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'The blast left the soldier on his back, staring at the mess of his leg'   STRUGGLING TO sit up, Frederic Couture surveyed his torn trouser leg and the bloodied strips of flesh which were all that remained of his foot. A landmine had exploded, blowing the rest of it away. "I'm 21-years-old and I've lost my foot,'' he cried. "What am I going to do now?' "You'll be fine,'' his comrades tried to reassure him, pulling hard on the tourniquet they had tied just above the ragged wound. "You'll be fine.'' But it was not true - not really.		Love is a battlefield   AARTI is stumbling across the fields, tears streaming down her face. Every now and again, she turns to look back over her shoulder, terrified that she is being followed. The man had shown her a gun, threatened her. She knew if they caught her that her life would be in great danger. She started to cry again. It was the third time her mother had sold her to a stranger. All to keep her away from Sanjay, the boy she loved, the boy she had first seen on the rooftop of the neighbouring house in the city of Agra, home to the Taj Mahal, that most famous monument to love. The boy who was from the wrong caste, the boy her mother would never let her marry. Aarti reaches the road, hails a rickshaw, finds a phone and calls Sanjay. He calls the Love Commandos.
	Only human   "DANCE," the policeman says. The girls, naked from the waist up, jiggle for him. The camera, held by a tourist, pans around to another young woman, naked but for a bag of yellow grain held awkwardly in front of her groin. “Dance for me,” the policeman commands again. The young woman giggles a little, looks shy, hops from foot to foot. “Dance, dance.” But she won’t dance. The camera swings back to the others. They clap, dance, jump – just as they have been paid to do. This video is the trophy the tourists dreamed of when they set off into the jungles of the Andaman Islands on safari, because theirs was no ordinary safari. This is a human safari, and the prey is a “Stone Age” tribe only recently contacted, taking their first tentative steps towards the outside world, trusting, innocent and hugely vulnerable.	Hope dies for Africa's lost generation   CAROL Singwoma is weaving her way through the crowd, the eyes of the men on her dirty white knitted turtle-neck top and the little skirt covering her thin legs. Her skin is a deep black, her eyes big and open, her features attractive, if not quite pretty. She is giggling, her arms folded across her small breasts, aware of the attention of the men swigging from bottles of beer and swaying to the sound of the African dance music as they spill out of the open-air bar into a darkened side street on the edge of the Zambian crossroads town of Kapiri Mposhi.
A nation adrift   THERE is a small boy, standing up to his waist in the flood water, staring at the boats that have pulled up to the burial ground in the village of Bago Daro. I’m not sure at first what draws my eye to him. There are dozens of other people clustered on the shore and in the shallows, but there is something about him that seems to pull the eye back again and again. I look at him through a longer lens, tight in on his face. He looks straight back. It is the lack of emotion on his face, I realise, that is drawing me in. The others around him are smiling or grimacing; there is hope in their eyes, or despair.	In this cat-and-mouse war, the sniper is king   IT WAS the tank crew which spotted them first, four men in civilian clothing jumping out of the back of a pick-up truck carrying a rocket-propelled grenade launcher in the heart of Al Zubayr. Corporal Mark Harvey was the first sniper to react, dropping to his knee and fixing the man carrying the RPG in his sights. One shot, the militia man dropping like a stone, dead before he hit the ground. A clean shot to the head.
