September 2007 - Posts
By Richard Engel, Middle East bureau chief
They are becoming the poster boys for excess. A new "photo cartoon" circulating in Baghdad among security contractors and some U.S. soldiers – and the laughter it’s generating here – speaks for itself.
"Blackwater has become a symbol of testosterone-fueled excess," one security contractor told me, who like most did not want to give his name because the industry is under such scrutiny.
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| The caption of a cartoon circulating in Baghdad reads: "I'm sorry, I can't hear you over the sound of how awesome I am." |
Blackwater has been at the center of a crisis here after a shooting – Blackwater says a gunfight – in Baghdad on Sept .16. Iraqi police and witnesses allege Blackwater guards shot dead at least 11 Iraqis. One officer told me today the dead toll has climbed to 17. Blackwater has remained tightlipped about the incident, only saying its guards were attacked and defended themselves under fire.
But a picture is emerging of at least some of what happened.
Two American sources who spoke on the condition of anonymity have told me that during the incident at least one Blackwater guard ordered his colleague to "stop shooting." The guard went so far as to draw a weapon to try to force him to stop.
"It was a Mexican standoff," a contractor said.
The account was also published today in the New York Times and Washington Post.
Other security companies here are now diving for cover. They worry the Blackwater crisis will jeopardize the entire security industry, essential for shipping nearly every import to Iraq.
CONTINUED >>
By Yonatan Pomrenze, NBC News Producer
The group of men were gathered by the side of the highway and quickly converged on any car or van that came to a stop near them.
A quick discussion of professions (bricklayer, woodworker, etc.) and salary (usually from $40 to $60 for the day) ensued before a few men hopped into the car, considering themselves lucky enough to have found a construction job for the day.
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| Yonatan Pomrenze / NBC News |
| Day laborers wait for jobs on a highway outside of Moscow. |
It was a scene that would look familiar to anyone following the debate over illegal immigration in the United States, but the highway was just outside Moscow and the undocumented workers were mostly from Tajikistan and Uzbekistan.
CONTINUED >>
By Adrienne Mong, NBC News Producer
CAN THO PROVINCE, Vietnam –
One of the great gentlemanly travel writers of a bygone era, Norman Lewis, once observed that "the lives of the people of the Far East are lived in public.... The street is the extension of the house and there is no sharp dividing line between the two."
Here in the Mekong Delta in Vietnam, the street is the river.
And the people's lives are played out on the muddy waters of the world's ninth longest river system.
One afternoon, off the River Can Tho, everywhere we looked there was human activity.
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| Adrienne Mong / NBC News |
| One of many lime traders plies her trade at the floating market on the Mekong Delta, Vietnam.
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An elderly man with a caved-in chest was washing his neck. A woman swung in a hammock hooked up inside a boat cabin. Teenage girls, fresh from a meal at a nearby hawker stall, rinsed their feet and hands in the water. A young man squatting on a makeshift dock was sorting eggs. Thin long boats cruised the canals, more than a few of them sporting a potted green shrub and the day's washing. On some, dogs or cats lounged in the shade – one even sported a rooster pecking around the deck.
Further along the river, the pace stepped up. A lone fisherman gathered his net from the water, the skeleton of a new bridge (one of two in the immediate area) looming over him. We chanced upon a crane unloading loose rock and gravel from a barge onto a construction site by the riverbank. Not far, on another barge, four men sifted slowly through a pile of wood logs a dozen feet tall.
Read the rest of Adrienne Mong’s blog about life along the Mekong Delta in the Daily Nightly blog. Her story about the water issues along the Mekong Delta is part of NBC Nightly News with Brian Williams special series "Thirsty Planet" that has been airing all week. Mark Mullen’s special report from the Mekong Delta will air on Friday evening.
By Ian Williams, NBC News correspondent
BANGKOK, Thailand –
Here's a paradox: Myanmar's ruling generals are trying very hard to keep us, professional journalists, out of the country, yet news and images of the pro-democracy protests and the bloody crackdown are firmly in the global spotlight.
That's thanks largely to two factors: a large and active exile community on the outside, together with cyber dissidents inside the country with access to technology that wasn't available the last time they rose up against the generals.
In the YouTube era, it' has revolutionized the way the story is being covered.
