It's been a week since the 15 British sailors and marines were seized by Iran and not much has been resolved. The British still insist that their personnel were in Iraqi waters when they were detained, and the Iranians are still arguing to the contrary.

The British have released GPS data that they say shows they did not violate Iranian waters, but Tehran has video footage and charts it says shows that the British sailors were in Iranian waters when they were seized.

Despite the diplomatic back and forth, it has only been over the last couple of days that there has been any kind of noticeable reaction to the incident in the Iranian media and on the streets of Tehran. Iran been in the midst of a holiday period – celebrating the Persian New Year – so a lot of people have been out of town, and most of the newspapers have not been printing over the holidays.

It was only earlier this week that I asked my barber, Reza Amini, what he though about the arrest of the sailors and he answered, "Fifteen British sailors have been arrest in Iran? Oh my God, does this mean trouble?"

Now everybody is talking about it.

The first few days after the detention, Iranian newscasts made it their third or fourth report, with minor ministry officials making statements. Now it's the main story on the news here and President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, senior ministers and powerful politicians have all made statements defending Iran's position.

Ahmadinejad told state TV, "Britain should apologize for entering Iranian waters illegally." He also went on to say that Britain has made a media fuss out of the issue instead of dealing with it diplomatically.

Ali Larijani, the secretary of the Supreme National Security Council (SNSC) told state television, "We had decided to release the lady in the group, but with the political ballyhoo by London, this decision will for the time being be suspended."

Larijani expressed Iran's displeasure with Britain for taking the issue to the U.N. Security Council, bypassing bilateral talks.

"We are not in the Stone Age … we can easily use Global Positioning Systems to clarify together whether the soldiers were on the Iranian or Iraq side (of the Arvand river)," said Larijani. He added that the British stance would not help to settle the issue, and warned that if it did not change, "then Iran would adopt another course, as well."

As the diplomatic rhetoric escalated, the mood on the streets of Tehran is mixed.

Mona Mashaya, a university student, said "If the soldiers were in Iraq waters they should be released, but I'm sure they were not. I'm sure they were spying. The British are always meddling in Iran's affairs; they have done a lot more harm to Iran than America ever has."

Some have expressed fear that the heightened rhetoric on both sides could create a larger crisis. "The British probably did violate Iranian water," said Jila, a retired teacher. "But this dispute has all the hallmarks of escalating into something much more serious and I just hope it is resolved quickly and peacefully."

Still others are insisting that the British are likely responsible for a violation of state sovereignty and should be held accountable. "If the British sailors are found to have entered Iranian waters illegally, then they should be tried according to international law, as anyone else would be who illegally enters another country's borders," said Elham Safi, a manager one of Tehran's hospitals.

In 2004, when a similar incident took place, the seized British servicemen were released within three days. But the government in Tehran at the time was very different and harbored less animosity toward the West.

Social constraints in Iraq prevent a lot of women from earning money – the men put food on the table by going out to work while women take care of children and the home. But by leaving the house, men are often more exposed to the dangers of car bombs, kidnappings and assassinations. As a result, most of the victims of violence in Iraq are men – leaving the women to dress in black and mourn them.

According to Iraqi tradition, women must dress in black for at least one year of mourning after the loss of a husband, father, mother, or any other family member or relative.

A source in the Iraqi Ministry of Women's Affairs told me recently that because of the various wars since 1980 – the Iran-Iraq war that lasted from 1980 to 1988, the first Gulf War in 1990, and the U.S. invasion in 2003 and its aftermath – that there are approximately three million Iraqi widows and the numbers are increasing.

Smile dissipates quickly
That stunning statistic may explain why I was so astonished when I recently visited the Iraqi Tourism Board to see some old friends and contacts.

I went in smiling because I hadn't been there for while and was excited to see my old friends, but the place had an eerie feel to it. It looked darker – and it was. In every room, when I popped in my head to say hello, there were women dressed in black from head to toe.

As a cup of coffee was placed in front of me, my curiosity finally got the better of me. I asked if a colleague had died or something? A woman covered in black responded, "They killed my husband and burned my home. So we moved to a Sunni neighborhood; stress and grief killed my mother a week later."

I turned my head to the woman next to her and she said, "They killed my brother in front of his wife and children…just because he is Shiite living in a Sunni neighborhood."

The smile I had on my face when I arrived was long gone. I actually felt ashamed that I had a smile on my face to start with. So, I chugged down my coffee and quickly left.

"We were told to fight against Israel, America and non-Muslims," said Muhammed Bakhtiar, 17, explaining why he wanted to become a suicide bomber. "We are so unhappy with our lives here. We have nothing," he said.

Last month, Bakhtiar and his school friend, Miraj Ahmad, also 17, left their home, families, and boarding school in Buner, a district of the Malakand Division of the Northwest Frontier Province. Their destination was the Muridke madrassa right outside of Lahore, Pakistan's second-largest city. The madrassa or religious school is run by the Jama'at-ud-Da'awah, the charity linked to the outlawed terrorist organization, Lashkar e Taiba. And Lashkar e Taiba has links to al-Qaida.

NBC News

Miraj Ahmad, left, and Muhammed Bakhtiar were recruited for jihad.

