three women were at a bus stop when the police rolled up. "You are begging, get in the van," the officers told them. They protested their innocence, but to no avail. After they were locked up in beggars' prison behind the high, barbed-wire-topped walls of the Nirmal Chhaya complex, next door to Delhi's Tihar jail, 50-year-old Ratnabai Kale twice tried to hang herself with her own sari.	Where a baby girl is a mother's awful shame   THE birth of Rekha's second daughter should have been one of the happiest days of her life. Instead, she lay on the bed of her home on the outskirts of Delhi, the newborn child on the floor, screaming in terror as her mother-in-law poured paraffin over her.	Sold for £20: just two of India's million stolen children RAJESH was 14 when he disappeared. Beneath a mop of jet black hair, his clear brown eyes glance sideways out of the picture that is all his family have left of him. He was his parents’ only son and they doted and relied on him. One morning in April last year, his mother, Sunita, asked him to go out to fetch water. She remembers him loading the empty plastic containers on to his cart and setting off cheerfully down the lane. It was the last time she saw him.
Scam-dog millionaires MILLIONS of pounds of taxpayers' money sent to India to educate poor children is falling into the pockets of crooked officials in the country. A News of the World investigation has uncovered corruption on an incredible scale after our Government poured in £340 million aid. It went to a multi-billion schools project blasted by Indian inspectors as fraudulent and riddled with malpractice.	Survival of the fittest in Hong Kong Ten years ago, as Britain handed over Hong Kong to the Chinese, the predictions for its future were uniformly bleak. So far, however, the pessimists have been proved wrong.	Turkey's 'creeping Islamisation' divides nation A clash of cultures divides the nation.
'Two of us fled. 75 other women killed themselves with grenades'   By the time Arulmathy and her fellow Tamil Tigers realised they were surrounded, it was too late. They had fallen asleep and now Sri Lankan soldiers were swarming into their bunker. Arulmathy watched aghast as 75 women she had fought beside for so many months reached for their hand grenades, pulled the pins and blew themselves to pieces, as they had been ordered to do.	"All of a sudden there was the sound of firing. I heard the sound of a bullet..." Long live Bhutto," Benazir Bhutto shouted, waving to the crowd surging around her car. They were her last words before three gunshots rang out and she slumped back on to her seat.	Kazakhstan is promised democracy, but the election result is not in doubt   In most elections, a lurch to the Right indicates a political swing: in Kazakhstan, it has more to do with which side of the car voters want their steering wheel positioned.
This is really a disaster. I don't know really how to explain it. At the moment, it is like hell...   "The most terrible thing that I have seen was when a mother had a bullet go through her breast and she was dead and the baby was still on the other side of the breast and the baby was drinking her milk, and that really affected me. I was at that place where it happened...I'm talking to you now, but maybe tomorrow I'll be dead." Vany Kumar, 25, speaking by telephone from a shelled hospital in Sri Lanka's no fire zone.	Burning Issue Despite years of robust economic growth, famine, insurgency and greed have pushed millions of people in India to the brink of starvation, especially in Jharkhand where famished children are 'cured' by branding THE POKER is glowing red hot, flames from a small pile of burning wood lick around it and leap into the air. Suklal Hembrom holds a leaf against his stomach and warily eyes the man sitting on the other side of the fire.	We heard the bullets and then the first shell hit our sandbags   THE shell exploded without warning. Kandiah Rasamahendran felt a searing pain in his left leg and looked down, to see blood gushing from the wound. His young sons were screaming, his wife struck dumb with shock. Frantically, he scooped sand from the floor of their makeshift bunker and poured it into the gaping hole, trying to staunch the bleeding.
Night out turns to carnage It was Saturday night in the centre of Kuta, the maze of clubs, restaurants, shops, hotels and beach bungalows which make up Bali's biggest tourist area. What everyone was looking forward to was a good night out. What they got was a massacre.	Jordan's perfume bottled by workers paid £2.05 per day   Workers at a factory in India have been paid just 26p an hour to make perfume bottles for England World Cup sponsor Umbro and the glamour model Katie Price, better known as Jordan. An Observer investigation found that the 7,000 employees at the factory in Gujarat are rewarded with a basic wage that is below even the minimum expected in India, and is just half the estimated minimum living wage.	India prays for rain as water wars break out   IT was a little after 8pm when the water started flowing through the pipe running beneath the dirt streets of Bhopal's Sanjay Nagar slum. After days without a drop of water, the Malviya family were the first to reach the hole they had drilled in the pipe, filling what containers they had as quickly as they could. Within minutes, three of them were dead, hacked to death by angry neighbours who accused them of stealing water.
