February 2007 - Posts
By Ian Williams, NBC News correspondent
The front page of Wednesday’s "Iran News" carries a picture of a smiling President Ahmadinejad with two young children, while an article alongside claims Iran is close to industrial-scale enrichment of uranium, and there’ll be no going back. The "Tehran Times" has Iran ready to strike the U.S. "anywhere" if attacked. Pretty ominous stuff.
But turn a few pages and there’s a rather different take on the Great Satan - a rundown on the Oscars with a large photograph of a smiling Al Gore, Oscar in hand. There’s also a piece about David Beckham’s likely impact on U.S. soccer, together with an interview with the former captain of the Iranian national team, who is now coaching a team in Los Angeles, and paints a glowing picture of his time in the States. "I see the potential and talent here," he says.
It’s a rather intriguing picture, as indeed it has been since I stepped off the aging Mahan Air Airbus at Imam Khomeini International Airport early this morning after the eight-hour flight from Bangkok.
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By Mark Mullen, NBC News Correspondent
For all the public flogging and private government meetings about the problem of content piracy in China, perhaps the best illustration of the problem can be measured by the remarks of another American I heard at a lunch here in Beijing.
The statement went something like "Piracy is terrible; so terrible that I plan on limiting my DVD purchases to only 100 this year."
The remark was followed by peels of laughter.
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By Jane Arraf, NBC News Correspondent
Despite U.S. assertions that the most lethal roadside bombs in Iraq are being imported from Iran, the U.S. military over the past year has increasingly found them being both assembled and manufactured in Iraq, officials tell NBC News.
At a briefing in Baghdad this month, U.S. officials publicly revealed for the first time what they called evidence that Iran was manufacturing explosively formed penetrators --EFPs -- a type of roadside bomb which has emerged as the biggest danger to U.S. troops here.
An intelligence analyst and explosives expert said they were being manufactured in machine shops in Iran and smuggled across the border to extremist Shiite groups. They were believed to be manufactured only in Iran, the analyst said.
This week, in the first statement of the kind, the coalition said Iraqi and U.S. forces had arrested two insurgents in an EFP workshop in a raid near Hilla south of Baghdad on February 17.
"The two were in the process of assembling EFPs," the military said.
Lt Gen. Raymond Odierno, commander of ground forces in Iraq, told NBC News this week that while the technology had initially come from Iran, it had since migrated.
"They initially started to come from Iran," said Odierno in an interview. "I think now we see some of the technologies -- some of the training -- being imported from Iran and probably being constructed here."
"I can't tell you they're exclusively coming from Iran," he said. "I will tell you that all the things, the indicators, that we have here [are] that the materials, the training and even a lot of the funding for the insurgency, for these types of technologies, are in fact coming from or being supported by the Quds force or other people from Iran."
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"What’s your name? What’s your father's name?" asked the manager of the Pakistan-Afghanistan Friendship Bus at the dusty bus station in Peshawar, the capital of Pakistan’s Northwest Frontier Province.
He quickly wrote down the names and paternal names of more than 100 passengers all trying to travel to Jalalabad, Afghanistan on two separate buses on Feb. 13. We were surprised that we didn’t need to show our passports or any travel documents, but since we had valid visas, we produced them. All that was required was to pay 250 Pakistani rupees, or $4.00 each, to board.
On the bus were many of our fellow Pashtun tribesmen. No one was worried traveling across the border without travel documents. No one seemed to care.
"I make this trip every Thursday," said an old man with a white beard. "I visit my relatives; no one ever disturbs me, why should they?" he asked us.
We had to agree.
To read the rest of the blog, click here: $4 for a one-way trip to Afghanistan.
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By Bruno Silvestre, NBC News Producer
The City of Lights has a problem. It can’t decide what kind of world capital it wants to be and it may be gradually losing its soul in an effort to preserve it.
I have been living in London for more than three years and a few weeks ago, I went back to what’s essentially my hometown to visit friends and family as I do on a regular basis. Thanks to the Eurostar, it takes about as much time to go to Paris by high-speed train as it does to go across London by tube.
Every time I step out of the Gare du Nord it strikes me again just how much Paris is a magnificent city that boasts incomparable assets. Its reputation as a tourist mecca is unsurpassed.
Landing in the French capital is like a dream come true for millions around the world. Culture is everywhere and the city presents an exceptional mix of atmosphere and history, architecture and "joie de vivre," romance and art. Not surprisingly, France in 2006 was again the number one destination for tourists worldwide.
That’s great news for the nation’s coffers. The $45.5 billion spent in France represents a vital boost for the national economy and provides jobs for hundred of thousands. Rude waiters and obnoxious taxi drivers did not succeed in deterring 78 million visitors from exploring the country. And most of them came to (or traveled through) Paris.
