March 2008 - Posts
By John Yang, NBC News' White House Correspondent
KIEV, Ukraine -- It is, in the words of a top U.S. official, "the world's stupidest major issue," and it threatens to cast a shadow over President Bush's sixth and final NATO summit.
It's all about a name -- "Macedonia," to be specific -- as Europe and the United States try to deal with one of the final unfinished chapters from the violent break-up of Yugoslavia.
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By John Yang, NBC News' White House Correspondent
KIEV, Ukraine -- Technology has brought the world closer together with cell phones, e-mails and instant messaging. And now it's done it for world leaders.
For the past year or so, President Bush and German Chancellor Angela Merkel have sat down on opposite sides of the Atlantic for regular biweekly secure videoconferences to discuss issues of common concern.
Before, fact-to-face contact between world leaders was limited to economic summits or other high-profile meetings.
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By Ian Williams, NBC News correspondent
SIDOARJO, East Java, Indonesia – Misi struck me as being pretty cheerful for a man who'd lost his home and livelihood to a torrent of mud.
"That's where I lived over there, next to the town hall," he told me during a recent visit earlier this year, pointing to the roof of a building that protruded, barely, from a lake of sludge. He said the furniture factory in which he and around 300 others worked was also under the mud.
Just a few rooftops were the only evidence of Misi's once thriving village. We were standing on a tall earthen embankment, part of system of levees designed to contain a three square miles of stinking mud that's been spewing from the earth for 22 months, and shows no sign of stopping.
Misi (who, like many Indonesians, only has one name) has become something of an expert on what locals call the mud volcano, offering guided tours on the back of his motorcycle and selling disaster videos to the tourists who come to view the ghoulish spectacle.
His videos are replete with eerie music, which reminded me of some b-grade horror movie, except this gurgling monster is for real – it's consumed eleven villages under a billion cubic feet of mud since a fissure deep beneath the earth was breached in May 2006.
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By Adrienne Mong, NBC News producer
BEIJING, China – Quite possibly one of the busiest people in China right now are the television censors.
As international news broadcasters like the BBC World Service Television and CNN International play footage around the clock of the Tibet unrest, viewers with access to satellite TV in Beijing and across cities in China find themselves scratching their heads as reports suddenly go to black whenever the word "Tibet" comes up.
Sometimes the screen goes black before a report about Tibet airs.
Sometimes the screen goes black right after the report begins airing.
Sometimes the screen goes black midway through the report – as though the censor had stepped away to make a cup of tea and returned a little too late.
Sometimes the screen doesn't go to black at all, and entire broadcasts go to air without interruption.
These include a live transmission by a Hong Kong cable television crew from a Muslim quarter of Lhasa, showing Chinese security forces searching homes the day after the first riots broke out on March 14.
Or, today, when some international broadcasters such as the BBC carried dramatic pictures of Tibetan monks bursting onto a small group of foreign press on a government-orchestrated tour of Jokhang Temple and openly condemning the Chinese authorities.
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James Miles, a reporter for the Economist, was the only accredited Western journalist in Tibet when riots broke out last week. He discussed with NBC News what he saw and what the riots mean.
By Mary Murray, NBC News Producer
Cuban blogger Yoani Sanchez has something to say and she thinks the government is trying to gag her.
For the past 11 months the 32-year-old cyber rebel has ruthlessly disparaged life on the socialist island in her "Generation Y" blog, tackling taboo topics like the country’s aging leadership and what she sees as Raul Castro’s "vague promises of change.".
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| Roberto Leon/ NBC News |
| Cuban blogger Yoanis Sanchez works on her computer. |
She even called for Fidel Castro’s resignation months before he issued it and sarcastically suggested that the next ruler should be a "pragmatic housewife" instead of a soldier, charismatic leader or a great orator.
Since last Thursday, Sanchez charges, Internet users in Cuba are experiencing difficulty logging on to her web site.
She is convinced government censors added filtering software to her page to intentionally slow down the connection.
"So, the anonymous censors of our famished cyberspace have tried to shut me in a room, turn off the light and not let my friends in," Sanchez blogged on Monday.
