February 2008 - Posts
By Mark Potter, NBC News Correspondent
HAVANA – During many visits to Cuba over the last two decades, I have never heard so many everyday Cubans openly criticizing life on the island as I did during this last trip to cover Raul Castro officially taking over the presidency from his ailing brother, Fidel.
There have long been Cuban dissidents and independent journalists challenging the socialist government and suffering for their beliefs. The difference now is that common citizens are starting to raise their voices a bit, at least on economic issues.
In past years, such public complaining would have been punished and was rarely heard. People have always griped here, as they do everywhere else in the world, but in Cuba it used to be done much more discreetly, usually after looking both ways to make sure no one from the government was listening.
CONTINUED >>
By Ian Williams, NBC News correspondent
While American are being treated to a political thriller, here in Thailand we are being entertained by something closer to pantomime,
the latest act being the return this week of Thaksin Shinawatra, the former prime minister, deposed in a bloodless military coup 17 months ago.
I learned of his imminent return from a taxi driver who picked me up at the airport after I'd arrived back in Bangkok from North Korea, where local TV doesn't carry a great deal of news about the outside world, or anything else for that matter, and where I had been covering the visit of the New York Philharmonic.
It was a curious conversation. "Sorry, no meter. Meter not working," the taxi driver announced, soon after we'd set off. It was late, I was tired. I really didn't need this, so I replied rather curtly, "No meter, no money!"
The meter then miraculously sprung back to life. A moment or two later he turned to me, beaming, giving a thumbs up sign.
"Thaksin back tomorrow, back tomorrow!"
I'm sure there is no direct connection between the driver trying to rip me off and the return of a man whose government was accused of massive corruption, but it did give me pause for thought.
The last time Thai politics made headline news was when the military sent tanks onto the streets of Bangkok in September 2006 to remove Thaksin from power. It was the 18th coup since Thailand became a constitutional monarchy in 1932.
It followed massive protests, largely engineered by the Bangkok elite, and accusations of abuse of power, as well as corruption.
I guess the generals thought Thaksin would just fade away as most deposed leaders have in the past. But the billionaire businessman had three things going for him: Massive support among Thailand's poor, a well-oiled political machine and pots of money.
He had reinvented Thai politics, which used to be essentially a competition of the Bangkok elite, with populist policies, including cheap health care and low-cost village loans. Men like my taxi driver, who suspect all politicians are corrupt, loved him for it.
Elections gave him the biggest majorities in Thai political history.
CONTINUED >>
By AJ Goodwin, NBC News producer
SILVER BANKS, Caribbean Sea – Tail slapping, fin slapping, breaching, surfacing to breathe and diving again, it’s an incredible show of nature.
We are shooting a story on humpback whales, which will air on the Today Show and other NBC News outlets in the coming weeks.
To capture video of the whales in their natural habitat, we have come to the Silver Banks, a 40 square mile area about 80 miles off the coast of the Dominican Republic.
We’ve been out here for two days and at any time of the day, if you look out from the ships’ deck, the view is spotted with whales.
CONTINUED >>
By Ian Williams, NBC News correspondent
PYONGYANG, North Korea – There was a first note of discord in the concert hall today – over flags.
"They seem to have short-changed us," said a grim-faced official with the New York Philharmonic, as he hauled down the Stars and Stripes. "There was discussion over flag size, and we wanted the flags to be the same size. So we’re changing it."
So up went a new, bigger flag.
It had happened during rehearsals this morning, which were more like a full show, since the hall was packed. Yet nobody I spoke to could tell me who the audience was. The orchestra had expected a few students, but they looked like officials. As one member of the orchestra quipped to me, it might be tonight’s audience having their own rehearsal.
They did seem to appreciate the humor of the Philharmonic’s Director, Lorin Maazel. After introducing Gershwin’s "An American in Paris," he said: "Perhaps some day a composer will write a composition called ‘An American in Pyongyang.'"
Looking for Kim Jong Il's tips for journos
After the rehearsal I returned to our hotel, the Yanggakdo, a monstrous 42-story building in an island in the Taedong River, which runs through the City. It has been affectionately dubbed "Alcatraz."
