November 2007 - Posts
By Mary Murray, NBC News Producer
CARACAS, Venezuela – In a country where some fear democracy is about to be muzzled, just about everyone seems to have something to say.
Venezuelans Sunday go to the polls to vote on a package of changes to the nation’s constitution that would, among other things, allow President Hugo Chavez to run for president his entire life and cut the work week down to 30-hours.
Tens of thousands of Chavez’s opponents poured into Caracas streets Thursday under a slogan "Shout No!" while even greater numbers of his supporters gathered Friday under the "Yes" banner.
Caracas painted in politics
The city is plastered with political signs from both sides – some slicker than others.
The government has hung hundreds of colorful banners along lampposts and billboards, urging people to stick with the man who took power in 1999.
The "No" campaign, a loose alliance of university students, old-guard politicians, and Chavez defectors, has had less access to posting their message on state property, so it has resorted to painting over the fancy pro-government signs and passing out handbills on street corners in downtown Caracas.
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By Kerry Sanders, NBC News Correspondent
CARACAS, Venezuela – Sunday could be a turning point for this country's future. Venezuela’s 16 million voters will decide if they want to change their constitution in a major referendum.
Among the 69 proposed changes to the country’s 1999 constitution is one critical issue: can presidential term limits be eliminated? If so, President Hugo Chavez could be re-elected president every seven years for the rest of his life.
Some here, and some in the U.S. State Department, fear that type of power could effectively give Chavez not only the "president for life" title, but it could allow him to establish a totalitarian rule similar to what Fidel Castro and his brother have done in Cuba.
The president’s supporters say they want Chavez to remain because he has done what no other leader here ever has attempted – shared the oil wealth with the poorest people.
Either for or against change
But the method of the referendum and the ballot itself is not what you would expect in the United States.
The reforms are grouped into two blocks. Voters choose "yes" to all of the reforms or "no" to them in one block.
The actual ballots do not have any explanation of what exactly people are voting for or against.
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By Michele Neubert, NBC News Producer
"It's an old disease in Iraq – people spend their money on books, not on food. Iraqi intellectuals are very poor because of it," our NBC News translator* said as he carried an armful of books into the office after a shoot at the Al Mutanabi book market.
"Your wife will kill you," I teased him, remembering how concerned he'd been after already spending a good proportion of his salary on books only the week before.
"I know, but I just couldn't help it. It's so fascinating there right now. I even saw some Harry Potter books," he joked. His face was flush with the unaccustomed exposure to sunlight after the months and years that he, like most Iraqis, spent being cooped up inside.
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| AFP - Getty Images |
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Iraqis shop for books as workers repair buildings that line Baghdad's Al-Mutanabi street on Nov.22.
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As the security situation improves, our local staff seems increasingly hungry for action, volunteering to dash out all over the place. Our translator’s love of books made him the natural choice to go and check the pulse of Baghdad's legendary Al Mutanabi book market (the area is still not safe enough for Western TV crews to wander around).
We'd heard that the Al Mutanabi book market – the longtime literary and creative nucleus of Baghdad until it was attacked by a suicide car bomber in March – was coming back to life.
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By Yuka Tachibana, NBC News Producer
NAIROBi, Kenya – "Don’t worry! She’ll be here…" Anne Nzuva, one of the organizers of a human rights symposium on the outskirts of Nairobi, reassured me.
But already, "she" was over an hour late. I stared out at the road leading to the gates of the compound we were waiting in, but there was no sign of her famous green Pajero (a sport utility vehicle made by Mitsubishi).
We are waiting for Professor Wangari Maathai, affectionately known as the "Tree Lady" of Kenya. She is a formidable advocate of tree planting and environmental protection, a human rights activist, and a Nobel Peace Prize laureate.
Grassroots environmental movement
The NBC News team I was with – correspondent Martin Fletcher and cameraman Jeff Riggins – had spent the past week driving up and down the bumpy roads of central Kenya as we filmed a story about Maathai for the Nightly News with Brian Williams.