"It won’t work," she vowed. "This is just fuel for my fire."
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By Carla Marcus, NBC News Producer
The warning to his family was explicit. "Do not befriend or talk to any Iraqis."
Sound like words likely to be spoken in ethnically-torn Iraq? The advice was actually given to the wife and children of an Iraqi colleague lucky enough to get his family to Europe. The family is presently applying for asylum, as well as learning a new language and skills which may lead to work.
Similar words were expressed by another workmate who moved his family to Syria. While he remains here in Baghdad to work so he can support his wife and children, the potential danger to his family abroad is high. Why? In each case, there's fear that if word gets out that the families have ties to Iraqis working for Western organizations, trouble could arise in the form of retaliation – the same fears each family lived with while in Iraq.
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By Kerry Sanders, NBC News Correspondent
SILVER BANK, Dominican Republic – I'm an adrenaline junkie.
Sky-diving? Done it.
Zero-Gravity? Over Cape Canaveral, I floated weightless in the so-called "vomit-comet."
Pulled 6 Gs? My blood pumped as I flew 400 miles per hour in a fighter only eight feet off the ground at the Reno jet races.
So it came as a bit of a surprise that floating motionless, on the surface of the Caribbean Sea, I could feel that same type of adrenaline rush.
But just feet away from my dead-mans-float, one of nature’s biggest creatures was looking me eye-to-eye.
A humpback whale, seemingly as curious as I was in her, stared back at me. I'm not one to humanize animals, but it certainly appeared she was looking at me with the curiosity of a child.
And why wouldn't she? The two-ton humpback was likely no more than three weeks old.
Every year, North Atlantic Humpback Whales migrate south to this particular spot from their summer feeding grounds in areas like Maine and Newfoundland. Experts estimate as many as 7,000 make their way to this place called Silver Bank, 80-miles off the north coast of the Dominican Republic.
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By Lawahez Jabari, NBC News Producer
BETHLEHEM, West Bank – Ahmed Balboul hoped that renewed peace talks between Israel and the Palestinians might save his life. But as a senior figure in Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigade, a violent militia affiliated with Fatah, Balboul had a number on his head – he had been wanted by the Israelis since 2000 because they believe he was responsible for the deaths of Israeli citizens.
In one of his last interviews with NBC News, Balboul disavowed violence and expressed his support for the Israeli-Palestinian peace process. "I want to live a normal life. I am not hiding anymore. We will give a chance for peace," he said to NBC News this past December.
Despite his support for the peace process and his hopes for an amnesty agreement with the Israelis, Balboul’s number came up. On March 12, he and three other Palestinian militants were shot and killed while riding in a car in the West Bank city of Bethlehem.
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By Mark Potter, NBC News Correspondent
BOGOTA, Colombia — Returning to this country after a years-long absence, I am simply amazed by all the positive changes here but am also struck by how some very painful things still remain.
On the plus side, the levels of violence that used to keep Colombians in their homes, off the roads and in constant fear have dropped substantially, and you can feel that change wherever you go. People flood the streets and take long vacation trips on mountain highways, something most people would never have considered just five years ago. It helps explain why President Alvaro Uribe, with his crackdown on crime, drugs and terrorism, still enjoys a popularity rating of more than 80 percent — six years into his term.
The sad part, though, is that some of the problems that infected Colombian life many years ago are still front and center. One of them is kidnapping.
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By NBC local journalist in Iraq*
BAGHDAD, Iraq - I remember vividly the moment when the bombing started five years ago. The sound of the air raids and the sirens still echo inside me.
Within minutes of the first siren, columns of smoke climbed the sky and thunderous explosions could be heard everywhere. It brought mixed feelings for many Iraqis; feelings of delight and anxiety, which were overwhelming to me and my family.
On the one hand, there was a strong sense of hope and expectation that this war would lead us to a better future and away from a life that had witnessed many wars and much destruction. On the other hand, there was anxiety that it could all end in disappointment.
On April 9, 2003, our neighbor came running to our house like an excited child, saying that U.S. forces were on the main road of our neighborhood. We did not believe her.
