Others are trying to escape abusive fathers or partners wrongly believing that they will earn enough in a few months

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Others are trying to escape abusive fathers or partners, wrongly believing that they will earn enough in a few months to pay off their debts to the gangs who offer to get them into Britain illegally.They are beaten and raped into submission, ending up in brothels where they serve dozens of clients every day, usually without receiving any money for work that exposes them to infections such as syphilis and HIV - and to further beatings if they try to escape.In this new context, the old solutions to the problem of prostitution need to be radically reconsidered. Traffickers, mostly East European criminal gangs, are quick to exploit any change in the law, as they did when the EU expanded its boundaries at the beginning of May last year. But the global sex trade is flourishing in Britain, with vast profits going into the pockets of traffickers who are alert to every opportunity to expand an operation that has already ruined the lives of thousands of women. Most foreign sex workers in London come from Eastern Europe and South-east Asia, with a small but significant number from Africa; in some poor countries, according to campaigners against trafficking, women and girls are now their biggest export. Even now, most people in this country are barely aware that it is going on, in high streets not far from where they live and work. It has happened behind our backs, a product of the international criminal underworld that is the downside of globalisation. There were still no policemen, no ambulances, no fire brigade. The petrol tanks of the cars were starting to explode, spraying fire across the street.

No one could take in the extent of the damage because of the heat and the smoke. I ran down the Corniche, everyone else fleeing in the opposite direction, and walked into a mass of rubble and flaming cars. There were bodies burning in a car, flaming away, a terrible hand hanging outside a motorist's window. There was a man, a big, plump man lying on the pavement opposite the still-derelict, war-damaged hotel, a sack, it seemed, except for the skull, the top missing And there was a woman's hand in the road, still in a glove. There were customers coming bloodied from their broken-windowed restaurants and the great cancerous stain of smoke rising from the road outside the St George Hotel.

Beirut is my home-from-home, home from the dangers of Baghdad, and now here was Baghdad in Lebanon, a St Valentine's Day massacre in the streets of one of the Middle East's safest cities. My home is only a few hundred metres from the detonation and my first instinct was to look up, to search for the high-altitude Israeli planes that regularly break the sound barrier over Beirut. So what was his real role in the opposition? Was he merely a disinterested onlooker, gazing down from his palace walls at the small men of Lebanese politics as they bickered about gerrymandered political boundaries? Or did he have other ambitions? Yesterday proved that someone believed he did More from Robert Fisk. I saw the blast wave coming down the Corniche. I know two friends who have been buying large quantities of bottled water One has purchased a new generator Routine manoeuvres, you might say.