Death at a checkpoint   HIS name was Ahmed Hameed and he was 36 years old. He had taken the wrong turning up to the checkpoint on the July 14 Bridge which spans the Tigris on the south-eastern edge of what used to be known in Baghdad as the Green Zone, but which has now been renamed the International Zone. Now he lies in a body-bag a few yards away from the US army gun tower which opened fire on him as he tried to turn his moped around. Soldiers from the US Airborne surround him, those at the back peering over the shoulders of the ones in front to get a better view as the bag is unzipped. In the tower, the heavy .240-calibre machine-gun hangs limply on its mount, pointing at the ground. The gunner is leaning on the parapet, looking out across the city Ahmed's head is turned away to one side, his mouth open, the blood which streaks his face already dry. His right hand is by his side, the left curled across his stomach. The fingers stop a few inches from the inch-wide hole just above his groin. Someone has tried to stem the bleeding from another hole in the top of his chest, but there was too much blood. It has soaked his T-shirt, which is pulled up to expose the wounds, and poured down his body, mingling with his sweat, leaving pale rivulets across the skin.		One family's anguish amid India's child abduction epidemic   It happens all of a sudden. One moment Anil Lakhotia is talking, the next his face is buried in his hands and his shoulders are shaking. Life goes on around him in a small cafe down a side street in the city across the river from Kolkata: a man wipes food from his mouth, a boy sways past under the weight of a heavy box. Anil takes none of it in. Instead, he is lost in his own world of pain, a world that began when his young son was kidnapped and murdered in January 2009. The silence grows heavier before Anil tugs at a handkerchief and dabs at his eyes. "I used to try to scare him, to make him laugh," he says, struggling to find the words. He looks around, a grown man helpless, and the tears roll down his face. It seems a long time before he speaks again. "I can't imagine how scared he was when it happened to him and I was not there for him. Everyone wants to protect their child but we were helpless."
India's 21st century slave trade   Azam was seven when his mother decided the time had come for him to go out to work. There were too many mouths to feed and no money coming in since her husband deserted her. And there were no opportunities in their village of Basagaon, which lies at the farthest and most desperate end of Bihar, the poorest state in India. Here more than half the population exist below the official poverty line of 22 rupees [25p] a day.   Anjura Khatun knew what to do. The next time the child trafficker came to the village, they agreed a price. A few days later, Azam was on a train to Delhi.   The boy was initially proud of his new role as family breadwinner. "My mum does not work, so I took the responsibility for feeding my family," he told the Observer, puffing out his chest. He has a sister and a brother, but Azam, now nine, is the first born. And after two nightmarish years in Delhi, he is older and wiser.		The Red Brigade: empowering women of India to fight back   THE young women stride out along the dusty street that cuts through the Madiyav slum. Their bright red uniforms glow in the late afternoon sun and there is no mistaking their air of confidence.   Since the gang rape and murder of a 23-year-old student in Delhi in December, women in India have formed the Red Brigade, a civilian group that aims to empower females to take back the streets, writes Gethin Chamberlain.   The men loitering around the market move aside warily, like a pack of wolves who have just discovered that the sheep are armed. They have good reason to be nervous: this is the Red Brigade, intelligent and sassy young Indian women who have had enough of being groped, gawped at and much, much worse. Enough, they have said: we are fighting back and reclaiming the streets.
	The real Slumdog Millionaires     AMID a narrow warren of side streets close to the mosque that dominates the skyline on the edge of the mega-slum of Dharavi, in the heart of Mumbai, a young boy tilts his head back and stares up at the narrow strip of blue which is all that can be seen of the sky. Rickety warehouses crowd in from all sides, their high sheet-metal walls and overhanging asbestos roofs blocking out the sun, plunging the dirt streets below into a gloomy half-light, though it is nearly midday.
Red hackles rise as the Black Watch stride out   TAM o'shanter on his head, pistol in his belt, the commanding officer of the Black Watch is striding ahead through the crowded market place in the centre of the town of Az Zubayr. Yesterday this street was thought still too dangerous to drive down in a soft-skinned Land Rover, but the CO has decided enough is enough. After days of sitting back and watching his troops come under attack from militiamen armed with mortars, AK47s and rocket propelled grenades...The order has gone out that the Black Watch is going to patrol the streets of Zubayr on foot.		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.
'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	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.
	Caught in the middle as Amarah explodes   "I WANT this moving now, now, now," he screamed, and there was another burst of gunfire overhead. Then they were there, the Warriors, with their 30mm cannon and chain guns, appearing over the crest of the bridge, just as the cavalry should.	Last days of the tiger   WHEN he found the bull the tiger had killed, Mangya Moghiya set to work quickly. The wily old poacher knew the tiger would be back soon, and he wished to stack the odds in his favour. He began digging a series of holes and inserted the inverted T-shaped metal plates attached by chains to his leg traps before stamping the soil back down. Then he retired to the safety of a tree and waited. Mangya was 55, extraordinarily thin, bald and almost deaf, but he had a lifetime of experience killing tigers in Rajasthan’s Ranthambhore tiger reserve, one of 37 national parks set up by the Indian government to protect the critically endangered animals. He knew the animal would return.