Not all the floors are used and if you hit the wrong elevator button you find yourself stepping out into a freezing dark hallway of one of the mothballed floors. With a few minutes to spare, I made for the bookstore, where the majority of publications contain the thoughts and writings of the late Great Leader, Kim Il Sung or his son Kim Jong Il, otherwise known as the Dear Leader.
I was after a Kim Jong Il classic called "The Great Teacher of Journalists." At first the assistant in glowing traditional robes told me she didn’t have it, then confided that she’d do her best to get it. When I returned to the hotel, there she was calling me over in a slightly conspiratorial way, book in hand, and a bargain at 4 Euros (they don’t accept dollars here).
Read the rest of Ian Williams blog in the Daily Nightly blog. See his report on the New York Philharmonic's concert on Nightly News with Brian Williams Tuesday evening.
By Ian Williams, NBC News correspondent
PYONGYANG, North Korea – No sooner had Lorin Maazel stepped off the aircraft this afternoon, the maestro was surrounded by cameras and bombarded with questions.
"Hang on," he said defensively, "I’ve only seen the airport."
There is incredible interest in this visit to North Korea by the New York Philharmonic – the first cultural exchange of its kind, and the single largest group of Americans to come here since the end of the Korean War.
There was chaos for a while as journalists, musicians and agitated North Korean security men mingled at the foot of the aircraft steps before the orchestra posed for a group photograph in front of the aircraft, a Boeing 747. They were then ushered to a more agreeable backdrop (for the authorities) of the terminal building with a giant picture of the Great Leader, Kim Il Sung, who though dead, remains head of state.
His son, Kim Jong Il, is in day-to-day charge here, and it is usually hard to move anywhere in Pyongyang without images of the two, together with some pretty blood-curdling anti-American propaganda.
Significantly, the billboards on the nearly deserted road from the airport to the city centre had been toned down.
Read the rest of Ian Williams blog from Pyongyang in the Daily Nightly blog.
CONTINUED >>
By Andy Eckardt, NBC News Producer
RUMMELSHEIM, Germany – Fair warning: This story involves one of those fairytale, somewhat kitschy German villages.
It also includes a cuddly toy, environmental laws and high-tech sneakers.
Let’s start in Rümmelsheim. Rummelsheim is the type of village where the grass seems to have been cut with rulers and fingernail clips. The sidewalks are so spotless you could eat off them.
Many Germans would call this little wine-growing town near the Rhine River a "lawn gnome community"– referring to those plastic dwarfs which often characterize "proper" German gardens and are a common sign of the German propensity for orderliness.
Sometimes that penchant for order is taken to extremes.
Take, for instance, a recent visit I made in an effort to shoot some video of the picturesque village. After I parked my car – perhaps a little sloppily -- I was immediately approached by an elderly local man, who was passing by with his grandson.
"You should be filming your car and the violation," the man began yelling at me.
Startled, I turned around to see what had gotten him so angry. It turned out that the tires of my car were on the edge of the sidewalk.
"This is not in order," were his last words as he walked away, steaming mad.
Which leads me to the cuddly toy....
CONTINUED >>
The New York Philharmonic Orchestra’s historic visit will attempt to break the isolation of North Korea, also known as the the "Hermit Kingdom" amid a prolonged standoff over Pyongyang's nuclear weapons program.
By Mary Murray, NBC News Producer
Cuba’s rulers seem to have pulled off what many would have considered unthinkable just a few years ago – a systematic and tidy transfer of power from one Castro to the next.
For ages, Cuba watchers feared that the island would either unravel or erupt when Fidel Castro stepped down. Some predicted a political power struggle would ensue, sparking thousands to flee across the Florida Straits on homemade or smuggler’s boats. Others envisioned Cubans flooding the streets to demand democratic freedoms denied under socialist rule.
Instead, when Raúl Castro officially took over the presidency Sunday, the nation serenely went about its daily business.
CONTINUED >>
For a growing number of African American retirees, moving to Africa is a return home, but for others, spending the golden years there allows a lifestyle grander than they ever imagined. NBC's Martin Fletcher reports from Accra, Ghana.
CONTINUED >>
By Jim Maceda, NBC News Correspondent
MOSCOW – A generation ago, Checkpoint Charlie in Berlin defined the no-go zone between East and West. If you listen to Russian officials these days, that geopolitical schism
has now shifted to the Serbia-Kosovo border.