Maathai grew up in a remote village perched between lush, green, rolling hills and, you guessed it, lots of magnificent trees. The mud hut she helped build as a girl still stands, but she no longer lives there. Instead, it has been turned into a tree nursery, which is being looked after by her niece and nephew.
Over the years, Kenya lost many of its trees due to a devastating mix of development, corruption and land-grabbing. In the late 1970s, Maathai founded the Greenbelt Movement, a grassroots environmental group, and made it her mission to replant trees and put a stop to deforestation.
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By Paul Goldman, NBC News Producer
TEL AVIV, Israel
Are you a world leader? Do you have what it takes to solve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict? Are you willing to make bold moves for peace?
In a new interactive game being distributed this week by the independent, Tel Aviv-based Peres Center for Peace, you can do it all. You can bring peace to the Middle East by implementing a two-state solution and on the way visit Oslo, Norway, to pick up your Noble Prize. It’s that easy.
As their political leaders gather in Annapolis, Md., in the latest round of U.S.-led negotiations, the new computer game grants ordinary Israelis and Palestinians the opportunity to play the role of peace-broker on their own personal computers.
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By Ian Williams, NBC News correspondent
KALAPARA, Bangladesh
Flying Officer Junaid Ashraf stood in front of a stack of boxes containing high-protein biscuits. Behind him, soldiers formed a human chain as they loaded the boxes into the belly of a giant transport helicopter.
Junaid and his fellow airmen from the Bangladesh Air Force are flying missions from dawn to dusk across the cyclone-affected coastal areas.
"As a human being you are shocked, because the people are crying, asking for goods,” he said. “They don't have any goods."
We joined one of those missions into the heart of the disaster zone, flying over a brutalized landscape of shattered houses and flattened crops. A ferry sat halfway up the bank of a river, where it had been thrown by the storm. I imagined a malign giant stomping across the landscape. CONTINUED >>
By Ian Williams, NBC News correspondent
KALIKA BARI, Bangladesh
We could hear the angry crowd well before the yellow, squat government building came into view.
It was under siege from 200-300 desperate cyclone survivors, jostling and shouting as they clambered for a share of the first aid to arrive in the village since the storm devastated Bangladesh six days ago.
"We need more, we need more," one man told NBC News. "One hundred per cent of the people in this village were affected by Cyclone Sidr. Everybody needs help. Everybody."
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By Richard Engel, Middle East bureau chief
It's not a good time to be a lawyer, student or journalist in Pakistan.
It's a terrible time to be a human rights activist.
It's a downright abysmal time to be a political opponent of President Gen. Pervez Musharraf.
But if you are any one of the 99.9 percent of the rest of the 165 million Pakistanis, you hardly notice the emergency law anymore.
Yesterday I went for a jog/hike in the Margala Hills around Islamabad. The dense forest is veined with mountain trails filled with vultures, hawks, monkeys and, supposedly, panthers, although I didn't see any.
What I did see was families with picnic baskets, groups of middle-school students chasing each other (and in turn being chased by their teachers) and young couples holding hands in the shadows behind boulders covered in thorn bushes.
The problem is, they are now doing it all at Musharraf's discretion.
The emergency rule Musharraf imposed earlier this month denies Pakistanis most of their basic rights: public assemblies of more than five are illegal; the state can make arrests without a warrant; and the courts are in disarray.
But most Pakistanis don't feel it. Musharraf wants it that way.
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By NBC local journalist in Iraq*
"Take a look at the story on the BBC website about the terrible things happening to women in Basra. We’d be interested to see what you think," I was told during my morning shift.
The report is full of brutal details about how some of the religious extremists in the southern Iraqi city of Basra are targeting women – threatening, intimidating and even murdering them – in an effort to enforce strict Islamic law.
What are the women’s crimes? Anything from wearing a shortish skirt, to not wearing a headscarf, to using make-up.
Forty-two women were killed in Basra between July and September of this year, according to the police chief.