CONTINUED >>
By Martin Fletcher, NBC News Tel Aviv Bureau Chief
You hear a lot these days about sustainable resources, forest degradation, sensitive ecosystems and water-borne disease. So much that it all begins to fade into incomprehensible eco-jargon. A bit like the war of the Bosnian-Herzogovians against the Serbo-Croats, which one writer described as a war of the unspellables against the unpronounceables. It all seems a long way away. What’s it got to do with me?
But up close and personal, it’s different. In a clinic near the Masai Mara in Kenya, the smallest unit of the Kenyan health system, my NBC News team and I crammed into the tiny room of surgical officer Richard Lemiso, and watched as a stream of worried mothers entered carrying their sick babies. Most had walked miles to visit this last beacon of hope, the man in the white coat.
Fever, diaorreah, stomach cramps, vomiting, sweating. The tiny faces either serene in sleep, or contorted in pain. The mood – resigned. The cause was almost always the same – dirty water. The diagnosis – typhoid, dysentery, dehydration, all potential killers.
This is the process, put very simply: trees have been cut for firewood, or died from disease, or been broken by large animals like elephants near the water springs. This allows other animals and cattle to approach and their feces and germs to enter the water source. That changes the balance between water for animals and water for people, dirtying the water available for villagers.
In other words, forest degradation harms the sensitive ecosystem, which reduces sustainable resources and leads to waterborne disease.
Read the rest of Martin Fletcher's blog about the LifeStraw - a new water filter that may be a revolutionary way to create potable water in the developing world - in the Daily Nightly blog. His story from Kenya, part of NBC Nightly News' special series "Thirsty Planet," will air Wednesday night.
CONTINUED >>
By Richard Engel, Middle East bureau chief
Diplomats are supposed to make friends.
They are supposed to use their, well, diplomatic skills to resolve conflicts, advance foreign policy and improve relations with foreign cultures.
It's hard to do that when you're surrounded by tattooed, gun-waving, badge-wearing guards – eyeless behind sun glasses – accused of wantonly killing Iraqis who get too close.
Of course, the security firm that protects embassy staff here, Blackwater, maintains it agents have consistently acted to protect its clients in what is an undeniably dangerous environment. There are several ongoing investigations, and we're hearing that at least one (led by Blackwater's main employer, the State Department) may exonerate the company.
Iraq's interior ministry has already concluded Blackwater was guilty of "murder" when its guards killed 11 Iraqis in western Baghdad on Sept. 16.
So there may well be conflicting official reports of the incident, one American, several Iraqi. Fog of war. Others will claim a cover up.
CONTINUED >>
By Martin Fletcher, NBC News Tel Aviv Bureau Chief
MASAI MARA, Kenya – Reaching the Masai tribe in the East African Rift Valley escarpment in Kenya is easy.
Just take a twin-engine commercial flight from Nairobi to the Kichwe Tembo landing strip, and 40 minutes later you’re already in the heart of Masai land.
However, the stringent financial realities of the new media landscape demanded that we drive.
When Jeff Riggins, Kevin Monahan and I finally pulled to a halt at the game lodge, we could hardly stand.
My recurring back injury flared so violently I took two painkillers. Jeff’s camera was so jolted that when we turned it on, we had to keep the microphone at least ten yards away to avoid its new piston-like whirring and grating sound. Kevin was all right: he’s a lot younger than Jeff and I.
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| Linda Friedman |
| The NBC team - Martin Fletcher, Kevin Monahan, and Jeff Riggins - with guide Albert Waweru on the Masai Mara shortly after witnessing a lion kill. |
We were met by astonished workers who took our bags and provided shoulders to lean on as we hobbled in. "The last time any guests drove here was, let me see, before the flood, that was in 1976," said one.
"I think those penniless students drove, too, in 1983," said another.
"Anyway, Jambo, welcome," said a third.
"You made good time," said a beaming Linda Friedman, who had arranged our drive but sensibly took the plane. "We thought it would take nine hours, you made it in eight and a half. How was the road?" CONTINUED >>
By Ian Williams, NBC News correspondent
I heard the squelch of Anil’s feet on the waterlogged path well before he arrived at the door of my hut.
"Problem with boat," he announced in a very matter-of-fact way.