On one side, Russia defends its nationalist proxy, Orthodox Serbians, who say they will never accept a non-Serbian Kosovo; on the other side, Kosovars – more than 90 percent of whom are Albanian Muslims – are backed in their desire for independence by the United States and most of Western Europe.
Russian warning
This new East-West gap should surprise no one who's watched and listened to Russia's take on Kosovo since June 1999.
Then, just as Serb forces were involuntarily withdrawing from Kosovo, Russian President Boris Yeltsin ordered his general to take his troops – part of an international peacekeeping mission – and occupy the strategic airport in Pristina before NATO could get there.
Those Russian troops eventually re-joined the peacekeeping operation, but only after days of intense negotiations in Finland between U.S. and Russian officials. Most Serbs believed that Yeltsin had abandoned Serbia by acquiescing to NATO’s demands.
For years, every time rumors of an Albanian declaration of independence for Kosovo were whispered in Pristina or Brussels or Washington, Moscow would weigh in, warning that such an illegal act could plunge the whole European continent into another spasm of violence. But no one seemed to take notice.
Then Russia started to muscle up: President Vladimir Putin is no Yeltsin, and Russia under Putin has grown into an economic powerhouse, no longer afraid to throw its weight around. During Thursday’s massive rally against Kosovo independence, Serbian protestors were holding up posters of Putin, showing that they consider the Russian leader to be their chief ally in the current stand-off with the West
CONTINUED >>
By Kevin Corke, NBC News White House Correspondent
MONROVIA, Liberia – To put it mildly, it was pretty bad.
As part of
President Bush's visit to Liberia's capital Monrovia, the final stop on his five-country African tour, we made a 30-minute drive into the center of town.
What we saw was shocking and disheartening – a once proud city in ruins.
The drive was marked by crumbling infrastructure and tattered shanty neighborhoods where a complete roof is a rarity and electrical power a luxury.
It’s sad, but understandable – considering that the city is still recovering from a bloody 14-year civil war that ended in 2003.
CONTINUED >>
By Adrienne Mong, NBC News Producer
Imagine Versailles plundered and razed to the ground by marauding invaders.
Then imagine, some hundred years later, a Donald Trump-like figure announcing that he will build an exact, full-scale replica of Versailles... not in its original location – but hundreds of miles away. All for the princely sum of $3 billion.
Why, you might ask, would anyone do such a thing?
 |
| Adrienne Mong / NBC News |
| The original Yuanmingyuan -- so thoroughly destroyed that decades later even the flowers are fake. |
Well, in China, a lot of people are wondering the same thing about a plan to rebuild the Old Summer Palace, or Yuanmingyuan, once hailed as the Versailles of the East.
‘The Garden of Perfect Splendor’
A complex of imperial gardens and buildings located in Beijing's far northwest, Yuanmingyuan is one of the capital's beloved historic sites. Its name in Chinese means "Garden of Perfect Splendor," some fans also called it the Garden of all Chinese Gardens.
Built largely during the 18th century and under the supervision of five Qing emperors, Yuanmingyuan covers 865 acres. It was famed not just for its beautiful grounds replete with waterways, hills, and scenic landscapes but also for its elegant mix of imperial palaces, pavilions, and European buildings, featuring the work of artisans from around the world.
But Yuanmingyuan was sacked in 1860 by English and French troops during the second Opium War - an act condemned by French writer Victor Hugo, who deemed the complex more impressive than Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris. If that wasn’t bad enough, it was sacked again in 1900.
In the process, priceless artifacts and works of art were whisked away from Yuanmingyuan's grounds to museums and private collections across Europe.
The episode has often been cast as a national humiliation, in which foreign imperialists bested the decrepit Qing regime to occupy Chinese cities and ports.
Since then, Yuanmingyuan has limped through the nation's post-revolutionary stages, rebuilt piecemeal through the collective efforts of local officials, historians, and preservationists.
Not so anymore.
CONTINUED >>
By Martin Fletcher, NBC News Correspondent
KIGALI, Rwanda -- Could these be new laws in tiny Singapore? Plastic bags in the entire country are illegal, as part of the fight to save the environment. Use leads to a fine equal to 10 U.S. dollars. Same fine for smoking or spitting in public. Civil guards in red uniforms carry rifles to enforce the laws.