"It’s terrible, but I’m not surprised." I told my NBC colleagues. "I’ve heard of similar things happening in some of Baghdad’s neighborhoods."
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By Michele Neubert, NBC News Producer
I had been warned. "It's been the quietest I've known it in Baghdad," a work colleague* had called to tell me as I was preparing to leave London. "For the first time, I have not been woken by bombs or gunfire while I was there."
I was encouraged, but it still didn’t stop me from worrying at a dinner party the night before departing, where the conversation revolved around how hopeless the situation in Iraq seemed and would likely remain.
So I steeled myself as usual for the Baghdad experience. First days are usually the worst. Everything you've conveniently forgotten in order to get through being back home with a semblance of normality suddenly comes flooding back.
But once safely ensconced in the armored cars in the capable hands of our security team upon arrival in Baghdad, it’s like you've never left. Flak jackets on, you settle into an automatic routine of familiar jibes and catch up chat that helps to fill the space of fear which goes with the airport road ride.
The dusty streets whizzed by as we sporadically did U-turns and other odd driving techniques in an effort to make it back to the bureau safely.
This time though, we saw some unfamiliar afternoon images from the darkened windows of our armored car.
I actually saw Iraqis on the streets, families eating out at roadside cafes, students hanging out by the university campus entrance, (a spot which had been targeted by suicide bombers in the past). There was even a man selling colorful balloons on the side of the highway. Signs of life in Baghdad I hadn't seen for years.
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By NBC News' Miri Yehuda
AWARTA, West Bank –
Once the month of Ramadan is over, just before the first rain, Palestinian farmers harvest their olive groves.
The importance of olives to the Palestinian economy cannot be overestimated. They are the single biggest crop for Palestinians and hold important cultural significance – especially as they symbolize land ownership.
As such, the olive harvest has become a major point of contention between Palestinian farmers and Jewish settlers.
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| Miri Yehuda / NBC News |
| A Palestinian family works during the olive harvest near the Palestinian town of Awarta, in the West Bank. |
Every year, there are reports of violence against the Palestinian farmers as settlers intimidate them and even beat them and steal the olives.
But Palestinians have found an unlikely ally in their efforts to continue their harvest – a group of Jewish activists, "Rabbis for Human Rights," put themselves in harm’s way to help protect Palestinians during the annual harvest.
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By Bruno Silvestre, NBC News Producer
PARIS – It's an invasion. They're everywhere. Wherever you look in Paris, you'll see them.
Bicycles. Dozens of them. And it's not just Lance Armstrong wannabees who are riding them. It's everyone, from the 15-year-old hurrying to get to school on time, to the 60-year-old pensioner leisurely crisscrossing a new Parisian neighborhood.
Like in most European cities, bicycles are not a new phenomenon in the French capital. After all, the first Bicycle Fair and the first bicycle race (81 miles between Paris and Rouen) took place here in 1869, 138 years ago.
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| Bruno Silvestre / NBC News |
| One of the many VELIB bike stations in downtown Paris. |
And since then, Paris has seen generations of cyclists proudly perched on their bikes, pedaling through its streets and boulevards. But since mid-July, a new self-service bicycle rental scheme called VELIB has turned the city of light into the city of bikes.
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By Richard Engel, Middle East bureau chief
With her white veil, bejeweled blouses, flawless English and flair for drama and theatrical timing, Benazir Bhutto has painted herself as lady liberty, a lone woman willing to risk all and stand up to Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf and his emergency rule.
Bhutto says she is the one who can stop Musharraf and his crackdown, which has seen several thousand lawyers, students and political activists arrested. Already, observers are comparing the situation in Pakistan to September's uprising in Myanmar, where monks and opposition leader (and Nobel Peace Prize-winner) Aung San Suu Kyi rallied against the military junta.
But Pakistan is not Myanmar, and Bhutto is no Aung San Suu Kyi.
Bhutto is a flawed hero. She has been accused – she says for political reasons – of massive corruption while serving twice as prime minister, first in the late 1980s and later in the mid-1990s. Bhutto stands accused of stealing roughly $1.5 billion, mostly in the form of kickbacks on government contracts.
