November 2009 - Posts
By Charlene Gubash, NBC News Producer
JIDDAH, Saudi Arabia – The road to Mecca for Islam’s annual hajj is littered with needles this year. Before you even leave your country of origin you have to get vaccinations for meningitis, seasonal flu, yellow fever, and for the lucky, the H1N1 vaccine.
Our trip started in Cairo, where Egyptian authorities are keen to prevent their residents from catching the H1N1 virus during the yearly pilgrimage and bringing it back home.
They insisted on a complete physical, including blood tests, chest x-rays and electrocardiograms to make sure we were healthy enough to travel before we were even allowed to get the H1N1 vaccine, which Egypt requires of all hajj pilgrims. China, Turkey, Bahrain, the United Arab Emirates, Jordan and others also are mandating the H1N1 vaccine.
Why are they so afraid? For at least five days, more than three million pilgrims from 160 countries are assembling in one place at one time, worshipping, eating and sleeping next to each other. For Muslims, it is the spiritual voyage of a lifetime; but for the H1N1 virus, it is the opportunity of a lifetime to hitch a ride on hosts that will deploy to the four corners of the earth.
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| Saudi Press Agency via EPA |
| Hajj pilgrims wear protective face masks ahead of the start of the hajj in Mina, Saudi Arabia, on Tuesday. |
That is why the Saudi government, in conjunction with the World Health Organization and the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, has been hard at work for several months reviewing every possible step of the pilgrims’ journey – from pre-departure, arrival, pilgrimage, departure and post-departure – to limit the spread of the virus and its chance to mutate.
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By Adrienne Mong, NBC News Correspondent
BEIJING – Five months after violence broke out in the northwestern Chinese province of Xinjiang, the area still remains under tight control. International calls are barred to and from Xinjiang. There is no Internet access available to the general population. And the government is in the midst of waging a "Strike Hard" campaign.
Earlier this month, nine people were executed for taking part in the July 5 riots, which official reports say killed 197 people. It was the worst single outbreak of violence in China in decades.
The violence erupted after ethnic minority Uighurs marched on Urumqi, the provincial capital, to protest the killing of two Uighur workers in southern China by Han Chinese. The Uighurs are a Turkic-speaking people that make up the largest ethnic group in Xinjiang, where large numbers of Han Chinese have been migrating to over recent decades.
Writer Matthew Teague was on assignment for National Geographic magazine in Xinjiang, to "bring some information about the [Uighur] people to the reader" and arrived in China just after the unrest began. His article – along with photographs by Carolyn Drake – is in the December issue of the magazine. He described his experience to NBC News in the video link above.
Esha Momeni, an Iranian-American student who was taken into custody for protesting Iran's elections, talks about her participation in the protests and the time she spent in prison. NBC's Ali Arouzi reports.
By Amna Nawaz, NBC News Producer
KARACHI, Pakistan – No one is exactly sure how old Taimur Muslim is.
A soft-spoken, lanky lad with a chipped front tooth and eyes undecided between green and gray, Taimur told me that school is his favorite part of the day, that he hates having to watch over his younger siblings at home, and that he wants to join the Army when he's older.
"I’m not very good in classes," he said through a shy smile. "But I don’t want to be a loafer. Teacher says we musn't be loafers."
Taimur told me he was 10 years old. But on that point, his voice was a little unsure. It’s an estimate – based on the fact that he began to work for a tailor full-time when he was 7 years old. He worked there for about three years, but stopped because of back problems. That’s when he came here and started kindergarten, just two months ago.
Taimur is a student at a private school in Machar Colony, a slum housing 700,000 residents on the outskirts of Karachi, Pakistan’s most populous city. The school is tucked away in the narrow, trash-lined, labyrinthine streets and sits behind high walls and a guarded entrance gate. It was built and continues to be run by a Pakistani charity organization called the Citizens Foundation.
Afshan Tabassum, the school’s principal, said Taimur’s story is typical for children in the area. Parents were wary of the school at first; they were skeptical of a system that kept their children from working for part of the day and contributing to the family's income.
But within a few months, Tabassum said, the idea caught on. Parents were lining up to enroll their children, eager to give them the education they themselves never had. Most of the students, she said, work during the half-day they don't attend classes, and few have any idea how old they really are. The taller ones claim to be ten – mainly because that’s the age they think they should be.