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.		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. This was her punishment, the older woman said, preparing to strike a match: Rekha had failed again to deliver a son and it would be better for everyone if she were dead. Suddenly the door burst open and her neighbours rushed in, roused by the frantic screaming. They bundled Rekha and her daughter out of the house, never to return.
The sisters who took on the IRA and won   THE men's toilet in Magennis's bar in central Belfast is not a large room. There is a small sink to the right of the door on the way in, a single stall to the rear of the room containing a WC, and a stainless steel trough on the same wall as the sink, with room for two people. There are a couple of adverts on the wall above the trough; below it is the obligatory puddle of urine on the floor. In the chipped brown varnish on the back of the door, the initials PIRA - standing for Provisional Irish Republican Army - have been scratched.	'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.
	What really happened to Shehla Masood?   Shehla Masood had a secret. She was about to break her silence, scuppering plans for a US$4.7 billion diamond mine, exposing a nest of corruption and rocking the political establishment to its core. Then she was murdered. It may sound like the plot of a prime-time TV drama, but this is a scenario India's Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) is faced with as it searches for clues to explain how Masood, an anti-corruption activist, met her death. Masood had devoted herself to using freedom of information requests to uncover the misuse of hundreds of thousands of dollars of state funds and wrongdoing at the highest levels: many in India think that murder is considerably more plausible than the original police assertion that she had shot herself in the throat. No weapon was found at the scene.	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. Her right leg was missing a chunk of flesh and had been gashed. The little girl is one of thousands of casualties hidden away from public view in hospitals across Sri Lanka, guarded by soldiers and police who roam the wards. As soon as they are fit enough to be moved, the injured are returned to the grim internment camps that are home to approximately 300,000 people
Home thoughts that hurt as the black snow falls   WHEN the soldiers awoke it was everywhere, the oily cinders coating every surface, falling like tiny flakes of black snow. On their sleeping bags, on their skin, in their hair, breathing it in, impossible to brush off, melting into diesel-dark streaks, seeping into their pores. Overnight the wind had changed and the black clouds from the burning oil pipelines and the fire pits lit by the Iraqis, which had darkened the skyline to the north and east for days, had drifted over the camp, leaving a trail of ash and soot in its wake. Now the cloud had passed, but the black dust continued to fall, creeping into the vehicles, into the food, into the early morning cups of tea and coffee freshly brewed on the stoves dug into little pits outside every clump of tents.		The peril within   THE track ahead is blocked. For mile after mile, the trees on either side have been felled and turned into a natural roadblock. Deep pits have been dug to hinder any attempt to drive into the jungle. Someone here really does not want visitors. From the knee-high undergrowth comes the occasional hiss of a snake moving unseen. A little further on, there are two sentries, armed with bows and arrows. “Go forward and someone will meet you,” they say. Suddenly, the trees open on to a clearing and the most unexpected sight. Here, in the heart of the jungle, someone has built an imposing war memorial. And what makes it all the more extraordinary is that it does not honour the fallen of the Indian state: this memorial, the Hindi script proclaims, is to the martyrs of the Maoist Naxal insurgency.
They poured out of their Warriors and let fly with grenades, guns, everything   Just after dawn yesterday the Warrior crashed through the wall of the house tucked away down a side road in the Iraqi town of Al Zubayr, west of Basra. The first inkling those sleeping inside had that anything was wrong was when it hit the 10ft high perimeter wall, accelerating all the time. Bricks flying everywhere, it plunged on straight into the side of the house, the driver wincing as debris showered down on the metal hatch above his head. By the time those inside the house realised what was happening, it was too late.	Litany of rape and abuse in Darfur region   ONE man held her arms, others held her legs. They took it in turns to rape her. It lasted six hours. When the baby is born in four months time she will keep it. But a part of her will always think of it as her Janjaweed child.