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By Jim Maceda, NBC News Correspondent
Five years ago today I was standing in a large, recently built UN refugee camp inside Jordan, on its desert border with Iraq. With my NBC news team of cameraman Maurice Roper, soundman Stan Ouse, producer Paul Hijaz, and engineer Lenny Venezia , we were filing live shots on the hour from our, well, more modest version of David Bloom’s ‘Bloom-mobile’ – a customized white KIA pick-up truck-turned-satellite link we named ‘Odd Job’.
The story here was obvious, at least to us: when ‘Shock & Awe’ rained down on Iraq, Iraqis would flee to Jordan, perhaps by the hundreds of thousands. The international aid community certainly knew it – that’s why it built Camp A – for Iraqi refugees – and Camp B for non-Iraqis – in record time. But there were no long lines of Iraqis. In fact, there were no Iraqis coming over at all.
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By Adrienne Mong, NBC News producer
SICHUAN PROVINCE, China - It was on the 13-hour journey toward an ethnic Tibetan town in northern Sichuan province that NBC cameraman Marcus O’Brien and I saw how quickly technology could help spread the word about the unrest in Tibet and China -- and also how difficult information could be to verify.
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By Andy Eckardt, NBC News Producer
It is an everyday lottery when it comes to fuel prices at German gas stations. Prices for regular unleaded and diesel gas bounces up and down, often changing twice on the same day. And drivers in this car-loving nation are unhappily dealing with increasing prices at the pump.
Record prices on the international oil markets have driven gas prices across Europe sky high, with a gallon of unleaded gas costing about $8.60 per gallon in Germany. (In Germany, gas is sold by the liter with one liter of unleaded fuel selling for an average of $2.29)
The high prices hit people where it counts – in the wallet.
"For us, as a family with two children, the high fuel prices are burdening," said Britta Koester, a nurse who has a 20-mile commute to work at odd hours and no options for using public transportation. "I am totally dependent on the car; the infrastructure in our little town is miserable in that respect," said Koester.
While filling up his small Volkswagen Golf, Dietmar Dannemann, 63, watched the meter at the pump carefully and tried to stop his purchase at an exact amount.
"As a member of the ADAC automobile club, I get one cent discount per liter, but I don't want to get more than 15 liters today, the prices are too high," he explained.
Meanwhile, Susana, a 33-year-old mother of two children, actually traveled across town to get a better price at the pump. "I get gas when I see a bargain," she explained. "And, in my family, we call each other when we spot a station with lower prices."
Still loving the autobahn
But despite the rising costs, Germans have continued their love affair with the open road.
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By Bo Gu, NBC News Assistant Producer
Bo Gu, an NBC News Assistant Producer, traveled from Beijing to Lhasa, Tibet on Sunday. The following is her account of the scene in the Tibetan city over the last several days.
LHASA, Tibet – When I arrived in Lhasa, the site of recent protests against Chinese rule, I asked a taxi driver to take me to the House of Shambala, a hotel in the center of town.
"The House of Shambala? No way, I’m not going there," said the Tibetan taxi driver, his wrinkled, tanned face looking nervous.
"It’s really chaotic in Lhasa now," another taxi driver said as he approached us. "Two hundred and I’ll take you to Lhasa, but not to the House of Shambala. That area is all blocked now."
The second driver wasn’t exaggerating – we soon discovered that the city was in lock-down mode.
We had already been checked twice by Chinese police at roadblocks on our way into Lhasa from the airport. They checked our IDs and even took a look inside the trunk of our car. On the way, we also saw at least 10 army vehicles coming out of Lhasa with soldiers sitting in the back.
And the east side of the city, where all the tourist attractions are – the renown Potala Palace, the Jokhang Temple, and the shopping sanctum, Barkhor Street – was blocked from access.
Silent streets
As we walked around the parts of the city that were accessible on Sunday, the streets were absolutely dead. Most of the shops were closed with steel shutters. We saw very few pedestrians on the streets. A soldier gestured to me an absolute "no" when I tried to take a picture of the Potala Palace.