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By Paul Goldman, NBC News Producer
TEL AVIV – Israelis this week were shocked to hear that starting in January 2010, their monthly water bill will cost 40 percent more.
Being in an extremely arid climate, every school age child in Israel is constantly reminded that water scarcity is a critical national issue. The slogan "Every Drop Counts" is repeated over and over in schools and by the media. Water supplies have gotten so low that now Israelis will not only need to stop watering their gardens and take shorter showers, but will also have to pay more for every drop.
But the issue has created a great catalyst for private Israeli companies to develop innovative ways to recycle wastewater, desalinate water and irrigate more efficiently.
The Water Technologies, Renewable Energy and Environmental Control (WATEC) exhibition in Tel Aviv this week showcased companies from all over the world working on water issues.
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By Lawahez Jabari, NBC News Producer
BETHLEHEM, West Bank – "I felt very nervous and frightened walking through the Erez Crossing today. I was forced to go back to Gaza. My family was waiting for me to return with my university degree, but I came home without carrying the dream that they were waiting for," said Berlanty Azzam, a 22-year-old woman from Gaza, in a phone interview Tuesday.
Azzam has been a student at Bethlehem University since 2005. Four years later and just two months shy of completing her degree in business management, Azzam was stopped on Oct. 28 at a routine Israeli checkpoint near Ramallah, in the West Bank, on her way to a job interview.
When the Israeli guard noticed Gaza City on her ID card, she was immediately arrested for being in the West Bank without permission. Within hours, according to her attorney, Yadin Elam, she was blindfolded, handcuffed, and removed to Gaza by force – without any kind of hearing or access to a lawyer before she was deported.
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| Tara Todras-whitehill / AP |
| Berlanty Azzam, a Palestinian student talks during an interview in Gaza City on Nov. 12. |
Azzam admits that she did not have the required permission to study in the West Bank – something that has been increasingly difficult for Gazans to obtain since Hamas, the Palestinian militant movement, took over Gaza in 2007 and the Israeli Supreme Court ruled that students from Gaza had to obtain a permit.
But, Elam said, those permits didn’t exist when she initially enrolled in Bethlehem University back in 2005. At that time, Azzam received a four-day permit to enter Israel, traveled to Bethlehem to enroll and never went back to Gaza. She also said that she repeatedly tried to get permit-application forms, without success.
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By NBC News' Mujeeb Ahmad
SPIN BOLDAK, Afghanistan – Even as the Pakistani army steps up its offensive against the Taliban in Pakistan’s northern tribal region, there are increasing concerns about militants from Afghanistan seeking safe haven in a different part of the country: Quetta, the capital of Pakistan’s southwest Baluchistan Province.
American military and intelligence officials believe that the Taliban ruling council, or shura, which commands and controls jihad efforts in Afghanistan, have abandoned their historic base in the southern Afghan city of Kandahar and crossed the border into Quetta.
In Pakistan, the issue is raised every day in the press and on the streets: Have the Afghan Taliban moved their power base from Kandahar and set-up shop in Quetta? Quetta is my home – my family and friends live there – so I had a personal, as well as professional stake in finding out what’s been going on.
Some colleagues urged me to talk to Mullah Manan, a commander of 70 foot soldiers in Helmand province in Afghanistan, to try to get some answers.
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By Adrienne Mong, NBC News Correspondent
BEIJING – OK, I confess. If a Web site features a photo gallery of Michelle Obama’s latest fashions, I click on it.
Like many other American women, I have a certain fascination with our first lady.
So there was a frisson of anticipation when we learned President Barack Obama would travel to China. Would Michelle come with him? What would she wear? Not red, surely? What about when she met Chinese leaders? Or when she met Chinese people? (Had anyone here noticed the fact that she chose a dress by Jason Wu, an ethnic Chinese designer for the inauguration? Even though he was born in that renegade province, Taiwan?)
As it turns out, Michelle Obama isn’t visiting China.
It also turns out the Chinese public doesn’t have quite the same fascination with her as many others around the world.
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By NBC News' Adrienne Mong and Bo Gu
BEIJING – It was President Barack Obama’s first full day in China, jammed with morning meetings with city officials in Shanghai and afternoon sessions with central government leaders in Beijing.