Holy man or hoax?   The vast, high-ceilinged hall is overflowing with people, thousands upon thousands of them, craning their necks, eager, attentive, oblivious to the heat of the Indian afternoon, oblivious to everything but the knowledge that they are about to get a glimpse of God. Barry Pittard sits cross-legged on the floor of the ashram. The heady fragrance of incense, marigolds and jasmine fills the air, mingling with the chanting and rhythmic hand clapping, overwhelming his senses. He recalls everything about that first glimpse of the tiny man with the orange robe and huge mop of Afro hair: how the man’s deep dark eyes bored into his own, how the man stopped, stepped off the stage and cut through the crowd towards him. How the man placed his feet against his legs and stood there for a long time. And how Barry knew, with absolute certainty, that he had finally found his guru. “I’d found my home,” says Pittard. “I felt I’d finally come to the place that I’d been looking for all of my life.”		'Even the stones were destroyed'   HALAWA'S body lay on the mountainside where she fell when the bombs exploded, her womb torn open, the tiny body of her unborn baby lying by her side, the blood soaking into the soil congealing in the heat of the sun. She was nine months pregnant; her friends said she was due to give birth to her fifth child within days.
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.	Convert or die, Hindu lynch mobs tell fleeing Christians   HE had been standing by the car when the men closed in around him. They left the talking to Prashant Digal, a teacher and organiser for the local VHP youth wing. ‘Why did you bring these people here?’, he demanded, punching Sudhir in the head. ‘Take the vehicle and go. Leave them here for us.’ They surrounded him, a young Hindu, and slapped him around again. No one came to his aid. ‘If you stay, we will burn you with them in the car. You will all be killed. Just leave them,’ they told him. But he did not, which was a decent thing for a frightened boy to do.
	Shallow grave is testimony to Sudan's lies   THE grave is just a mound of earth, no more than two feet high at its peak and 10ft in diameter. It lies about 50 yards from the edge of the village of Nami in North Darfur. The nine bodies buried had lain on the ground for more than a week before the Janjaweed finally left the village and the people who had escaped the killing felt brave enough to return.	Monsoon in child labour storm FASHION chain Monsoon, named Britain's most ethical trader, is using Third World suppliers who paid workers just 12p an hour. A News of the World investigation reveals some factories making garments for the company - slogan "Living our values and ethics since 1973" - employing children and one even using kids under nine.
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.		Burning Issue   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. Everyone in the village knows what should happen next. The child will scream loudly as the flesh begins to blister. Held down, he'll writhe in agony. Again and again, the poker will be jabbed at his belly. The more the child screams, the happier everyone will be, because the villagers of Mirgitand, in the East Singhbhum district of India's Jharkhand state, believe the distended stomachs of their famished children can be cured by branding them with red-hot pokers.
GORDON BROWN WEDS TODAY   CHANCELLOR Gordon Brown will today end his long bachelor years and wed long -time girlfriend Sarah Macaulay. The man who has made prudence his by-word has finally decided to throw caution to the wind amid amazing secrecy. But he finally came clean last night after the Record discovered the banns posted at his local registrar's office.	Suicide and suffering grip Europe's nation of orphans   THE HEADMASTER glanced around the classroom. "Hands up, those of you with parents who are working abroad,'' he told them. A forest of arms shot up; out of a class of 21 pupils at the school in Liteni in northern Romania, only three children kept their hands on the desks. "Who do you stay with?'' the headmaster, Gheorghe Moga, asked. "My grandmother,'' replied one of the 10-year-olds with his hand in the air. "My cousin,'' said an 11-year-old. Mr Moga went around the room. Grandmother, cousin, grandmother, cousin ... Romania, a nation mired in poverty, is counting the true cost of living on the edge of western Europe. Hundreds of thousands of parents are leaving their children with friends or relatives in order to go abroad in search of work.

Copyright ©2011 Gethin Chamberlain. All rights reserved.