Sri Lankan guards 'sexually abused girls' in Tamil refugee camp   A British medic held for months in an internment camp for Tamil civilians has revealed how military guards dealt out cruel punishments, while many suspected of links to Tiger rebels were taken away and have not been seen since. Sri Lanka coverage in full	Goodbye Chiang Kai-shek, says Taiwan in bid to rewrite history The tour guide was seething. "Chiang Kai-shek was a psychopathic dictator,'' she shouted, glaring at the woman in the gift shop of what used to be the main memorial to Taiwan's former leader.	Sri Lankan guards 'sexually abused girls' in Tamil refugee camp   A British medic held for months in an internment camp for Tamil civilians has revealed how military guards dealt out cruel punishments, while many suspected of links to Tiger rebels were taken away and have not been seen since.
'It's been 30 years since our daughter was taken North Korea admits its spies snatched a 13-year-old girl from the Japanese mainland. It says she is dead, but her parents' search for the truth goes on.	Goa: property frenzy and crime poison the hippy dream For decades, waves of westerners have swept through the beautiful Indian resort, some settling in search of the good life. But the trial of two men accused of killing a British teenager is just the latest source of tension in a community beset by fears over rising crime and economic insecurity.	Do they know it's Christmas?   RUBINA turns the card round and round in her hands, peering blankly at the Christmas trees on the front. Maybe they are foreign houses, she ventures after a while, giggling. It is clear she has no idea what the shapes are, though she stuck them to the card. In Sreepur village, Bangladesh, the Muslim women who make what are probably the UKs most ethical Christmas cards are certainly aware that Christmas is coming, but they have only the vaguest idea of the trappings that accompany it.
Afghan army takes fight to Taliban's heartland The Taliban were out there, somewhere in the darkness to the north of the jagged peaks of Masum Gar, just the other side of the Arghandab river. They had fired one rocket. Now they were ready to fire again.	Sania Mirza and Shoaib Malik give India and Pakistan a new reason to squabble When Sania Mirza and Shoaib Malik – an Indian tennis star and Pakistan's cricket hero – fell in love, it offended Hindu sensibilities and bolstered Muslim pride.	Goa: property frenzy and crime poison the hippy dream For decades, waves of westerners have swept through the beautiful Indian resort, some settling in search of the good life. But the trial of two men accused of killing a British teenager is just the latest source of tension in a community beset by fears over rising crime and economic insecurity.
No internet sex please, we're Indian, It may have given the world the Kama Sutra and the Bollywood wet sari scene, but it appears that India is not yet ready to be exposed to the delicate subject of sex on the internet.	Friendly fire SITTING IN her hospital bed with a plastic patch taped over her left eye, Robina ud Din was a picture of misery. The red-haired two-year-old had been flown to the US military hospital in Bagram, outside Kabul, the Afghan capital, after being injured when American soldiers opened fire on her family's car at a checkpoint in the eastern town of Khost.	Afghan leaders steal half of all aid, says US military Corrupt police and tribal leaders are stealing vast quantities of reconstruction aid that is intended to improve the lives of ordinary Afghans and turn them away from the Taliban

Special reports	Sri Lanka	India	Afghanistan

In brief
Britain and US protest after India tightens tourism rules Hospital shelled in Tamil no-fire zone N Korea's ill must choose morphine, amputation or pickled cabbage US to build Afghan super-madrassasFreed jihadis put Pakistan's war on terror 'back to square one' Nawaz Sharif warned cell awaits in Pakistan Australia terror link to 7 July attacks Asia braced for more shocks as quake toll heads for 2,000	China puts a continent in hock to its ambition to reclaim Taiwan Nato will be fighting the Taliban for years, says top general 'We must convince our people that the Taliban are no longer a threat' Politics on hold for the partying Bhutto Tamil civilians slaughtered as army shells 'no-fire zone' Mayawati - Power broker of the lower castes India launches offensive on Naxalite rebels as they near Delhi	Menace from missiles that span world Afghan leaders steal half of all aid, says US military Taliban butcher turns baker to fill his men's stomachs for war Glitz all over for Slumdog stars India pays couples to put off having children Buddha disrupts flight path at Delhi airport 'Our country is self-sufficient... but it's boiled rice and cabbage for breakfast, lunch and supper'

Copyright ©2009 Gethin Chamberlain. All rights reserved.