"Problem?" I asked groggily, having just emerged from under my thick mosquito net.
"Yes," he replied. "Boat sank. You want tea?"
All night the heavy rain had pounded our huts. It came in intense waves, the wind rattling doors and window frames, and by morning the village was sitting in a mud soup, the bloated river lapping high against protective dirt walls.
Our small boat had been among several moored in what the night before had been a protected inlet, and several young boys were now working with old pans and leaking buckets to bail them out and pull them further up the receding river bank. They chatted and laughed, slipping and falling in the mud. But with the rain still falling it seemed like a hopeless task.
For Anil, our taciturn Bengali host – a man who could coolly describe the latest cobra attacks or the tiger tracks he’d found in the village – the tropical storm sweeping from the Bay of Bengal was little more than an annoyance.
Within two hours he’d rustled up a bigger boat – "this one will make it," he told us in an attempt to reassure - and the mud-splattered NBC team, guided by the helping hands of scores of amused villagers, was soon making its way gingerly across a thin plank and onboard the bobbing vessel for the five-hour river and road journey back to Calcutta.
The village in which we’d spent the night was on a small island in the Sundarbans, which lie at the mouth of the River Ganges, where India’s most revered river empties into the Bay of Bengal.
The monsoon rains here are intense, and being caught in the middle of it does leave you wondering how India could possibly have a water shortage.
Click here to read the rest of Ian William's blog "Water problems in India" in the Daily Nightly blog. His report is the first in the NBC Nightly News with Brian Williams series "Thirsty Planet" about water issues accross the globe.
By NBC's Ghazi Balkiz and Rob Moro
The military's 'surge' strategy has enabled the U.S. Army's 1st Battalion, 5th Cavalry Regiment, to concentrate its efforts against al-Qaida in Iraq in the Sunni neighborhood of Ameriya, in western Baghdad. With the help of local volunteers, the military has reduced attacks against American and Iraqi forces and decreased sectarian violence.
See video from Jim Maceda's recent military embed with the 1-5 CAV.
CONTINUED >>
By Adrienne Mong, NBC News Producer
CAN THO, Vietnam – Nguyen Huu Chiem was born in Can Tho province, the eldest of ten children and the seventh generation of a Mekong Delta farming family.
"I have lived here for so long … that I understand the delta's ecology," he said over a pot of tea near Can Tho City one balmy evening. "I remember there were many fish in the water and many birds in the air. The delta has always had great biodiversity."
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| Adrienne Mong / NBC News |
| Farmers work in a rice paddy in the Mekong Delta, Vietnam. |
Chiem, whose father was a rice farmer, decided to devote his life to studying ecology and the environment, because "I see [my father] work very hard at rice farming, [and] I could also see agriculture the way we do here in future is in danger."
"Formerly, you could drink directly from the water. Now you cannot. You have to boil the water," he said in rapid-fire English. "Formerly, you could plant rice naturally. Now you cannot.
"Every year, you see the biodiversity changing quickly," continued the 50-year-old professor, who heads the Department of Environment and Natural Resources Management at Can Tho University's College of Agriculture and Applied Biology.
"Aquaculture is developing more, because there is no fishing. There are more artificial fisheries. Formerly I never eat the aquaculture. I only like to eat the white fish (wild freshwater fish)," he paused and cocked his head. "You must be the same, eh?"
CONTINUED >>
By Dawna Friesen, NBC News Correspondent
DAMASCUS, Syria – To hear about the millions of refugees from Iraq is one thing. To see them, and speak to some of them, is quite another. All have tales of chaos and death.
It is a refugee crisis unlike any other in modern times.
There are no dramatic pictures of massive camps with UNHCR tents lined up row after row. No starving children waiting for food hand-outs.
That's because the estimated 1.5 million Iraqis who have flooded into Syria have melted into Damascus's already crowded streets. They live wherever they can, whole families crammed into tiny, seedy apartments with only the most basic of provisions.
According to the UNHCR, they are mostly middle class. Nothing has prepared them for the life as a refugee. Many have already used up their life savings.
While Syria has generously welcomed them, and gives them access to education for the children and subsidized health care, they do not have residency rights nor are they allowed to work.