And yet, for a world capital, there’s something missing. There is no buzz.
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By Jane Arraf, NBC News Correspondent
Military officials here are fond of saying that progress can coexist with violence. I think it's true -- one doesn't necessarily cancel out the other. Nor does the experience of one of the many Iraqis grappling with almost unimaginable losses make the kind of sweeping political statement that some readers see lurking there.
My colleague, who wrote about his preoccupation with people dying, would be one of the last people to say that things were better under Saddam. He's just trying to get by, not make comparisons.
"Blood is still blood and human beings are still human beings," he says. That doesn't mean he doesn't have a right to the fear and uncertainty and overwhelming grief that characterizes life in Baghdad for a lot of people now.
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By Kevin Burke, NBC News Cameraman
The beauty, grandeur, complexity and savagery of Antarctica are almost impossible to convey in words and pictures.
It’s hard to explain the awe-inspiring sight of a 20-ton humpback whale launching himself completely out of the water and disappearing out of sight again. Or to convey the feeling of being in the silent and surreal presence of icebergs that have been wandering aimlessly for centuries in Antarctic currents.
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| NBC News/ Kevin Burke |
| Neko Harbor in the Antarctic Peninsula. |
Same goes for the sight of 100,000 King penguins and their chicks congregating on a beach the size the size of two football fields. Or trying to verbalize what it’s like seeing looming glaciers teetering precariously on the edge of collapse and destruction. Or the sight of a hungry leopard seal taunting a raft full of tourists.
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| NBC News/ Kevin Burke |
| Gentoo Penguin in the Antarctic Peninsula. |
I have traveled to the Antarctic Peninsula in pursuit of a life-long goal to see as much of the planet as time allows, and to explore a place that few people ever get to experience.
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| NBC News/ Kevin Burke |
| Ice Arch in the Gerlache Strait that runs through the Antarctic Peninsula. |
My impressions of this vast frontier at the bottom of the earth are still fresh and forming. At this point the only thing I’m certain of is that this will not be my last visit to the seventh continent.
Kevin Burke is an NBC News cameraman, most recently on assignment in Iraq.
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By Jane Arraf, NBC News Correspondent
Whatever most of us dream of, it isn't normally to die a natural death.
This is a country that's been scarred by the last four years. For many of the families and friends of the hundreds of thousands of Iraqi civilians who have been killed since 2003, scarred much more by this war than the years they survived under Saddam Hussein.
"Dying normally has become a fantasy to Iraqis -- a wish we dream of having." These are the words written by one of our talented Iraqi staff. He can't write under his own name for security reasons, but here are some of the things that weigh on his mind.
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By Carol Grisanti, NBC News Producer
Sipping hot spicy tea and enjoying local delicacies on the roof of the Lwara Fort, a red brick outpost of the Pakistani army, 6,000 feet up in the snow covered mountains of North Waziristan and about a half mile from the Afghan border, it felt more après ski than a view onto one of the most dangerous frontlines in the war on terror.
"That’s the Chandi Gap where most of the firefights between the militants, the coalition and us takes place," said Brig. Rizwan Akhtar, the Pakistan fort’s commander, as he pointed out a pass in the icy hills leading straight into Afghanistan.
We were in Taliban country. The Taliban and al-Qaida militants hold sway here; not the Pakistani army.
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| Carol Grisanti / NBC News |
| A Pakistani border guard at Lwara Fort in North Waziristan, Pakistan. |
"It’s physically not possible to seal the border by deploying troops," said Maj. Gen. Azhar Ali Shah, Commander 7th Division, North Waziristan. "But we make it very difficult for them."
The army was keen to show us just how difficult it is to police this inhospitable terrain, a long mountain border of jagged peaks, some as high as 15,000 feet, deep rugged ravines and countless treacherous paths successfully traversed by smugglers for centuries.
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By Anna Forberg, NBC News Researcher
The streets of China have rapidly become flooded with individuals and families, suitcases in hand, hurrying to get home for Spring Festival. And as the Chinese New Year quickly approaches, the transition from the Year of the Dog to the Year of the Pig has become big business, apparent through the streets, stores, and restaurants of China.
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| Kin Cheung / AP |
| Vendors show their pig toys at a new year market in Hong Kong on Wednesday in preparation for the Year of Pig celebrations. |
Chinese street vendors have saturated their collection of items for sale with pig paraphernalia – pig window stickers, piggy banks, pig shirts, stuffed pigs, and all sorts of other goods.
Local merchants aren’t the only once embracing the porker; larger international companies with stores in China also are catching on - and cashing in – on the Year of the Pig.