On the last Saturday of each month, every citizen, including cabinet ministers and the president, must go outside and clean the streets. Each day, shopkeepers must sweep the sidewalk in front of their store. Paved streets in towns as well as dusty alleys in poor villages, and the highways in between, are spotless. A cigarette butt or old newspapers or abandoned coke cans on the ground are so rare as to be remarkable.
Bikes and walking are encouraged over cars and buses. In the center of the capital, traffic flows easily even at peak times. A car blowing black exhaust fumes risks being impounded on the spot.
OK, here’s the punchline: It isn't Singapore, it’s Rwanda. But on an African continent of desperately congested and polluted cities, why this startling emphasis on cleanliness here, in a country with so many other problems?
Fourteen years after the genocide, when Hutus killed 800,000 Tutsis and moderate Hutus in 100 days, Rwanda is still coming to terms with its months of madness. Local courts still try killers, who apologize and finger other killers still at large. But parallel to this ongoing purging of the psyche of an entire nation, is a cleansing of the physical world as well as of the inner one.
It isn’t only B.G. (Rwandans refer to life as B.G. and A.G. – Before the Genocide and After the Genocide.) Street cleaning was also mandatory B.G. But we sometimes forget that the 1994 Genocide was not the first, but the third, assault by the Hutus on the Tutsis in thirty-five years, so the physical purging element may still somehow be related to mass murders, only earlier ones.
Click here to read the rest of Martin Fletcher's post about Rwanda's long road back in the Daily Nightly blog.
By Kevin Corke, NBC News White House Correspondent
KIGALI, Rwanda – Draining.
Before departing Washington with the President Bush on this six-day, five-country African tour, many well-meaning friends and colleagues said the trip would be an emotional one for me. They must have reasoned that this being my first trip to the land of my ancestors, surely that must count for something beyond words.
Unable to grasp their certainty and not being the emotional type, I gave no hint of how lightly I regarded their expressions. But how wrong I was.
 |
| AP |
| U.S. President George W. Bush and First Lady Laura Bush lay a wreath at the Kigali Memorial Center, which documents the 1994 genocide in Rwanda, on Feb. 19, 2008. |
Today, I was confronted by the most heinous example of evil I've ever seen.
We visited a memorial of Rwanda's 1994 genocide, a site in Kigali where the remains of more than 250,000 victims are still buried. Thanks to the film "Hotel Rwanda," many Americans know what happened then: Close to a million Rwandans were slaughtered by their own countrymen in a 100-day period.
To see pictures of the bodies of hundreds of babies, children, women and men piled up like trash in burned out churches was truly numbing. Staring at the mass gravesites where bodies sent a chill down my spine. Who could do such a thing? Hadn't this poor, starving and struggling country been through enough?
CONTINUED >>
By Carol Grisanti, NBC News Producer
For those who think the election campaign is suspenseful in the United States, come visit Pakistan.
In the United States, it may be a close contest among the Democrats – and the ultimate outcome on Nov. 4 is still hard to predict. Here the elections are full of intrigue, poll rigging and death threats.
The Pakistani elections scheduled for Monday are parliamentary elections for a new national assembly.
SLIDESHOW: Pakistan prepares for vote
President Pervez Musharraf isn't running. He already got himself elected as president for another five years last October in a somewhat shady procedure thanks to a parliament crammed with his supporters. And then he declared martial law to quell the outcry.
Yet, at the same time, these elections are all about Musharraf and whether he will be able to maintain his grip on power.
CONTINUED >>
Prince Seeiso of Lesotho takes NBC News on a trip through the mountain kingdom in southern Africa to show the enormous challenges his country is facing in the fight against HIV/AIDS.
By Ed Flanagan, NBC News Researcher
Edison Chen, a popular singer, actor and TV host in Asia, was hoping American audiences would discover him when Christopher Nolan's newest installment in the Batman series, "The Dark Knight" is released in the United States sometime later this year.
 |
| Getty Images |
| Actor Edison Chen seen here in Oct. 2006. |
Instead, Americans are getting their first taste of this young Hong Kong actor via one of the
largest sex scandals to hit the Hong Kong/Chinese film scene in recent memory. The scandal, now known as the "Edison Chen Incident," exploded when digital photographs showing Chen apparently performing sexual acts with other Hong Kong celebrities, Bobo Chan and Gillian Chung, turned up on prominent Hong Kong Internet bulletin boards systems (BBS) and celebrity blogs.