CONTINUED >>
By Ed Flanagan, NBC News Researcher
The startling story out of China’s southern town of Guangzhou this week of a 30-year-old man dying of exhaustion after a reported three-day online gaming binge may be an odd curiosity in the West, but it underscores growing concerns about Internet addiction in this country of more than 160 million Web surfers.
With a little more than 10 percent of China’s 1.3 billion population now online – thanks in large part to a booming economy and the nearly 113,000 Internet cafes that dot the country – the past few years have seen a rash of Internet addiction issues popping up and, recently, a serious governmental backlash against them.
CONTINUED >>
By Martin Fletcher, NBC News Tel Aviv Bureau Chief
MASAI MARA, Kenya – One thing that has always bugged me is when people interrupt each other, not letting the other person finish their sentence. Everybody is in such a hurry to say something, we rarely really listen.
So when Kipas, a Masai chief on the edge of the African Rift Valley escarpment in Kenya, gave me his talking stick, I was thrilled. We have a lot to learn from these simple nomadic Masai herdsmen, I thought, and their wonderful respectful customs.
When the men gather, whoever holds the talking stick, speaks. Everyone else listens. If you want to talk, you wait until you are handed the talking stick. It is a narrow piece of smoothed wood about eighteen inches long with a knob on one end, like a small club, decorated with brightly-colored, patterned beads. It is a thing of honor and the chief gave it to me as a present.
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| NBC News/ Martin Fletcher |
| Masai Chief Tobias Ole Kipas Manie watches over his herd with local village boys. |
I humbly accepted it with my left hand and he grabbed it back. "No," Kipas said, his perpetual happy smile suddenly replaced by a grimace, "Never hold it in the left hand."
"Oh, sorry," I said.
"It is our custom," he explained.
Here, among the Masai, an ancient, proud tribe struggling to fend off the encroachment of the modern era, custom explains everything, but when I asked if women carry talking sticks too, Kipas didn’t smile. For while men gather to talk, to decide, to rest beneath the tree, and in general while away the day delightfully, custom and tradition dictate a different way of life for their womenfolk.
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By Antoine Sanfuentes, NBC News Senior White House Producer
Little did I know when I got the call on Saturday, Sept. 1 that 24 hours later I would be travelling on Air Force One on a secret flight to Iraq. Covering the White House involves various levels of security but this particular trip was shrouded in the kind of secrecy that only a small circle of journalists ever see.
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| Antoine Sanfuentes / NBC News |
| Soldiers in Anbar, Iraq, wait for Bush to speak. |
After first having a conversation with a casually dressed White House official while walking up Wisconsin Avenue in Washington's Georgetown shopping district, I was handed a map with an explanation of where to be and at what time the follow day.
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| Antoine Sanfuentes / NBC News |
| Bush arrives in Anbar, Iraq. |
The most unbelievable thing about the conversation to my ears was the fact that the White House was allowing us to take 700 pounds of satellite equipment on Air Force One. Usually journalists who have the privilege of flying the modified 747 with the president are only permitted to take a small bag or laptop because the cargo area of the plane is never available for a larger overnight bag (the bags usually follow on the press charter).
CONTINUED >>
By Mary Murray, NBC News Producer
Just when you think you've heard it all here, someone tells you about Mary McCarthy.
At 107 years old, the Canadian born McCarthy would seem like an unlikely person to be trapped by Washington's strategy to topple Fidel Castro. But with millions frozen in a Boston account, she is.
Her late husband, Spanish businessman Pedro Gomez, owned a leather factory in Havana and made combat boots for the Cuban army. That is until Fidel Castro seized power, ran his customers out of town and nationalized his operation.
After Gomez died, his widow inherited all of his money, but it’s been essentially untouchable – sitting in a Boston bank.
Back in the 1960s the U.S. government froze all Cuban assets – including McCarthy's inheritance after the heiress refused to abandon her Havana home.
"The people here are very, very nice," says McCarthy. "Very charming and very generous and will help you at any time and at any hour." With that in mind, she’s refused to leave.
See the video link above to hear McCarthy’s full story.
CONTINUED >>
By Carol Grisanti, NBC News Producer
There is something of a modern-day bard in Pakistani architect Naeem Pasha, but it’s not just because he writes poetry – it’s more an expression of what he wants his buildings to be.