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By Jane Arraf, NBC News Correspondent
If the new security plan in Baghdad works, it will work street by street. On some streets in the Dora neighborhood Thursday, American and Iraqi soldiers took the first steps to try to reverse the slide of a city dangerously divided by sectarian violence.
In some parts of the neighborhood in the south of Baghdad, residents say the Mahdi Army, a Shiite militia loyal to Muqtada al-Sadr, has forced Sunnis out of their homes and taken over the houses.
"The soldiers are going to those houses now and telling the Mahdi Army they have two weeks to leave," one resident told me, marveling at the idea. She said the soldiers -- American and Iraqi -- were telling them if they couldn't produce a legal title to the homes, they would have to go.
It's a key part of the plan to stabilize Baghdad and one of the most difficult to implement.
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By Mary Murray, NBC News Producer
Staying on top of events is no easy task for the average Cuban.
Cuba’s communist government regulates the Internet as a controlled substance.
At the same time, the state owns all domestic media outlets – managing 19 newspapers, 20 television stations and 87 radio outlets across the island.
But one domestic information source has slipped through the state’s fingers: the traditional word on the street. Cubans even have a name for it: they call it "Radio Bemba."
Even though most folks trust it as much, if not more, than what they read in the Communist Party’s "Granma" newspaper, Radio Bemba is just Cuban slang for the rumor mill, the grapevine, street-side chitchat as news.
More times than not, some nugget of news rolling along Radio Bemba’s "airwaves" turns out to be right, or at least to contain a grain of truth.
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By Jane Arraf, NBC News Correspondent
There's very little more serious than accusations that another country's government is arranging the killing of American soldiers. But now the U.S. says it didn't mean it.
On Sunday, a senior U.S. military intelligence analyst told the world's media at a long-awaited briefing about accusations that the most lethal roadside bombs in Iraq could be traced back to "the highest levels" of the Iranian government. Today, the U.S. military spokesman told the same reporters that wasn't what they meant to imply.
And President Bush, asked at his first news conference of the year about the apparent contradiction, said they didn't know how far up the orders went and that it didn't really matter.
When asked what assurance he can give Americans that the intelligence is accurate, Bush replied, "What we do know is that the Quds Force was instrumental in providing these deadly IEDs to networks inside of Iraq. We know that.
"And we also know that the Quds Force is a part of the Iranian government. That’s a known. What we don’t know is whether or not the head leaders of Iran ordered the Quds Force to do what they did.
"But here’s my point: Either they knew or didn’t know. And what matters is that they’re there."
The Quds (Jerusalem) force is an elite group of Iran's Republican Guard.
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By Jane Arraf, NBC News Correspondent
"No recording devices permitted" read the invitation to the briefing on Iran. At the Coalition Press Office, it wasn’t called Iran, or a briefing on accusations that Iran is helping attack U.S. soldiers in Iraq. In the language of international accusations, the topic of the press briefing was "subject matter related to a neighboring country." Everyone knew what it was though.
The U.S. administration for months has accused Iran of sending weapons and technology across the border to be used in attacks on American forces in Iraq. It promised to reveal evidence backing up those charges but officials weren't comfortable that they had enough evidence they could present publicly without jeopardizing their sources.
So on Sunday nearly 50 journalists were packed into a crowded briefing room in Baghdad to listen to officials whom we weren't allowed to identify, talking about things they weren’t allowed to fully explain.
The senior U.S. military official told us he should be referred to as a "senior Coalition defense official" rather than an "American official." After journalists pressed the point that accusations this serious were being made by officials who wouldn't divulge their nationalities, he agreed that he and his two colleagues could be referred to as "U.S. officials."
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By Adrienne Mong, NBC News Producer
Beads of sweat are collecting on Huang Wei’s unblemished forehead.
It’s 1:30 p.m. in an old warehouse near Shanghai Baosteel Corporation in the city’s port, and this 8-year-old is working hard on his Cha-Cha.
"One-two-three-four! One-two-three-four!"
The dance instructor at the Chou Yan Dance School counts aloud as Huang and about 20 other Chinese children – ages 6 to 9 years old – follow along with intricate footwork.
These kids have been practicing and rehearsing Latin dance routines for weeks, hoping to put on a big show for the Spring Festival on Sunday.
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| NBC News |
VIDEO: Salsa in Shanghai
In a new trend toward more extra-curricular activities, Chinese children learn how to strut their stuff during salsa classes in Shanghai.
A row of tiny little faces stare ahead, fixed in concentration.
When the music filters in, echoing off the wood floors and cement walls, slender arms strike out gracefully, feet shuffle in speedy and, more importantly, rhythmic fashion.