The episode not only raises important questions about privacy and censorship, it is arguably the former British colony's
biggest scandal in years and has secured a place on newspaper front pages every day since it broke a couple of weeks ago.
CONTINUED >>
By NBC News' Iqbal Sapand in Kabul, Afghanistan and Carol Grisanti in Islamabad, Pakistan
Malalai Ishaqzai was anxious to tell her story.
"The Taliban kidnapped my 21-year-old son Mustafa," she said. "They demanded a ransom of $200,000 or else they said they would kill him," she told NBC News. "Then they ordered me to give up my job."
Ishaqzai, 36, is the mother of seven and, as a member of the Afghan parliament, one of the few female politicians in this male-dominated society. She is a prominent figure and well-known in the Afghan capital.
 |
| Iqbal Sapand / NBC News |
| Mustafa, after having survived being kidnapped by the Taliban, safely back at home with his mother, Malalai Ishaqzai, in Kabul. |
News of the kidnapping recently surfaced and had become a hot conversation topic in Kabul.
NBC News went to visit Ishaqzai at her home in an upscale Kabul neighborhood. The family lives well, at least by Afghan standards. An antique red Bokhara carpet covered the entire length of the living room in their fourth floor apartment. It was bitter cold outside, but it had finally stopped snowing, and it was warm inside thanks to a gas heater.
A houseboy brought tea and Ishaqzai began to tell her story.
CONTINUED >>
By Alexa Chopivsky, NBC News Correspondent
Tuesday was Day 68 at the London inquest into the deaths of Diana, Princess of Wales, and Dodi al-Fayed.
So far the jury has heard from priests and pathologists, soothsayers and Scotland Yard, butlers, bartenders and best friends, videocam-toting tourists and toxicologists, ex-girlfriends and ambassadors, masseuses, forensic experts and eyewitnesses, journalists and jewelers, professors and pathologists, intelligence officers, doctors, bodyguards, ambulance drivers and financial analysts, onetime car dealership managers and Diana relatives, psychiatrists, the French Brigade Criminelle, and a British Member of Parliament. All connected – some in big ways, some small – to events surrounding "the crash."
 |
| Alexa Chopivsky / NBC News |
| John Loughrey shows off the face paint he wears everyday to the London inquest into the deaths of Princess Diana and Dodi al-Fayed. |
Truly a colorful cast. But surely the most outstanding character at the Royal Courts of Justice – ground zero for the proceedings – is 52-year-old John Loughrey, who quit his job as a chef outside London so that he could "do this inquest."
"I’m probably one of Diana’s most loyal fans," he boasts, his face painted – as it is every day – with "Diana" and "Dodi" straddling his nose in blue. "Everybody knows me in the courtroom."
‘I want to know the truth’
Loughrey is the court entertainer, of sorts, playing his supporting role by sitting in the public gallery every day of the hearings.
During a break he nods familiarly to a lawyer representing the Metropolitan Police, whose 2006 investigation into the crash determined that the tragedy was the result of an alcohol-fueled accident and not, as some allege, foul play.
CONTINUED >>
By Ed Flanagan, NBC News Researcher
China may have rung in the year of the rat this week, but the nation’s heart is still hungrily set on the pig.
With pork prices having jumped over 50 percent in the past year, national attention has shifted to the ever escalating prices for basic foodstuffs. Pork is a staple in the Chinese diet – 65 percent of the 110lbs of meat the average Chinese eat each year is pork – and the near daily increases in price here have become a banner issue for poor and middle-class Chinese. Now with some of the most severe rates in years, government officials here are quietly wondering if unchecked inflation could potentially lead to a repeat of the public incident that followed the last period of economic hardship. CONTINUED >>
By Adrienne Mong, NBC News Producer
CHANGYUAN, Henan Province – I thought I was back in Iraq. It certainly didn't sound like China.
The town of Changyuan in central Henan province rang in the Year of the Rat in full-blown style. Fireworks went off all night, all over town. Traditional Chinese courtyard houses just below my hotel window sparkled and smoked through the wee hours and into the morning.