But the headline event was easily his town hall meeting with a group of highly vetted students in Shanghai, during which he also took several questions submitted over the Internet. China’s blogosphere – the world’s largest with 350 million Internet users and 60 million bloggers – was buzzing before, during, and after the event.
Among English-speaking residents across China, the reaction veered between scorn and disappointment, particularly over Obama’s comment, "I’m a big supporter of non-censorship." He said this in response to a question about China’s Great Firewall, the online filtering and surveillance program run by the communist government’s Ministry of Public Security.
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| Jason Reed / Reuters |
| U.S. President Barack Obama greets participants in a town hall-style meeting with future Chinese leaders at the Museum of Science and Technology in Shanghai on Monday. |
"It pains me to write this…but Obama’s performance this afternoon reminded me of nothing so much as an overly coached American businessman on his first trip to China, so concerned about what he should or should not say that he forgets what he wanted to say in the first place, and ends up going home with nothing but a hotel bill and empty promises," Adam Minter, an American writer, wrote from his home in Shanghai.
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By NBC News' Bo Gu
BEIJING – Liu Mingjie expected that President Barack Obama’s first visit to China would bring more business to his little boutique shop in Beijing’s popular Houhai area, a lakeside district filled with trendy restaurants and bars, souvenir shops and lots of tourists.
Until last weekend, Liu had been interviewed by both Chinese and foreign media about what he was selling: T-shirts that superimposed Obama's face over that of China's late Chairman Mao Zedong on the front, and the words "Oba Mao" on the back.
But Lui’s brisk business was suddenly terminated by local government officials, just days before Obama’s arrival in China, without any explanation. He says he was simply told, "No, you cannot sell Obama T-shirts anymore."
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| Liu Mingjie shows off the “Oba Mao” T-shirt he was selling out of his shop in Beijing, that is until the authorities told him to stop. |
While the culture of mocking celebrities and politicians is not yet widely embraced in China, the possible embarrassment brought to the president of the United States by having his image on T-shirts dressed in the uniform of China’s infamous Red Guards, who caused mayhem during the Cultural Revolution, was too much of a ticking bomb for local officials. Liu doesn’t know when or whether he’ll ever be able to sell his T-shirts again, but he’s not the only one who is confused and upset.
Qi Zhiyong, a former factory worker who lost one leg during the crackdowns on student demonstrators 20 years ago that culminated in the infamous Tiananmen Square protests, has found himself suddenly forbidden to talk to the media and has been followed by plainclothes police for the last few weeks.
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By Ian Williams, NBC News correspondent
TOKYO – When I asked Masako Usui what she thought of Japan's new first lady, the news presenter for the NTV television network started to bang and twist her thumbs together.
"They were returning from a trip abroad, when we saw her thumb-wrestling with her husband through the plane's window," Usui told me, as we stood on the edge of NTV's vast newsroom. "That would never have happened before," she said laughing.
For Japan's media, politics has suddenly become a whole lot more interesting because there has never been a Japanese first lady quite like Miyuki Hatoyama. If there was a premier league for first ladies, she'd be right up beside Michelle Obama and Carla Bruni, the wife of French President Nicolas Sarkozy, except that as far as I know neither of them has ever traveled to Venus.
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| Pool / Getty Images |
| Japanese Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama and his wife Miyuki Hatoyama at the premier's official residence in Tokyo on Oct. 29. |
That was the extraordinary claim Hatoyama made in a recent interview. More precisely, she said her spirit had flown there in a UFO, and that it was a beautiful place, very green.
She went on to describe how she "eats the sun" each morning to gain energy, and how she'd met Tom Cruise in a previous life. She said Cruise, who played a samurai knight in the movie The Last Samurai, was Japanese back in the other life.
That’s pretty wacky stuff, but you say that at your peril in Tokyo these days. Several people complained to me about the obsession of the foreign media with the first lady's eccentricities (Time Magazine called her "Mrs. Occult"), as if a trip to Venus was a perfectly natural thing to do.
Most Japanese are remarkably unfazed by Hatoyama's cosmic adventures, and see her as a breath of fresh air.
"She's very confident. Her attitude is: ‘This is me, accept me for who I am. This is what I do, and if you don't like it, take it or leave it.’ But in a very positive way," said Hayami Yu, an actress and singer, who has met the first lady on several occasions.
And that seems to have a broad appeal in a country where first ladies have been traditionally far less visible, and where women are still very poorly represented at the top levels of business and politics.