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By Andy Eckardt, NBC News Producer
This week, visitors to Berlin can get a feel for what it meant 18 years ago to look at Brandenburg Gate with a wall in front of it.
A South Korean artist has installed a fluorescent plastic copy of the Berlin Wall in front of the city's historic gate in protest of the enduring division of the Korean peninsula. But for many visitors interested in the history of the once-divided city, the display is just another piece of chic artwork in the vibrant German capital, and not much more.
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| Reuters |
| Korean Artist Eun Sook Lee performs next to her illuminated installation "Vanished Berlin Wall" in front of Brandenburg Gate in Berlin on Friday. |
It is hard to find any of the few remaining sections of the Berlin Wall these days. After reunification, the German government was quick to sell off these reminders of the Cold War.
A few crumbling segments and a brick trail through Berlin are all that remain of the wall. In an odd way, the now sanitized path reminds me of the Freedom Trail in Boston – it does not resemble the gruesome "death strip" that was equipped with barbed wire, landmines and watchdogs to prevent East Germans from fleeing the country.
Checkpoint Charlie, the famous allied border crossing, is now just a small booth at the end of the elegant Friedrichstrasse, a major shopping area in central Berlin, where tourists can take photos with actors dressed up in old army uniforms.
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By Kerry Sanders, NBC News Correspondent - finally at the North Pole
DAY 7
7:35 a.m.
Yipee. Cheers. Champagne toasts. We’ve made it. We’re at the North Pole. The GPS says it all.
It’s snowing as some of the crew and passengers gather on the bow to celebrate the moment.
One couple from England adds excitement to our moment on top of the world. He proposes to her. She accepts. Kisses. More celebration.
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| Marketa Jirouskova |
| GPS navigator shows that the ship has finally reached the North Pole. |
It takes a few hours to set the gangplank and get to the ice, but we’re here. I’m among the first human footsteps ever on this snow-covered ice. I’m truly in awe. I wondered if gravity would feel different here? It doesn’t.
I wondered if the air would smell different here? It does: clear with a unique freshness.
I wondered if the sun would hurt my eyes reflecting on the snow? Yes, it hurts. For the first minutes it’s OK, but then you need sunglasses.
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| NBC News |
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The NBC News team finally reaches the North Pole. From left to right, Kerry Sanders, Nery Ynclan and Dmitry Solvoyov.
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Time for a swim After some back and forth with the ship and the ice – it seems like the time is finally ripe for the "polar plunge."
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By Paul Goldman, NBC News Producer
Most of us think garbage is a stinky business, but for Doron Sapir, it’s part of his life and work.
Until 1999, Sapir’s knowledge about recycling was limited to throwing away his own garbage, but then he was appointed to the unpleasant job of taking care of 2,700 tons of garbage produced by the city of Tel Aviv and its surrounding area every day.
Today he can proudly say that he has not only transformed the Hiriya dump, one of Tel Aviv’s main dumping grounds for over 40 years, into the largest and most advanced environmental center in Israel, but he has also helped pave the way for the development of a huge public park twice the size of New York’s Central Park. CONTINUED >>
By Kerry Sanders, NBC News Correspondent - enroute to the North Pole
DAY 6
11 p.m.
Today was supposed to be "NP Day": North Pole Day.
We were churning thru the ice at around 5 knots, and all signs were we’d been at 90-degrees north in a few hours, then bam! The Yamal hit a pressure ridge.
The pressure ridge in the ice is like the Vikings Defensive Line. As much as you push, you can’t get through. The Yamal rammed repeatedly, back and forth, back and forth, but no progress.
The crews’ nickname for the captain is "father." He takes the helm for a few hours, and thanks to experience, he chooses a path that finally clears the stubborn pressure ridge.
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By Andy Eckardt, NBC News Producer
Even though the trees across the country are quickly losing their leaves, Germany is very "green" these days.
