London, England
By Jason Cumming, msnbc.com reporter
LAKENHEATH, England – In a country where "football" means "soccer" and "American football" is derided as an inferior version of rugby, the quarterback painted on the bookie’s front window is an unusual sight to say the least.
On the other side of the High Street, the Stars and Stripes are on display outside the Costlow cell phone shop. A laminated U.S. map welcomes customers to R & B Property Agency and there are noticeably more SUVs and Ford F-350s on quaintly named streets like Dumpling Bridge Lane than in most places in Britain.
With the U.S. Air Force’s 48th Fighter Wing based on 2,000 acres of countryside at the edge of this village, about 500 of the community's 2,000 dwellings are occupied by Americans and their families, giving the area a distinctively American flavor.
But the absence of "McCain 2008" or "Obama for President" signs sprouting from lawns in Lakenheath has much more to do with geography than a lack of interest in the race for the White House.
As a home to American airmen for 60 years, RAF Lakenheath is one of three U.S. military outposts within a 15-minute drive of the village. Officials estimate there are as many as 30,000 Americans in the area.
Long considered a source of aggravation, the conversation-halting roar of F-15s overhead now provides local residents with regular reminders that the looming U.S. election could have a dramatic impact on their livelihoods.
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By Jim Maceda, NBC News Correspondent
LONDON – Just typing his name brings back an old, deeply buried dread. Thirteen years since the end of the war in Bosnia,
Radovan Karadzic – along with Gen. Ratko Mladic – remains, for many of us who covered them, one of that war's "faces of evil," even if the austere, white-bearded version of Karadzic seen today looks nothing like the slick poet-psychiatrist of those days, with his rock-star mane of gray hair and European suits.
Karadzic was the perfect front man for the horrors that were allegedly carried out against thousands by his paramilitary henchmen. He was a kind of mafia warlord who was cleverly articulate – even if crazed – when it came to explaining the history of Serbs victimized over the centuries at the hands of the West.
According to investigators, he used "ethnic cleansing" to justify beatings, rapes, mass murder, starvation and unspeakable torture of non-Serbs.
And, for years, Karadzic managed to evade U.N. forces, Serb police and a hoard of international media – including NBC News – only to be arrested, in the end, on a city bus near Belgrade.
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By Michelle Kosinski, NBC News Correspondent
Last year saw several large-scale and highly publicized terrorist plots in Europe. There was the failed attempt to set off car bombs in London, including outside a busy nightclub on June 29; an attack on the Glasgow airport that ended in a nasty fire and a roundup of several suspects, most of whom worked in the U.K. in the medical profession; and arrests in Germany of young suspects who had been to Pakistan recently, allegedly for terrorist training, accused of plotting to attack U.S. interests.
These three cases attracted global attention, but would you believe that there were actually 583 failed, foiled or successfully executed terrorist attacks in the EU last year alone? That is about a 25 percent jump over 2006, according to the latest EU report on terrorism, released earlier this month.
More than simply a list of numbers and dates – its contents, compiled by Europol, are intriguing.
It paints a picture of suspected terrorist activities and trends in Europe. And what happens there is significant to the rest of the world. We've seen Europe become a first stop, in the exportation of terror from suspected training camps in Pakistan and Afghanistan.
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By Michelle Kosinski, NBC News Correspondent
LONDON – "Everyone around here is doing it."
"It has become a trend."
"I have thought about doing it myself."
Somehow, these are all quotes from teenagers, talking about – suicide.
Since the start of 2007, 19 teenagers and young adults have taken their own lives in the tiny towns scattered through the southern Welsh county of Bridgend, where people have been living along the Ogmore River for centuries. Total population: 130,000.
The rash of suicides has been an unsettling story, to say the least, here in the U.K.
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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."
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| 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.
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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.
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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?
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By Brinley Bruton, msnbc.com London Editor
I became a British citizen last week. During the official ceremony in the town hall of Camden Council, one of London’s 32 councils, sat several dozen people, the sorts I see every day in my adopted home.
Some women were dressed in headscarves and long skirts, others tight jeans and leather jackets. One man wore an expensive-looking pinstripe suit, while another trudged in with a knitted cap and a long t-shirt. Nobody really stood out, except maybe the young woman with electric blue dreadlocks and thigh-high moon boots.
The CD player balancing precariously on a chair in the corner lent the event an unfinished feeling, a surprise in a country that practically invented pageantry.
Nevertheless, after we listened to a welcome speech, pledged our loyalty and stood for ‘God Save the Queen,’ the woman to my right held up her new nationality certificate.
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| Brinley Bruton/ msnbc.com |
| Brinley Bruton takes her official photograph with the Mayor of Camden after becoming a British citizen. |
"I’m going to hold onto this and I’m not going to let go," she said, smiling broadly.
Most of us ‘queued’ (that’s the term for lined-up here) for an official photograph alongside a portrait of the queen and the real life Mayor of Camden, who wore a lace collar and a fur-trimmed red cloak.
Outside the hall after the event, another woman hugged an older companion, her long pink veil trembling, whether from laughter or tears I couldn’t tell.
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By NBC News' Chapman Bell
Scores of members of the international press corps descended on a west London hotel on Tuesday for the political coming out of the new leader of the Pakistan’s People’s Party, 19-year-old Bilawal Bhutto Zardari, the son of assassinated opposition figure and former Pakistani Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto.
But surprising as it may seem just weeks after his mother was killed by a gun and bomb attack Dec. 27 during a campaign stop, little obvious security surrounded Zardari, an Oxford student who now finds himself heir to a Pakistani political dynasty.
I was only assigned to cover the event in Kensington at the last minute. Our bureau was told not to worry about accreditation but rather just to show up at the site of the press conference and we could gain access.
We arrived at the hotel and immediately knew we were at the right place due to all the satellite trucks parked on the street.
We walked up to the door just 30 minutes before the beginning of the event and entered the venue at the same time as a couple of other journalists.
No questions were asked.
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By NBC News' Chapman Bell
Jimmy Page, Robert Plant, John Bonham, and John Paul Jones. Four names that effortlessly roll off the tongue… Led Zeppelin broke up the year before I was even born, but as in the case of the Beatles, the Who, the Doors, (I could go on) the music keeps going. On Monday night those four names were reunited again for a benefit concert here in London – Jason Bonham filling in on the drums for his late father.
"Have you ever seen so many happy people in one place?" someone asked me as the show started at the O2 Arena in Greenwich. I look around at the sea of smiling fans – from middle-aged rockers to kids and grandparents, in everything from tie-dyed t-shirts to suits and ties. Everyone was standing and dancing – and that person’s comment stuck with me the whole night.
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