"In Japan, the man is the man, and the woman is the woman, walking five steps behind," said Jane Yamano, who runs a string of beauty schools and is a friend of the first lady. She says that is changing, albeit too slowly, and that Hatoyama confidence and openness is "inspiring."
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By Martin Fletcher, NBC News Correspondent
KAKUMA, Kenya – I've been back from my latest trip to Africa for several weeks, but there are two girls I can't get out of my mind: a mature 14-year-old called Nyanuel Noang from Sudan, and an impossibly sweet little 11-year-old named Michu Danabo from Ethiopia.
We met them at the unlikeliest place. While driving through an arid plain in northern Kenya we saw in the distance, in the middle of nowhere, a cluster of low buildings surrounded by razor wire. Was it a prison? An army camp? A food depot?
It turned out to be at school run by the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees called the "Angelina Jolie Boarding School for Girls." The actress, a UNHCR Goodwill Ambassador, donated money to help construct the school. But while the money came all the way from Hollywood, the girls came from the Kakuma refugee camp a couple of miles away.
At the Kakuma camp, about 50,000 forlorn people from Ethiopia, Sudan, Somalia, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Burundi and Rwanda are fed by aid agencies that work with the UNHCR. They live in shacks made of local materials like branches, mud, leaves and wood. Water is often available – but not always. Some Somalis have been there since 1991. There are schools, clinics and food depots. The camp offers security, support and comfort. What it cannot give is any hope for the future.
But for the past three years, the brightest of the refugee girls from Kakuma, as well as a few from the local tribes, have been permitted to dream.
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By Paul Goldman, NBC News Producer
SAMBURU, Kenya – We were on a five-hour journey from Maralal to Samburu in northern Kenya. It was noon and we asked our driver, Albert, to stop at a beautiful village we were driving past for a cup of tea.
The menu was hand written on the wall of the "Small World Hotel." The local tea is called "chai" and costs ten Kenyan shillings for a cup, or about 15 cents.
The small village was made up of one main unpaved street with mud shops lining it and straw huts scattered behind them. The town is in the middle of nowhere and the three-year drought here has left most of this region without water, food or tourists.
We ordered three cups of chai and sat on the ground beside the main road. After the very first sip, we all looked at each other, thinking the same thing: It was undrinkable. But by now, what seemed like most of the village’s residents had sat down beside us, watching our every move. Could we possibly pour out the liquid in front of the locals?
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| Krzysztof Galica / NBC News |
| Paul Goldman, left, and NBC correspondent Martin Fletcher, right, stop for a cup of "chai" tea at the "Small World Hotel" in a small village in northern Kenya. |
Albert came over and explained that in this area they combine the tea with hot water, milk and sugar. Lots of sugar. Ever the diplomat, Albert passed the cups to some women who had just arrived. By now I realized why he hadn’t ordered a cup for himself.
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By Doug Adams, NBC News Producer
BERLIN – As Germany celebrates the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, in many ways this is still a divided city.
It's not a physical divide – little remains of the former wall today. But spend a few days in Berlin and you realize that the city is still split by psychological and economic barriers.
There is an expression about the "wall in the mind," referring to psychological and social barriers that keep easterners (ossis) and westerners (wessis) separate.
Many West Berliners, for example, say they rarely venture deep into East Berlin even now. Josef Jaffe, who has been an editor for the Die Zeit newspaper his entire career, described how he knows his way around Paris and New York better than around East Berlin.
And in Germany, a nation of newspaper readers, the four biggest East German newspapers and magazines are hardly read in West Berlin.The same goes for the largest West Berlin papers in the East. And therein lies the "wall in the mind."
Still wrestling with differences
I recently spent a week in Berlin as part of journalism fellowship sponsored by the RIAS Berlin Kommission to study German politics and media. In our meetings with journalists, politicians and academics, the East-West tension was a constant undercurrent. CONTINUED >>
By NBC News' Ed Flanagan
BEIJING – Twenty years after the toppling of the Berlin Wall, another "wall" is facing intense public scrutiny in China.
The so-called Great Firewall of China, the online filtering and surveillance program run by the communist government’s Ministry of Public Security, is alive and well and censoring freedom of expression for millions of Chinese.
But over the past few months, Chinese discontent with the Great Firewall has bubbled over with increasing frequency and fervor.
