When a group of Syrian families arrived in Paisley this month, some locals came out and hugged them, but others posted racist abuse online – and stuck to their guns when exposed by the local press. So is there a problem in Paisley or across the country? And if so, what’s the best way to take it on?
Read MoreChen Jianyi is 17 months old. She has spent all but the first few weeks of her life in an orphanage in Shanghai. But Chen Jianyi is not an orphan. Somewhere in China, the parents of this little girl with fine, dark hair, fair skin and black eyes are most probably alive. No one except her mother will really know…
Read MoreThe public benches are crammed with restless, anxious-looking people as court 1A opens for business at 9.30am on a Monday morning. Some have the drawn faces that speak of a hard life and many are sighing, betraying their suspicion that this will be a long wait. Many have been here before.
Read Moreolly Pan Drops, Soor Plooms, Chocolate Italian Creams, Rich Butter Treacle, Cinnamon Balls, Liquorice Comfits. The names of the sweeties reel off my tongue, taking me back to summers spent in my mum’s car, when I “helped” as she sold boilings, toffees, chocolates and fudges to the corner shops and cafés of the west of Scotland.
Read MoreYou hear the sound of the engines first. Then the lights of the C-17 military transport aircraft appear as it dips across the evening sky, making ready to land on a runway just out of sight over the hill. Ken Scott is watching through the window of his mobile home. The sight of these planes returning from Afghanistan, often with a tragic cargo, has brought this old soldier to the realisation that wars will continue well beyond his lifetime. Yet he tracks the planes in the sky like an excited boy.
Read MoreThey brought him to Glasgow to be buried beside his "papa", so that the young, fallen soldier and his grandad could "go for a pint together when they feel like it".
Read MoreThe electric pruners make light work of the bare cox’s apple branches as David Bradley strips them back, preparing the orchard for a new season and the harvest to follow. The farmer cuts and thins out the trees but when he removes the chamois leather glove protecting his right hand, the loss of his index finger, ligaments and skin tissue is laid bare.
Read MoreThe old soldiers whose test case at the high court could open the door for up to 10,000 comrades
Gyanendra Rai gazes at the smoke as it curls upwards from the funeral pyre and thins out over the rooftops of Pashuputi Nath, the world's most sacred Hindu temple…
Read MoreThe computers were broken, but the glass in the monitors remained in one piece and the keyboards’ soft clicking left the children delighted as they stabbed at the letters with their fingers. Inside a bin shed on Glasgow’s Easterhouse estate, the seven children were making the best of the remorselessly grey day and the sparseness of playthings in this back court, turning it into their “office”.
Read MoreTheir six-month tour was almost over. This was their final mission. But over the course of one night, A (Grenadier) Company would undergo one of the most intense firefights of the war in Afghanistan.
Read MoreThere 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…
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