It starts with the trash every day. In most local communities, households now have four different trash bins outside their door – one for paper, one for plastic, one for organic waste and a trash can for "other rubbish."
In addition, glass containers are strategically positioned at street corners in every neighborhood, but also require active consumer participation. Under German rules, green, brown and white bottles need to be separated.
While the only reward for garbage sorting is a good "green conscience," the German government has been granting financial incentives for new measures that cut CO2 emissions and save energy.
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By Kerry Sanders, NBC News Correspondent - enroute to the North Pole
DAY 5*
6:28 p.m. 88 degrees, 15 minutes North. 54 degrees, 00 minutes east.
I think I’m snow blind. I just saw what looks like a two-masted sailboat on the horizon. Double take. Triple take.
As it turns out, my eyes are not deceiving me. The crew onboard the Yamal has also spotted the ship. The radio room on the Yamal tries to contact the sailing vessel several times, but no one answers. A sailor on watch sees a dog through his binoculars. The decision is made: launch the chopper to the ship to see if anyone is onboard. Maybe someone needs help.
As we circle and then land: one, two, soon 10 people are outside the ship waving their arms.
The hike across the snow from our landing zone is through pools of deep water sitting on the surface of the ice. It’s raining, it’s windy, and since we rushed off so quickly, I’m unprepared. The boots I’m wearing would be useful on hard pack ice, or snow, but not water.
By the time we reached the crew, my feet were soaking wet, but they’re all smiles, shocked to find we’ve just landed and made our way over.
It turns out this is the research vessel Tara. The ship’s multinational crew is collecting date on global warming. They’ve been here for two months, and will stay through for another three months, or longer if they can.
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By Adrienne Mong, NBC News Producer
BEIJING – On one of the bluest of "blue sky" days in Beijing this past weekend (a rare occurrence in this usually smog-filled city), a handful of skinny young Chinese men armed with cameras and notebooks were clustered around an older man with shoulder-length hair and wire-rimmed glasses – looking like groupies surrounding their favorite rock star backstage.
Except this was no rock concert.
It was the third annual Beijing Bloggers' Conference.
That's right. On this beautiful autumn day, a couple hundred young folks decided to forego the crisp sunshine and unseasonably balmy weather to burrow into a large conference hall at Tsinghua Science Park in the capital's northwestern corner to frankly talk about the Internet, blogging, podcasts, investment opportunities, and other more technical matters.
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| Adrienne Mong / NBC News |
| Blogging at the Beijing Blogger's Conference. |
The groupies were circled around a man known popularly online as "Tiger Temple" whose blog is rated the third most popular site in China for 2007 on sohu.com, a popular Chinese search engine . Sohu.com lauded him for blogging "with a heart of the common people."
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By Kerry Sanders, NBC News Correspondent - enroute to the North Pole
DAY 4
8:30 p.m. - 349 miles from the North Pole.
I am not sure you can invent a more stark contrast. The captain "garaged" the Yamal in a bed of ice, and he and the crew called the passengers to the aft deck.
A crew member dressed as Neptune, Greek God of the Seas, said in Russian that if the ship were to proceed – Neptune required an offering.
The offering turned out to be a large amount of German beer.
So here we are, in the ice, fogged in, on the aft deck, beer in the hand of a guy dressed up like Neptune, and what’s next?
I’m not making this up: a BBQ with chicken, steak, and bratwurst.
I can’t help but think of explorers from centuries past who traversed this ice, only to die of the cold and lack of food while we’re here enjoying music and food on a nuclear powered icebreaker.
I feel guilty, but at the same time marvel at how far mankind has come. The first ship to make it to the pole was in 1958. It was a U.S. submarine.
My guess is we’re two days away from the destination: 90 degrees. I know it’ll probably look like it does here, iced over, with a dusting of snow, but my excitement is growing. Soon I’ll be in a spot that sadly some scientists predict could melt away by the end of the century.
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By Mary Murray, NBC News Producer
HAVANA –
President George Bush awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest U.S. civilian honor, to Dr. Oscar Elías Biscet, an opponent of Cuba’s communist regime serving a 25-year sentence in a high-security Havana prison.