Chinese netizen's ire was recently sparked by the Green Dam censoring software that was proposed last summer and the blocking of popular social media pages like Facebook and Twitter during the Uighur riots in Xinjiang in July.
The censorship during the Uighur riots caused such consternation online, it sparked one bitter Chinese Twitter user to mournfully tweet that day, "Today, two ‘140s’ were killed in China – 140 people in Xinjiang and 140 character micro-blogging service Twitter."
It is perhaps fitting then that the Great Firewall should find its opposition in another online medium: Twitter.
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By Chris Hampson, NBC News Director of International News
LONDON – It gets dark very early in London at this time of year. By five o'clock it’s pitch black.
Tonight, though, the sky is lit up with the bright and sparkling explosions of fireworks.
Bonfires blaze in towns and villages across the country.
If you want to know why, you'll need a kid of my generation or older to tell you.
"Remember, remember the Fifth of November, Gunpowder, treason and plot.
I see no reason why gunpowder treason, Should ever be forgot …"
We used to chant this scrap of verse every year.
Nowadays it's Halloween that captures the imagination. But for close to 400 years we've celebrated a quaint little custom here called Guy Fawkes night.
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| Mike Hewitt / Getty Images |
| Conor Hewitt, 11, makes light circles with a sparkler during Guy Fawkes Night celebrations in Brighton. |
Back in 1605 a bunch of conspirators – disgruntled Catholics – decided to try to kill the king and members of parliament because they felt badly treated. They smuggled 36 barrels of gunpowder into a cellar under the House of Lords with a plan to blow the place sky-high.
But the aforementioned Mr. Fawkes got caught red-handed in the early hours of Nov. 5 and, as was the custom back then, got tortured and executed for his trouble.
Londoners were encouraged to celebrate the safe deliverance of the king with bonfires. Then a hundred years or so later someone got the smart idea of putting an effigy of Guy Fawkes on top and burning it. Someone else added fireworks. And so the tradition was born.
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By Andy Eckardt, NBC News Producer
MAINZ, Germany – I vividly recall the car journeys I would take as a teenager from Frankfurt to Berlin. In those days, the trip to the isolated city of West Berlin, which was located in the heart of East Germany, required us to take the so-called "transit route" through communist East Germany. It was a bumpy ride in many ways.
There were extensive waits at the Herleshausen border crossing, where grim and often unfriendly East German border guards took our passports and checked them for hours. Once allowed through, we had to travel for more than 200 miles through the communist country on roads that made a clacking sound as you drove over them – making it feel like a journey on old railroad tracks.
Along the roadside we passed East German police, who laid in wait to issue speeding tickets to "foreigners," as it was a quick and easy way to get some cash in the much stronger West German currency.
But that all changed after the collapse of the Berlin Wall on Nov. 9, 1989.
Today, we travel the same route from Frankfurt to Berlin on spanking new highways. And it is difficult to find traces of the former 870 mile long East-West border with its hundreds of watch towers, barbed-wire fences and automatic shooting devices that once divided the two Germanys.
And there are only few signs of the original Berlin Wall, which was fortified with tank barriers, search lights and armed guards patrolling with their dogs.
"If you look at Checkpoint Charlie today, Berlin's famous Allied border crossing, it is really nothing more than a commercialized Disneyland of the Cold War," said Fabian Rueger, a historian and tour guide in Berlin.
The actors in old military uniforms at Checkpoint Charlie and the street vendors selling fake pieces of the wall are surreal images for those who actually grew up during in Cold War times.
Today, it is mainly my generation and that of my parents, who have vivid and very emotional memories of what it was like to live through the Cold War and the "peaceful revolution" that swept across Eastern Europe and ultimately brought down the internal German border in 1989.
It’s created a quandary: How do the different generations reconcile the vast and extreme changes that have altered the country in such a short period of time?
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By Mary Murray, NBC News Havana Bureau Chief
HAVANA, Cuba – Cuban diva Omara Portuondo will heat up the stage at the 10th Annual Latin Grammy Awards during a rare U.S. appearance this Thursday.
Dubbed the queen of Cuban vocals, Portuondo will be presenting an award during the televised show and her latest CD, "Gracias," has been nominated in the Best Contemporary Tropical Album category.
Her appearance at the Las Vegas awards show demonstrates the slow loosening of restrictions on travel between the U.S. and Cuba.
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