"It's not that I am concentrating on purely architectural expression," said Pasha, 64, his brown-rimmed glasses perfectly offsetting a head of thick snow-white hair and neat goatee. "All those sketches would have a lot of couplets, the beginning of a poem might be there," he said smiling.
I was intrigued.
Pasha led me on a tour of the spectacular new National Art Gallery in Islamabad, Pakistan's capital. It’s the first national gallery in the country – and Pasha's crowning achievement.
There is no barrier between architecture, poetry or painting, he explained.
"They understand each other – we might not know their language of understanding, but all these expressions understand each other," he said.
I had never thought of a building in quite that way before.
CONTINUED >>
By Michelle Kosinski, NBC News Correspondent
It’s mind-boggling, the rate at which investigative leaks are being reported in the press in Portugal, where supposedly police must not discuss the investigation building against the McCanns – the British couple who are now in the crosshairs of the investigation into their daughter Madeleine’s disappearance.
These daily "breakthroughs" then flow to Britain, where the media is in a feeding frenzy over any shred of material on the story, and then make their way around the world.
Blog traffic in the U.S. on the case is also fast and furious. Did they…or didn’t they? That is the ultimate question here. After all, very few want to believe they did.
CONTINUED >>
By Robert Bazell, NBC News' Chief Science and Health Correspondent
As I have written here before the men and women who provide the medical care for U.S. and Iraqi wounded do a fantastic job. But on this trip I can see the strain brought on by the prolonged deployment, the extra five months.
I’m in the Ibn Sina hospital in Baghdad’s Green Zone, a decent facility built by Saddam Hussein for friends and family. The 28th Combat Support Hospital (CSH or "cash" in military speak), out of Ft. Bragg, N.C., currently staffs it. Combat Support Hospitals are like other numbered Army units with a home base. When this group leaves, the hospital will have a different number when the next CSH takes over.
On Friday, the 28th will have been here exactly 365 days. When they arrived they thought they would be flying home that day, but like so many units, they got extended. (That is the nurses, medics and support staff. Most physicians stay six months, but get deployed more often). The extension is one of the hardest things these dedicated people have had to endure.
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NBC News Today Show broadcast from Tehran, Iran on Thursday. Matt Lauer reported from the former U.S. Embassy in Tehran on the legacy of the hostage crisis and its continued impact on Iranian-American relations 28 years later.
While Richard Engel reported on both the role of women in Iran and gave a glimpse of Iranian society that is rarely seen -- from horse back riders at a Tehran country club to Iran's answer to Brad Pitt.
And just like the infamous 'iron curtain' of the Cold War, political scientists today are talking about an equally divisive "Green Curtain," green being the color of Islam, that has fallen over the Middle East. Richard Engel analyzes the Sunni- Shiite divide from a Tehran perch. Click here to read his story: "A peak behind the 'Green Curtain' in Iran."
Click here to see the complete coverage of the Today Show in Iran.
CONTINUED >>
By Jim Maceda, NBC News Correspondent
There’s no power, running water, or plumbing at Bravo Combat Outpost, a former Saddam Hussein air raid shelter in West Baghdad that now serves as the grim home to around 40 U.S. soldiers, at any given time, from the 1st Battalion – 5th Cavalry Regiment (1-5 Cav).
These forward-based troops, dropped in the middle of a West Baghdad Sunni neighborhood called Ameriya, have little spare time: It’s "surge" missions, chow and sleep. They couldn’t watch Gen. David Petraeus’ and Ambassador Ryan Crocker’s hearings unfolding in Washington: There’s no TV here.
Besides, nothing that Petraeus or Crocker said would really affect their future: The 1-5 Cav already has its redeployment orders for January 2009.
So I was a bit surprised to learn that so many of these soldiers had asked about the hearings. "They’re very interested," said Spc. Steven Yoda, seated at his laptop inside the Tactical Operations Center, a dark, dreary place that smelled of diesel and dirty laundry. "I’ve had a lot of soldiers come in and ask to check it out on the Web. We’ve been circulating transcripts of the hearings as well."
What was the buzz in the bunker? Most thought that Petraeus’ call for a drawdown of one brigade and one Marine expeditionary unit – about 6,000 troops – was a good sign of progress.