Most of these students have been taking Latin dance classes for at least six months, some for several years.
And the fruit of their efforts is readily apparent. All of them move in tandem as parents watch from the fringe, pride etched on their faces.
It’s a startlingly development in China. Not so much the Latin dance craze -- although of course that’s somewhat unexpected. What’s surprising is the apparent radical transformation in the way Chinese parents are bringing up their children.
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By Mark Mullen, NBC News Correspondent
On the way to an errand today, there was a nicely dressed man walking down the block in front of me who brazenly broke the law in broad daylight: he spat. It’s a four-letter practice not only common in China, but also one now being targeted by the Beijing government and volunteers in the run-up to the 2008 Olympic Games.
While every Olympic host city hopes for positive publicity from the games, perhaps no other city (not to mention country) in recent memory has banked on the games as an opportunity to show the world it is a sophisticated and worldly player; a global coming-out party if you will.
To sell that message, The People’s Republic wants its citizens to be on good behavior: no spitting, cutting in lines or other behavior which would not be good manners to describe.
To get out the message, China just kicked off a public civility campaign with a rally complete with a slogan chanting "We can always improve" and banners telling people: "Don't cut in line."
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By Jane Arraf, NBC News Correspondent
The strange saga of an Iranian diplomat abducted in Baghdad took another turn Wednesday with the revelation that Iraqi security officers possibly acting on orders from a rogue government department had abducted him.
The diplomat, assigned to the Iranian Embassy in Baghdad, was taken at gunpoint on Sunday by kidnappers wearing Iraqi security uniforms.
Iran's accusation that the United States was to blame has threatened to raise tension between the two countries even further.
Iraqi Foreign Minister Hoshyar Zebari said the Iraqi government was holding four Iraqi military officers in connection with the kidnapping. He told NBC News in an interview that they were investigating whether the men acted on their own or were acting on orders from government officials.
"The government is determined to punish those responsible if they were part of any government entity," Zebari said." I don't want to jump to any conclusions but the type of the operations, the people who were arrested by the security forces, give us some doubts. There may be entities acting on their own."
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By Adrienne Mong, NBC News Producer
For the first time in five weeks, it’s dark outside my hotel window.
Looming above our hotel is a 68-storey skeleton. Normally by day, I can see hundreds of men in hard hats and thick coats climbing over the steel girders. And at night, hundreds more are usually scattered around the base and the cranes swing back and forth under a blaze of headlights, doing what I can’t exactly tell, but whatever it is, they sure have been busy.
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| Adrienne Mong / NBC News |
| Migrant workers scramble to keep pace with their construction deadline. |
After all, Tower 3 of the China World Trade Center needs to be done by next year. At 990 feet, it will be Beijing’s tallest building and one of the city’s more prominent silhouettes welcoming visitors for the 2008 Summer Olympics.
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By Jim Maceda, NBC News Correspondent
Watching the
15-minute cockpit video that was classified by the U.S. military for almost four years, until it was leaked and published Tuesday by The Sun newspaper, is like watching a Greek tragedy unfold.
Knowing that British Lance Cpl. Matty Hull is about to become an early casualty in the war in Iraq, at the hands of two seasoned U.S. fighter pilots, is almost unbearable to witness.
In hindsight, the stops and starts of conversation between the pilots and their ground controllers near Basra, in southern Iraq, sound so confused; so flip, dude; so full of misjudgments, and lethal mistakes.
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By Jane Arraf, NBC News Correspondent
Outside my window in Baghdad there's a man selling balloons from a cart. In the cold gray light of this city where people now try to blend in to stay out of trouble, the balloons stand out like a particularly garish rainbow.
It's just a one-man wooden stall, but it's a reminder of the resilience here -- not just of the balloon seller but also of the man who imports the balloons, the drivers who bring them to the markets and the parents still willing to walk down the street to buy them for their children.
That's always been one of the disconnects here -- the signs of normal life that persist in the midst of widespread violence between Sunnis and Shiites.
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By Adrienne Mong, NBC News Producer
"Sure, no problem, you can go to the Internet café," said Ms. Guo, the café's owner. We were negotiating over the telephone on filming web surfers during peak traffic time.
"Come by between seven and nine," she continued.
"Ok, between seven and nine in the evening," I replied.
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| Adrienne Mong / NBC News |
| An already packed Beijing Internet café early before 8 a.m. |
"No, in the morning."
"What?? Are you sure?" I tried to keep down the creeping doubt in my voice, for fear of offending her.
"Oh, yes, most definitely there will be a lot of people," she insisted. "It's free of charge between seven and nine in the morning. Trust me, lots of people."
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