There is nothing romantic about modern, seafaring piracy. Heavily armed and ruthless, today’s ocean-going bandits terrorise cargo ships, luxury yachts and even passenger liners. Audrey Gillan writes about Somali pirates
Read MoreThe two small vessels were travelling across the Indian Ocean at high speed, their occupants wielding rocket-propelled grenades, AK47s and machine guns. Within minutes, they had gained on the bulky container ship. As he stood on the bridge of the MV Rozen, Captain Priayantha Perera sounded the alarm. He knew what was coming: pirates.
Read MoreThe day starts at different times when you work as private security detail (PSD) in Iraq, depending on what the operation is. Certainly, if we have to go out of the GZ [Green Zone] then we can’t leave before a certain time in the morning because there are curfews. We don’t tend to travel at night and we always wait for first light.
Read MoreIt was a story of a clash of two cultures, of the abduction of a 12-year-old mixed-race Muslim girl taken by her father to Pakistan amid claims that she would be forced into marriage with a man more than twice her age.
Read MoreMost Nepalis live on about £1 a day. A Gurkha soldier earns around £1,000 a month. Little wonder the country's young men will do whatever it takes to join the British army.
Read MoreThey are bankers, abattoir workers, solicitors and HGV drivers, but they also have a second job – part-time soldiers. Foreign correspondent of the year Audrey Gillan was given unique access to the Territorial Army in southern Iraq, where she found out what it's like to be fixing the office photocopier one day – and getting shot at the next.
Read MoreThe note from the Newspaper Publishers Association said: “Women war correspondents: the MoD advised that the marines and the 16 Air Assault Brigade wished not to have women.” It came as a shock. After months of rigorous training, fretting over kit, getting fit and steeling myself for war, I was told that because of my gender…
Read MoreThe path to the village of Gonipur is thick with mud, forcing walkers to go barefoot for fear of losing a sandal. It is half an hour from the main road to this village, and the main road is a two-hour bus ride from the bustling town of Sylhet in Bangladesh’s north-eastern corner.
Read MoreJames Millar was born by the sea in 1965. His father ran his own building business and his mother taught children with learning disabilities. His sister Sarah was six years older and always had her head in a book. Three times a year they would go on holiday, once to another part of England, and twice abroad. The Millars liked their English lives. They were well enough off to spoil their son, who has strong memories of being taken sailing when he was three, of having a Chopper bicycle…
Read MoreFerteze Nimari had lost two of her brothers and her husband was forced to bury all the dead in one grave. Later, packed into a stifling bus with sixty fellow Kosovars, the couple held onto each other as he clutched a strap suspended from the ceiling. The bus stopped in the Stankovac I refugee camp in Macedonia and they told their story. ‘The tank came to our village of Sllovi. The Serb neighbours said not to worry – it was just there to observe us. But by lunchtime the next day a teenage girl lay dead in the street. Then another 15 people…
Read MoreI went to see Mohammad Sarwar one March morning in 1996, a good 14 months before he became Britain’s first Muslim MP. I drove to the office of his cash and carry firm that day, quite sure he was every bit the coming man. I had no sense just how coming – or indeed how going – and little notion of what my own part would be in this Clydeside drama…
Read MoreIt is 6 a.m. in this sweltering southern city and Elizabeth Zogob is splashing holy water onto the grave of Elvis Presley. She places tiny crosses woven from palm leaves against his cast-iron tombstone in hopes, she says, that "God might watch over my boy."
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