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By Dan Strieff, msnbc.com reporter
DUBLIN, Ireland – While reporting stories on contemporary Ireland, lines that W.B. Yeats wrote nearly a century ago kept coming back to me:
"Romantic Ireland’s dead and gone, / It’s with O’Leary in the grave," he wrote in support of a labor strike in 1913.
The rural Irish life, romanticized in such films as the 1952 John Ford classic "The Quiet Man," starring John Wayne and Maureen O’Hara, or the "emigrant Irish" depicted in Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman’s "Far and Away" can seem like relics of the past when viewed against the growth of the country’s cities and huge influx of immigrants.
For many years, Ireland suffered from wretched poverty and religion-based violence – hardships that built the nation’s character and fed the country’s unmatched literary heritage.
"It was, of course, a miserable childhood: the happy childhood is hardly worth your while," wrote Frank McCourt in his Pulitzer Prize-winning 1996 memoir "Angela’s Ashes."
Now, Ireland has been ranked as the second richest European country (after Luxembourg) on a per capita basis. Corporations that have located major European operations to Ireland include Google, Pfizer, Intel, Microsoft, IBM, Hewlett Packard and Jansen Pharmaceutical.
So, after reporting on the changes – chiefly, prosperity and multiculturalism – that have swept Ireland in the past decade, the question emerges: Has anything been lost in the "new" Ireland?
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By Mary Murray, NBC News Producer
On Thursday,
Cuba authorized the unrestricted sale of computers, DVD and video players and other appliances in a move that’s being seen as an effort by Cuba’s new leader, Raul Castro, to appease some of the grumbling by residents of the island.
Cuban consumers have complained for years that there is not much here to buy.
The sale in government-run stores of most electrical appliances and electronics have been carefully controlled for years – in many cases restricting their sale to foreigners and Cuba's diplomatic community.
That hasn't meant, of course, that people didn’t get their hands on electronic goods. Almost anything here can be bought – mostly at exorbitant prices – on Cuba's flourishing black market.
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A Saudi woman protests against the law banning women driver in a daring way. NBC's Jim Maceda reports.
By Adrienne Mong, NBC News Producer
I was curious.
I had my camera.
I had visited the Web site.
And soon I would see one of the world's largest buildings in person.
Bigger than the Pentagon, bigger than the small country of Vatican City, a building that is supposed to be so impressive that its architects describe it as "a symbol of place."
But really it's just an airport terminal.
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| EPA file |
| People walk through the new Terminal 3 building at the Beijing Capital International Airport in Beijing, China. |
And I was going to get my first glimpse of this behemoth not as a journalist reporting on the ceremonial grand opening, but as a passenger flying in from London.
Dizzying statistics
Designed by British architect Norman Foster (responsible for the feng-shui friendly Hong Kong Shanghai Bank in Hong Kong and the Millennium Bridge in London, among many others), Beijing Capital International Airport's Terminal Three is the kind of project that inspires people to summon up dizzying statistics.
The new terminal, which cost an estimated $3.75 billion to construct, occupies 14 million square feet. The building was constructed at lightning speed; it took four years and 50,000 workers.
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By Karl Bostic, NBC News Producer
GAZA CITY, Gaza Strip – Last week, Gaza was the site of some of the fiercest fighting between Israeli forces and Palestinians in years. Israel ground forces, tanks and helicopters invaded the territory in an attempt to put a halt to the onslaught of rockets being launched from Gaza in to Israel. The clashes resulted in a deadly toll – more than 120 Palestinians were killed in the offensive, and it’s estimated that at least half of the casualties were civilians.
But what really seems to be taking a toll on the people of Gaza is the gradual erosion of daily life. Since the militant group Hamas seized control last June, Israel has imposed restrictions on the flow of people and goods in and out of Gaza which have essentially crippled the economy. Last week a coalition of human-rights groups released a report stating that Israel’s blockade of the Gaza Strip has created the worst humanitarian crisis since its occupation began in 1967.