CONTINUED >>
By Stephanie Gosk, NBC News Correspondent
In January 2006, one of our local producers made a heart-wrenching decision. His previously quiet Baghdad neighborhood had become the latest battleground in the intensifying civil war between Sunnis and Shiites.
Mahdi Army militants, loyal to the Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, had taken over the streets. Even though Haidar (not his real name) is a Shiite, he knew his wife, a Sunni and his two daughters, a 5-year-old and 18-month-old, were in danger. It was time to get them out.
"I rented a car and drove to Syria. At the border many people were leaving," explained Haidar. "It took five hours to get through." Haidar dropped his young family off in Damascus with his wife's parents and then returned to Baghdad to continue his work with us.
Since the war began in 2003 an estimated 1.5 million Iraqis have escaped the violence in Iraq and fled to their neighbor in the north. For over four years Syria welcomed them, granting three-month long visas at the border with little hassle and few questions. But as of Monday the rules changed. For families like Haidar's, the border is now closed.
CONTINUED >>
By Robert Bazell, NBC News' Chief Science and Health Correspondent
This is one vantage point only. But according to the staff here at the 28th Combat Support Hospital in Baghdad’s Green Zone, the main military hospital here, the lull in violence they had seen for the last several weeks, appears to be over.
Yesterday began with an entire infantry platoon being rushed in. One soldier had his leg blown off completely just below the knee, extensive damage to one arm and perforations in his intestine.
The rest of the men suffered less serious injuries, many of them broken ear drums. The ones the medical staff suspected might be at risk for head injuries got examined and spent the night. Toward evening they told us their amazing story.
CONTINUED >>
By Robert Bazell, NBC News' Chief Science and Health Correspondent
As two Black Hawk helicopters landed in the 108 degrees Baghdad afternoon, we formed a line to show respect for two tiny vehicles as they drove by – each carrying two body bags containing U.S. soldiers beginning their journey from a hospital in Iraq to burial back home.
The four were among seven U.S. soldiers killed Monday in the western part of Baghdad when their truck fell off a bridge. Varying accounts say the truck was swerving to avoid a roadside bomb or slipped off the bridge when it tried to turn too quickly. The soldiers had been ordered to set up an instant road block, one of the strategies to capture insurgents.
Surviving members of the unit, many weeping openly, served as pall bearers carrying the litters to the waiting helicopters. The long line, mostly staff from the 28th Combat Support Hospital, as well as visitors like us and representatives from the nearby U.S. Embassy, gave a salute or covered their hearts during the loading and as the choppers took off.
This ceremony called an "Angel Flight" takes place often. Some of the doctors who work at the hospital have even a written a song called "Too Many Angel Flights."
CONTINUED >>
By Mark Mullen, NBC News Correspondent
Even in a society like China where male heirs are often preferred, the news here still made people cringe: Luo Cuifen, a 29-year-old woman, is to undergo surgery to have more than 20 needles removed from her body.
Apparently, the needles were stuck into Luo’s body when she was an infant – possibly by relatives who wanted her dead so that her parents in this one-child society might have another chance at giving birth to a son. Doctors consider it a miracle that Luo survived all these years.
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| AP |
| In this undated photo, an X-ray image of Chinese woman, Luo Cuifen, 29, needles are seen in her body. |
Some women newly empowered
To be sure, the status of women in China has improved in recent years due to education, modernization, general changes in attitudes – and, ironically, to the country's traditional male preference.
In China's largest cities, many educated, single women now are in greater demand – creating a dramatic social shift. China’s longstanding one-child policy has created a skewed ratio between the genders, with 119 boys reported born for every 100 girls, according to official figures.
A recent documentary film, "Shanghai Bride," explored the sometimes cut-throat nature of that city’s marriage market, where women’s vastly superior numbers mean they call the shots in the dating game.
CONTINUED >>
By Richard Engel, Middle East bureau chief
It was a sober assessment.
The surge will be over by next summer, but even then U.S. troops will only return to pre-surge levels.
There has been progress toward reconciliation, but it’s hard to put your finger on where it has been.
But today’s testimony was not merely a report card on the surge. It also outlined a new strategy for stability in Iraq, the latest of many.
