The anxious wives were on the phone again to their husbands in the Pakistani garrison town of Rawalpindi, a terrorist target where daily routine can turn to horror in an instant. "She's very worried," Abdul Habib said after putting down the receiver while visiting a friend's carpet shop close to the site of a bombing which left 35 people dead. Not far from the carpet shop, Junaid Anwar Baig's wife had also phoned. "She calls two or three times a day," said Bai...

Natalya Lepyoshkina smiled as she fed her three-week-old "children" a meal of warm cow's blood, rinsed them off with water and poured them into an array of glass jars. "They're happy, they're full," she said as the young leeches, squirming and swollen from their meal, settled into the containers that would be their home until the next feeding. Lepyoshkina's charges were among the three million leeches raised every year at the International Medical Leech Centre, an institu...