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| Karl Bostic / NBC News |
| Ismael Terawi with some of his 12 children outside his home in Gaza. |
While reporting from Gaza on the Israeli incursion, we decided to visit the family of Ismael Terawi, a man we profiled two years ago during the election campaign for the Palestinian Authority, to see how he and his family were doing with the new restrictions. It wasn’t a pretty picture.
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By Andy Eckardt, NBC News Producer
A few weeks ago, I wrote about the zeal of the recycling-conscious German public. Little did I know at the time that one waste product was potentially life threatening – at least for German hedgehogs.
Hedgehogs, spiny creatures which are native to Africa, Asia and Europe, are so beloved in Germany that they led McDonald’s Germany to introduce a new, hedgehog-friendly design for its McFlurry ice cream treat containers.
Two years ago, McDonald's Germany was contacted by BUND, one of Germany’s largest environmental groups, which reported that up to 100 hedgehogs had been killed as a result of being caught in the lid holes of the popular McFlurry treat.
"There were no solid statistics on hedgehog deaths caused by McFlurry lids," said Alexander Schramm, a McDonald's spokesman in Munich. "But, because our company had confronted the same problem in the U.K. in 2006 and had already changed the product line, we decided to do the same in Germany."
The re-design process included several different lid-sizes and cover flaps, which could prevent hedgehogs and other small animals from getting stuck inside the containers and, as a result, starving to death.
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By Jim Maceda, NBC News Correspondent
MOSCOW – The Russian elections are over, all the votes have been counted, and the results will be officially certified on Thursday. We all know that Vladimir Putin's former chief of staff – Deputy Prime Minister Dimitry Medvedev – won.
In December, at the start of the campaign, the Kremlin reportedly sent out notice to all the regional governors on its payroll that it wanted to see a 70/70 result: 70 percent turnout and 70 percent support for the bureaucrat who Putin hand-picked to succeed him. And the Kremlin got what it demanded – almost to the vote. Medvedev's total count was 70.24 percent on 69.65 percent turnout.
Andreas Gross, the spokesman for the only group of Western observers who dared venture into this electoral experiment Putin calls "managed democracy," said at a press conference that the election was "not free, not fair, but accurate all the same."
That's a diplomatic way of saying, remove all the free TV coverage, the biased reporting, the state broadcast media’s ability to create rock stars from rocks, the pressure on employees and students to vote the "right way," the discounted food, the lotteries, the prize money, and the crackdown on all real, anti-Kremlin opposition – and the numbers would still add up to produce a Medvedev victory. There was no need to massage them.
That tells you a few things: how popular Putin is with his people and how disinterested Russians are with politics in general and democracy in particular.
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By Carol Grisanti, NBC News Producer
PESHAWAR, Pakistan – "I am not Taliban," Kamran Khan told me. He could not have been more emphatic. "I am not a fundamentalist, I am not a terrorist, I am not an extremist," he said with a seriousness that belies his years.
The 25-year-old Khan is the newly elected parliamentary representative from North Waziristan – the area believed to be the command and control center of al-Qaida along the remote and rugged Pakistan-Afghanistan border.
Just last month a U.S. military strike on a safe house in the area killed one of Osama bin Laden’s top commanders, Abu Laith al Libi. The house was being used as a training camp to plan attacks on U.S. forces across the border in Afghanistan.
According to Khan, only one percent of the local population supports the militants. The local people are fed up with the violence, the beheadings, and the daily fear. They want to live in peace, he said. They want to see an improvement in their lives.
But the reality is much more complex. The Northwest Frontier and the tribal areas are polarized. On one side are the new young leaders like Khan, who want to bring an end to the violence, and on the other are the hard line militants who want to establish an orthodox Islamic state inside Pakistan.
A secular moderate supported by Taliban
In Pakistan’s Feb. 18 parliamentary elections, Khan ran as a secular candidate on an independent ticket – and won.
He defeated his opponent – a hard-line religious cleric – in a region where the Islamic militants hold sway, by calling for change. And even more surprising, the Taliban supported Khan.
"My first priority in the parliament is development," said Khan. "We have no hospitals, no roads, no drinking water." He also said he wants to tackle issues like the inequality of women. "There is no education," he said. "I want our women to be educated. They should become doctors and teachers."