CONTINUED >>
By Robert Bazell, NBC News' Chief Science and Health Correspondent
Within the first hour of our return to the main military hospital in Baghdad on Sunday, a U.S. Army unit that had been patrolling streets nearby rushed in. The medical staff declared one soldier dead in the emergency room from head trauma and rushed to treat two other soldiers who survived with severe wounds to the abdomen and legs. The injuries were from a roadside bomb, an improvised explosive device (IED), which had struck their vehicle.
We took no pictures. The soldiers accompanying their stricken comrades were far too upset, some were weeping.
A few minutes later two Blackhawk MEDEVAC helicopters landed with Iraqi victims of another IED attack that had blasted a bus. Two men were dead while a 1-year-old baby and her mother survived. In addition to the massive trauma, mother and child seemed to have suffered some kind of lung damage. The medical staff guessed it might be from chlorine, although they could not immediately confirm a diagnosis.
In January, when I was last here, insurgents launched the first chemical bomb attack. They added swimming pool chemicals to explosives causing severely scarred lungs in 60 Iraqi police officers. There is no way to treat such lung damage. Doctors can only give the patients oxygen and watch to see whether they heal or die.
Almost eerily calm
Despite these events at the beginning of our return to the 28th Combat Support Hospital in Baghdad’s "Green Zone," the fortress-like enclave, the staff here say the past few weeks have been calm – eerily so, in fact.
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By Mary Murray, NBC News Producer
Cuban master pianist Chucho Valdés dominated Thursday night's opening of the "Varadero Jam Session" – a new bi-annual music festival that organizers hope will showcase both the island's established and rising new talent, while becoming synonymous with the best in jazz music.
This video clip of Valdés and his electrifying performance is a rare glimpse for U.S. jazz lovers barred from traveling to the communist island under Washington's strict travel ban.
Before an intimate audience in Varadero's Plaza America hall, the 65-year-old performer presented what critics here describe as his vintage signature: highly sophisticated jazz improvisation skillfully combined with his polished technique. He was joined on stage by members of his quartet – percussionist Yaroldy Abreu, drummer Juan Carlos Rojas and bassist Lazaro Rivero.
After performing this weekend in Varadero, about 85 miles east of Havana, the three-time Grammy winner heads to several European cities to promote a new CD, "Canciones Ineditas."
CONTINUED >>
By Carla Marcus, NBC News Producer
We've been reporting about Iraqis being forced from their homes by members of opposing ethnic militant groups for over the past year.
Whether they are driven to flee because of an intimidating threat or the gruesome death of a loved one, the Iraqi Red Crescent estimates that over 1 million Iraqis have left behind their homes, possessions and neighbors with the hope of settling in a less menacing environment.
Many resist, often due to a stubborn sense of infallibility, or simply because they have no options when it comes to finding a safer place for each family member to live.
But as the lines which delineate Sunni and Shia neighborhoods in Baghdad become more defined, some residents who fear violent reprisals have taken a more pro-active approach to inevitable displacement and are leaving on their own.
CONTINUED >>
By Yonatan Pomrenze, NBC News Producer
It was inevitable. Russia already has McDonald’s, KFC, Pizza Hut, TGI Friday’s and Subway.
So it wasn’t a question whether or not Starbucks would also make it here. It was only a matter of when.
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| NBC News/ Yonatan Pomrenze |
| Employees at Russia’s first Starbucks coffee shop pose before a ribbon-cutting ceremony on opening day. |
And Thursday morning, with little fanfare and a quick ribbon-cutting ceremony, Starbucks opened its first coffee shop in a shopping mall just outside Moscow.
The low-key opening was no surprise. Starbucks may have opted for what company executives called a "soft launch" for their first Russian store in order to test the Russian waters for Starbucks’ potential success.
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By NBC News' Fakhar Rehman and Carol Grisanti
LAHORE, Pakistan –
It was a question of honor.
Tariq Masih’s father owed $500 and couldn’t pay it back. "Every day someone would come and ask for the money, it was insulting and humiliating for me," Masih said.
"One day I couldn’t take it anymore and went to the hospital and arranged to sell my left kidney to pay my father’s debts."
A wealthy Saudi businessman paid $3,000 for Masih’s kidney. "I am keeping it a secret from my wife and my mother," said the 25-year-old brick kiln worker.