My last embed with the U.S. military in Iraq hadn't been this noisy.
CONTINUED >>
Insurgents who have been driven out of Anbar province have regrouped in the Iraqi city of Mosul, which is seen as the main front against al-Qaida. NBC’s Richard Engel recently spent several days patrolling with the 3rd Armored Cavalry Regiment and reports from the scene.
By Jim Maceda, NBC News Correspondent
One word of caution: I may be a foreign correspondent, but at heart, I’m a fifth generation New Yorker who grew up eating box scores for breakfast.
If you say "hero of 1969," I still think of Joe Namath, who led the New York Jets to their Super Bowl championship, before Neil Armstrong.
Unfortunately, frustratingly, my relationship with the greatest show on earth – American football and best of all, the Super Bowl – has always been at a distance.
From scratchy shortwave to satellite TV
In the ‘70s, as a cub journalist based in Paris, the Super Bowl was, well, forgedaboudit (before someone had coined the term). In those medieval days, I could find Yankees games on my crackling short-wave radio, but never the Super Bowl.
It didn’t get much better in the ‘80s. As I moved from Paris to the Middle East to London to South East Asia, reporting on the news of the day, I was always trying to watch the ever-elusive football game without much luck.
Toward the end of that decade, however, things began to change. We did a news spot on ‘Refrigerator’ Perry and his Chicago Bears who came to London to play an exhibition game at Wembley Stadium. That turned out to be the spark that ignited the slow burn of British interest in American football – a pastime that had been seen as rather confusing, annoying (with all those time-outs) and less-than-macho by the die-hard fans of blood-soaked, pad-less rugby.
CONTINUED >>
By Jim Maceda, NBC News Correspondent
As Super Tuesday looms, many Europeans find themselves gripped by the excitement of the U.S. presidential primaries. Why are they paying such close attention, and which candidates have struck a chord on the other side of the Atlantic?
CONTINUED >>
By Adrienne Mong, NBC News Producer
CHENZHOU, Hunan Province – It was at Yizhang that our luck ran out.
Just 30 miles away from our destination, we were diverted off the Jingzhou Expressway heading north.
We had been traveling for two days to get to Chenzhou, a city located in Hunan Province, which has taken some of the worst hits from the freak winter weather that has gripped China in a major cold snap during the past four weeks. Chenzhou’s four million people have been without power and, increasingly, without running water, too.
The expressway only re-opened to traffic on Saturday, after being closed for several days. By mid-morning on Sunday we were moving at a good clip. Both sides of the highway were flowing with steady traffic – buses and cars brimming with passengers, trucks overflowing with supplies.
 |
| Adrienne Mong / NBC News |
| A pylon nears collapse over a field of iced-over rice paddies in Hunan. |
In fact, despite below-freezing temperatures, conditions for the highway were so surprisingly good that I merrily sent a text message to our bureau chief in Beijing and our ITN colleagues who had just left Guangzhou and were heading in the same direction as we were traveling: "Roads all clear!"
But then we quickly entered a bizarre looking landscape, where everything was covered in inches-thick ice, including downed power lines and tree branches. Even the rice paddies were iced up. Correspondent Mark Mullen said it was like being trapped in a "snow globe."
CONTINUED >>
By Ali Arouzi, NBC News Producer
The Iranian government has outlawed pet dogs and has begun to arrest owners who bring their animals in public.
CONTINUED >>
By Adrienne Mong, NBC News Producer
After hearing how the snow storms and ice blizzards have not just stranded millions of travelers, but also ravaged parts of China's farming heartland in the central and southern regions, it wasn't quite what we expected to see at the Dong Jiao market in eastern Beijing: Piles and piles of fresh healthy-looking fruit.
"Where did these come from?" I pointed to all the oranges for sale by a young woman wrapped up against the cold in a puffy parka.
 |
| Adrienne Mong/NBC News |
| Winter's bounty: mangoes from overseas, but strawberries from China. |
"Guangdong!"
"Guandgong province?" I squawked back. Guangdong, one of China's southern most provinces, has been hard hit by snowfall and freezing temperatures while regions just north of it have been paralyzed by the extreme weather, interrupting travel and transport. "I thought no fruit was getting through from the south?"
CONTINUED >>