With such an ambitious social program, I said that it sounded like he was calling for a rebellion.
His response was that, "Militancy will go away with jobs."
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By Jim Miklaszewski, NBC News' Chief Pentagon Correspondent
CAMP VICTORY, Iraq – Long after sundown, Gen. David Petraeus sat down with a handful of us Pentagon reporters in an otherwise empty dining room at Camp Victory in Baghdad to talk about ending the surge operation that began about a year ago and bringing those U.S. surge forces home.
Appearing as tired and weary as I've ever seen him, Petraeus appeared to regain some of his trademark energy as he talked about the reduction in overall violence in Iraq to its lowest levels in three years and expressed confidence that all five of the additional combat brigades sent to Iraq for the surge, some 21,000 U.S. forces, would be going home by the end of July. But typically cautious, Petraeues warned, "It will not be easy."
The general calls them "storm clouds," major problems that could reverse the security gains made during the surge and says he'll lay out all those potential pitfalls when he briefs Congress on the status of the surge in early April.
Among the "clouds" on the horizon: a spike in violence as U.S. forces decrease or an inability of Iraqi forces to takeover security operations, along with the lack of political and economic progress.
It's because of all those potential problems that Petraeus is resisting pressure, both political and from within his own military, to continue to drawdown the numbers of American troops in Iraq once the surge has ended. Meanwhile there's a tug-of-war developing within the military for what U.S. troops will remain.
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By Martin Fletcher, NBC News Correspondent
Working as a foreign correspondent for over 30 years has been an epic journey, in which I have grown from a clueless adventurer into whatever is the kindest description of me today. But in one sense, I’ve gone full circle.
In the old days, in Africa and Asia, NBC News once used one-man-bands: that is, people who shot the pictures with a big camera and recorded the sound, wrote the television story and then recorded radio reports on a separate tape recorder. They produced themselves.
Within a year of joining NBC, that was my job. In time, the team expanded: cameramen, soundmen, producers, correspondents, editors, engineers, fixers, drivers; we traveled to the airport in black limousines chauffeured by stiff-backed men in black suits and caps. We flew first class and became connoisseurs of fine wines. And then the shoe dropped: budgets were slashed.
Today, it’s back to the beginning. Now, one-man-bands are called SoJos, solo journalists: digital journalists who travel with a small camera and a computer. The difference is that in the old days you had to be as strong as a mule to carry the gear. Now, it all fits in a small backpack. And these technical developments give rise to new dilemmas within news organizations, among them – to use heavy gear and four-man crews, or light-weight equipment and fewer people?
The digital era is an exciting and challenging time for journalists, faced with revolutionary new ways to gather news and distribute it. Smaller, lighter equipment and fast broadband connections mean fewer people are needed and more stories can be covered.
But it’s also a risky time. Will media organizations use these developments simply to save money, or to cover more news? Will the old media outfits adapt or will they be replaced by new forms of media? Will the emphasis on SoJos, or even two-man teams, harm the content? Do you even need to send people to cover expensive foreign news, if you can just pick up local television or agency coverage, or even cell phone pictures from citizen journalists? It’s tempting to rely on computers and links to websites and video blogs from citizen journalists.
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By Tom Aspell, NBC News Correspondent
GAZA CITY, Gaza Strip – A 15-year-old Palestinian boy lay dying today in the intensive care unit of Gaza’s Shifa Hospital. Both his legs had been amputated above the knees after injuries sustained by what the hospital admission center called "an explosive device."
The boy was connected to a respirator, his heart beat was strong, but there was no brain activity and doctors said he probably wouldn’t live long.
There was no frantic activity to try to save his life because the intensive care unit was already overcrowded and doctors were needed to work on patients with a better chance of survival. All of the beds were occupied by young men, all of them unconscious.
When I asked one of the doctors if the unit was equipped to handle so many casualties and if it was short of any supplies, he said, "We need everything."
Israeli offensive
Gaza has just experienced a four-day assault launched by Israel to stop Palestinian militants firing rockets into Israeli territory. CONTINUED >>