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| Carol Grisanti / NBC News |
| Tariq Masih shows the scar from where his kidney was removed. He sold it for $3,000 to pay his father's debts. |
Pakistan is one of the top countries in the world for "transplant tourism." It has been dubbed the "Kidney Bazaar" by the media with Lahore, the second-largest city, regarded as its hub.
"Nearly 2,000 kidneys are transplanted in Pakistan every year and 70 percent are bought by foreigners from Saudi Arabia, the U.A.E., Britain and Canada," said Dr. Zafar ul Ahsan, the top urologist at the Fatima Jinnah Hospital in Lahore.
Pakistan is one of the few countries that does not ban organ sales or have any regulations governing them. The Supreme Court took up the matter last month and accused the government of "apathetic procrastination" for failing to pass legislation curbing the practice. The high court wants transplants restricted to blood relations.
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By Ian Williams, NBC News correspondent
Everybody here seems to be talking about climate change, but when it comes to action, there are two very different responses to be seen in Australia this week. The first will be the discussions at APEC, taking place in Sydney amid intense security. The second couldn't be more different – the practical, dogged and groundbreaking work of conservationists in the country's bush.
Take APEC first. Asia Pacific leaders have started to arrive here in fortress Sydney.
The first to arrive was China’s President Hu Jintao, who entered via Perth, the capital of Western Australia, and had coal on his mind. China’s the most important customer for that state’s big mining companies, buying up natural resources as fast as they can be dug from the ground.
President Bush came next amid the biggest security operation this country has ever seen. His harborside hotel will give him a stunning view of the Opera House – and a three-mile long, nine foot tall security fence, which the local media has dubbed the "Great Wall of Sydney," to keep protesters at bay.
For weeks, the Australian authorities have been calling this meeting of Asia-Pacific leaders the "climate change summit," hoping it might produce a concrete commitment on limiting greenhouse gases. That was always a long shot, especially now that Bush is hosting his own summit on the issue in Washington later this month and he probably won’t want to be upstaged in Sydney.
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| Ian Williams / NBC News |
| Australians hope to restore the Scottsdale reserve to its original state and create a wildlife corridor up Eastern Australia. |
Hu’s side trip to Perth underscored his priorities – continuing to fuel China’s booming (and hugely polluting) economy. Fast-growing India is also reluctant to sign up to anything that will restrict its growth.
And so Australian Prime Minister John Howard, a late convert to the cause of climate change action, is now trying to downplay his hopes for the meeting, talking more generally about "progress" on the issue.
Many Australians are skeptical about Howard’s climate concerns. But, with an election due later this year, it’s a testament to what an important political issue it has become; respondents in one recent poll named climate change as the single most important external threat facing the country.
That is a reflection of a new reality here, "an extraordinary sea change in public opinion," according to Brendan Mackey, Professor of Environmental Science at the Australian National University in Canberra.
"Our droughts, our floods, our fires have really made people understand just how vulnerable we are to extreme weather events."
We’d visited Professor Mackey in the capital, Canberra, on our way into the bush to witness part of a hugely ambitious conservation project, which has gained wide support – thanks to that new reality.
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By Adrienne Mong, NBC News Producer
HENGDIAN, Zhejiang Province --- The paint was still drying when we showed up at 7 a.m. Dozens of film crew workers swarmed around the set: an 1880s Canadian "mansion" that had sprouted in a single day. (What normally takes three to four days to construct in Hollywood or a Canadian studio took just one day on this Hengdian movie lot.)
Teams of Chinese workmen were adjusting studio lights, hanging European oil landscape paintings, and screwing on door hinges.
"This window, this curtain is off camera here," said Attila Szalay, the director of photography for the movie, "Iron Road." He was speaking to his first assistant director, Sylvia Liu, a Chinese from Hong Kong, who nodded and said something to a colleague in Mandarin.
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| Adrienne Mong / NBC News |
| Actors in a period Chinese movie await their cue. |
They were overseeing the final touches before the next crew came into block the first scene of the day.
Wandering through the spacious rooms punctuated with colonial details - crystal sherry glasses, a porcelain tea set, even the doilies on the wood tables - we had a hard time reconciling what we were seeing with the world just beyond the walls: rice paddies and mountains.
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