While in good company among the other Medal of Freedom recipients, including Liberia’s President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf and Harper Lee, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of the "To Kill a Mockingbird," Biscet, 46, has been a political prisoner in Cuba for most of the last eight years.
As Biscet’s son, Yan Valdes, accepted the award on his behalf at the White House Monday, Bush praised Biscet as "a physician, a community organizer, and an advocate for human rights" who is a "man of peace, a man of truth, and a man of faith."
Bush lauded the fact that Biscet "has continued to embody courage and dignity," despite his long imprisonment.
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By Martin Fletcher, NBC News Tel Aviv Bureau Chief
LUXOR, Egypt – An irreverent and entirely inappropriate thought kept imposing itself as I waited to report live on MSNBC about the first-ever public viewing of the face of King Tutankhamen from his underground tomb in the famed Valley of the Kings in Luxor, Egypt.
There he lay in front of me, his blackened face and empty eye sockets staring upwards, with taut cheeks stretched over small bones, lips pulled back in a sneer and deep wrinkles forming jagged scars in his face.
And all I kept thinking as I waited for the anchor to ask her first question: Do not kiss the Sleeping Beauty who died more than 3,000 years ago. I imagined that if I did, maybe he would come back to life. And if he did, what would I say?
But all went well. King Tut didn't interrupt the live broadcast, and when the lights went out, I was left contemplating these mortal remains of the famous boy-king.
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By Ian Williams, NBC News correspondent
SURABAYA, Indonesia –
Will it? Won’t it? Has it already erupted? From my vantage point here in Surabaya, guessing what’s going on with
Mount Kelud is the most popular game in town. It’s headline news; Indonesia’s television stations reporting regular live updates from somber-faced correspondents camped on the steep slopes of one of country’s deadliest volcanoes.
The brooding volcano sits around fifty miles southwest of us here in Indonesia’s second city. Its alert status has been at the highest level for more than two weeks, and experts say an eruption is imminent.
My driver wasn’t so sure, though.
"Maybe yes, maybe no," he told me, throwing his hands into the air – a sort of resigned, fatalistic gesture that I’ve noticed is very common when it comes to Kelud. My hotel receptionist stuck her neck out a little further: "They always say that," she said of the country’s excitable vulcanologists.
The experts think they have their facts right. Indonesia sits on a belt of intense seismic activity known as the Pacific "Ring of Fire." The country has 70 active volcanoes, more than any other country, so the experts have plenty of hands-on experience.
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By Kerry Sanders, NBC News Correspondent - enroute to the North Pole
DAY 3
Onboard Yamal, 2:14am.
I was jostled out of my bunk by the sound of the Yamal colliding with the first pieces of Arctic ice. BAM!
Those early smashes into the ice sound faintly similar to a mortar round exploding in the distance, or for those who’ve never heard the sounds of war, it resembles a percussionists’ kettle drum in the popular children’s musical piece "Peter and the Wolf."
It eventually sounds as if we’re inside the kettle drum, and not only can we hear it, everything on the ship is shaking.
NBC cameraman Dmitri Soloyvov and I are sharing a cabin. Initially, he slept through the collisions with ice, but by 2:35 a.m., he was awake.
We have a small porthole, so we could see outside what scientist call "frazzle ice." They’re the small pieces of frozen seawater, some about the size of a large backyard swimming pool, bobbing at the surface. The waves here are no more than two to three feet. Because of the ice in our way, the ships speed has dropped from 19 nautical miles per hour to 15.
Finally, we have arrived to what my imagination believed is the Arctic.
We’re officially at 78 degrees, 52 minutes and 42 seconds North and 40 degrees, 54 minutes, zero seconds East.
There’s ice as I’ve said, and the temperature has dropped, still, on deck, it’s warmer than I expected. Without the wind-chill, temperatures are hovering between 38 and 40 degrees. In the wind, of course, it’s a biting cold that feels well below freezing.
