On Assignment
By Jim Maceda, NBC News Correspondent
OUTSIDE GARMSER, Afghanistan –
The U.S. Marines began a major operation to try to disrupt the Taliban’s stranglehold on southern Afghanistan early Tuesday. NBC News’ Jim Maceda is embedded with Marines at Forward Operating Base Dwyer outside of Garmser, Afghanistan, in Helmand province, and responded to questions via satellite phone.
You’ve reported from Afghanistan extensively since the war began in 2001 – what makes this military embed different from your past trips to Afghanistan?
The most significant difference is that this embed is in southern Afghanistan. Most of my trips into Afghanistan over the last couple of years have been with U.S. forces in the east, along the Pakistan border. During those missions, the U.S. troops were self-contained, giving themselves their own orders. Here they are working with the British-led NATO forces responsible for Helmand province.
The troops in the east were making big changes, I think, in improving the situation for local Afghans up and down the border with Pakistan. In April 2006, they started to apply a kind of Gen. Petraeus counter-insurgency plan, which has not been the case in the south. Since probably 2002, this area has been no-man’s land for Westerners and for international coalition forces, and it has become a safe-haven and fiefdom of the Taliban.
The reason why we are here now is because we had the opportunity to embed with the first large contingent of U.S. forces to operate this far south in Helmand province, the first Marines to be here since they left in 2002. So this is really a kind of "back to the future" type operation. The Marines arrived in Afghanistan about six weeks ago, and after weeks of preparation, the first major offensive operation launched today.
CONTINUED >>
By Michele Neubert, NBC News Producer
STOCKHOLM, Sweden – Ever had the desire to wear X-ray specs?
Well, maybe that’s why the ThruVision, a new security scanner that looks through clothing and can detect weapons from up to 25 yards away, was all the rage at a recent international counterterrorism conference in Stockholm, Sweden.
But instead of the usual X-rays, the machine uses non-invasive "terahertz" technology, as I learned from Mikael Karlstrom, the machine’s designer.
And for those hoping to see everything, it’s a disappointment.
CONTINUED >>
By Michele Neubert, NBC News Producer
Trying to counter the world’s myriad terror threats is like "learning to eat soup with a knife." That mantra, which is actually the title of a counterinsurgency manual written by Lt. Col John Nagl, seems to sum up the tremendous challenges facing the West’s top military and terror experts, many of whom invoked the phrase at a recent counterterrorism conference in Stockholm, Sweden.
The conference, which was co-hosted by the Swedish National Defense College and the UK's Defense Academy, brought together American and European defense officials, police, intelligence agents, and academics, who sat in a converted brewery overlooking the Stockholm skyline, trying to get a handle on the slippery problem of terrorism, radicalization and insurgency.
CONTINUED >>
By John Yang, NBC News' White House Correspondent
KIEV, Ukraine – During the
NATO alliance summit later this week in Bucharest, Romania, Bush administration officials say they anticipate that NATO allies will commit "upwards of several thousand" more troops to the group’s forces in Afghanistan.
The biggest contributors are likely to be France and Poland, with other nations kicking in relatively small numbers. In addition, officials say, countries such as Spain may be making their first troop contributions to the effort.
The additional troops would allow the U.S. to shift some of its forces to the south, where most of the fighting is, in order to address the concerns of the Canadians, who are in the lead there. Canada had threatened to withdraw troops unless another ally sent at least 1,000 more troops to the south.
CONTINUED >>
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.
CONTINUED >>
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.
CONTINUED >>
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.
CONTINUED >>
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.
CONTINUED >>
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?
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 >>