These are typical summer temperatures I’m told, but usually not this early in the season. I wonder if it’s another sign of global warming, but the experts we’re traveling with assure me science doesn’t work that way. You can’t pick a day or so out of the week and make conclusions. Data must be collected for decades to understand trends they say.
Eight hours after we first woke up, we’re now well into an area where most of the surface is covered by ice.
As we’re eating lunch, the intercom system on the ship crackles with word a crewmember on the bridge has spotted a polar bear off the starboard side of the ship.
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| Courtesy Jan Bryde |
| A mother polar bear and her two cubs walk across ice near the North Pole. |
A mad dash to the deck ensues. The surprise could not be more entertaining. A mother-bear with two cubs is trundling across the ice.
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By Kerry Sanders, NBC News Correspondent - enroute to the North Pole
DAY 2
Onboard the Yamal, 9 a.m.
It’s odd, but we’re headed to the North Pole, and yet I’m sweating.
Why?
Apparently onboard a nuclear powered ship, there’s endless energy, so keeping with what Dmitiry Soloyvov, the Russian cameraman I’m traveling with, says is a typical Russian custom, the ships heaters are on full, and the ship is beyond toasty. Dmitry says, "We Russians don’t like the cold!"
No kidding. It was so hot I woke up several times because I felt so dehydrated.
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| Dmitry Solovyov/ NBC News |
| The bow of the Yamal cuts through summertime ice as it heads towards the North Pole. |
I’m still finding my way around the ship. It’s big (I counted six decks), and so far, the Arctic Ocean is cooperating. Seas are at most three feet: calm by my calculations. A few passengers onboard are feeling seasick, but they’re in the minority.
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By Kerry Sanders, NBC News Correspondent
NBC News sent Miami-based correspondent Kerry Sanders, Miami-based producer Nery Ynclan, and Moscow-based cameraman Dmitry Solovyov to the North Pole.
The only time you can travel by ship to the North Pole is during the summer months. Our NBC team departed June 26, 2007.
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| NBC News |
| The NBC News Team at the North Pole from left to right, Kerry Sanders, Dmitry Solvoyov and Nery Ynclan. |
Quark Expeditions arranges to take passengers to the North Pole every year. It's an expensive proposition to go to a place on earth where it's estimated only about 40,000 people have ever been (that includes explorers, members of the military, scientists, and tourists). If you want to go, begin saving now: cost exceeds $20,000 per person.
Our team traveled to the North Pole to prepare reports for NBC Nightly News, the Today Show and CNBC. Onboard with Kerry and crew were scientists, an extreme sportsman who once skied to the North Pole, and a few dozen tourists.
What follows is a day-by-day look by Kerry Sanders at their voyage to the top of the world.
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By NBC's Matthew Perlstein
LONDON –
Warriors. Conquest. Sacred mountains. Elixirs. Rivers of mercury. A vision of cosmic opulence. The legacy of China’s first Emperor, Qin Shi Huangdi, has found a temporary home in a major exhibit at the British Museum.
Droves of eager spectators have flocked to catch a glimpse of "The First Emperor: China’s Terrracotta Army" at the British Museum since the exhibit opened in September.
The presentation showcases the ancient collection of 7,000 life-size warriors replete with cavalry, archers, armor, and chariots commissioned by "The First August and Divine Emperor of the Qin" after he successfully united all of China’s warring states in 221 B.C.
VIDEO: Take a tour of the British Museum’s
"The First Emperor: China’s Terrracotta Army" exhibit
The massive undertaking commissioned by the man who also claimed to be the "Emperor of the Universe" took 38 years and required over 700,000 workers. Even more amazing, each warrior is markedly differently – leading many scholars to believe that each face was modeled after a real soldier.
Although frozen in the same pose for over two millennia, the soldiers appear shockingly mobile. A chariot pulled by four terracotta horses seems to wait patiently to be spurred into action. Observing from a bench inside the exhibit, visitors seem stiffer than the warriors, struck by the power and vision of China’s first Emperor.
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