The grounds of this madrassa looks much like the campus of any exclusive boys boarding school – except for the bearded armed guards sporting Kalashnikovs checking all those who come and go. There is a cricket field, swimming pool, all sorts of sport activities, and horses too. In addition to religious instruction, the school offers computer sciences, engineering and pre-med classes for students ranging in age from six to 17.

It also offers jihad.

"We read about jihad in books and wanted to join," said Ahmad. "We wanted to go to the Muridke madrassa so we would have a better life in the hereafter."

Recruited at local high school
Ahmad said that he and his friend Bakhtiar were recruited at their high school in Buner. The recruiter offered to take the boys to Muridke for two weeks of training and then to Peshawar where they would be introduced to people and make contacts.

"We were told it is our choice to become a freedom fighter or a suicide bomber," explained Ahmad, who had a neat beard and wore a white Muslim prayer cap. "But we should never fight against Pakistan."

Every morning the students were taught Islamic studies; afternoons were reserved for sports. Jihadi training was given in the evenings; two classes a night.

"The jihadi man who brought us to Muridke told us we would become great by fighting jihad," said the clean-shaven Bakhtiar. "We knew we could never become great if we stayed in Buner. I wanted to become great."

About 600,000 people live in Buner, a green valley surrounded by high mountains. The area is underdeveloped and the climate is harsh.

The Yusufzai tribe, the largest of all the Pashtun tribes, makes up most of the population.  Pashtuns are the ethnic group comprising 15 percent of Pakistan's population – mostly in the Northwest Frontier Province, along the Pakistan-Afghan border – and in Pakistan's southwest Balouchistan Province. 

They have an ancient culture, speak their own language and abide by their own tribal codes of honor and hospitality called Pashtunwali. They have gotten a bad name of late since the Taliban are also Pashtuns.

VIDEO: Scenes from the city of Buner, a city along the Pakistan-Afghan border, where two local boys were recruited for jihad.

The Buner tribesmen who cannot eke out a living from farming often try to leave and work in Malaysia or the Gulf States.

Some, like Bakhtiar and Ahmad, just try and leave. Buner seemed like a perfect place to sign up kids for jihad.

Parents outraged
When the parents of Bakhtiar and Ahmad learned the boys had missed a week at their Buner boarding school, they panicked. They contacted relatives and friends. There were no clues. Finally a nephew remembered the boys talking one night about the Muridke madrassa. He went there and somehow managed to get past the armed guards and identified his cousin, Bakhtiar. He called home to Buner and told the family to come.

The parents of both boys said that they believed the Hera boarding school in Buner had brainwashed their sons.

The principal, Abdur Rahman, denied this, saying he went to the local police and demanded they go after the man who recruited the boys at his school.

"We don't support this; suicide attacks are murder; this is against Islam," said Rahman. "Those boys went to Muridke by themselves, they should have been here taking their exams, and I no longer want them back in my school," he said.

The tribal elders intervened and now Bakhtiar and Ahmad are back in school in Buner.

"My brother and my uncle found me in Lahore," said Bakhtiar. "The people at Muridke let us leave and said we could come back after we finished our exams at home," he said.

But we asked them, "Do you want to go back and learn jihad?"

"I don't know" said Bakhtiar."Maybe, maybe."

Ahmad agreed. "There is nothing for us here. Nothing."

Recently -- and for the first time -- I have been reading survivors' accounts of the Holocaust.

Turns out I am not alone in being delayed in addressing the subject.

I was surprised, for instance, to find that Primo Levi's first account of Auschwitz was only widely published a full 13 years after his liberation. (And it took the medical report he co-authored for the Russian liberators sixty years to be released to the public.)

Meanwhile, Eli Wiesel -- who like Levi was used as a slave in the Buna-Werke, a subcamp of Auschwitz -- couldn't write about it for 10 years, and even then he had to be persuaded to do so. And then it took him several years to find a publisher for his first book, "Night," a memoir about his experiences that was published in 1956.  

So why did it take decades for me to read Wiesel and Levi's testimonies? Maybe because of the pain passed on by my parents, whose entire families disappeared in smoke in those same extermination camps, I couldn't face such open wounds, even dried by time.

Two things happened this week that picked off the scab.

First was when I joined a roomful of happy Holocaust survivors eating cake, drinking coffee and dancing at the new Café Europa near Tel Aviv. The goal of the café is to create a place for Holocaust survivors to meet and share their common experiences.

Survivors  
Happy is probably not an apt word to describe these 80-plus survivors of the death camps. Their lined faces wrinkle in shy smiles at the concept -- happiness is denied to people with such memories -- but moments of joy, even frequent moments, are their right, as babies are born and birthdays celebrated. Yet the shade of their history darkens and chills every occasion.

As they smile and chatter, lean on each other and shuffle their feet in time to the music, one cannot forget. They are always a Survivor. Any reference to their common tragedy reddens and waters their eyes.

Thus the events at the Europa. Social workers in Ramat Hasharon asked them if they wanted to get together to talk about their lives. "We'd love to get together," the old folk said. "But we don't want to relive the camps. We want to dance." 

The second moment came as I joined thousands of Jews, crammed together and trudging through a densely packed tunnel leading out of a soccer stadium into a parking lot. The occasion was the England-Israel Group E qualifying match for Euro 2008.

The experience took me back to those elderly survivors.

Shoulder to shoulder we soccer fans plodded, laboriously matching our steps, shoulders rolling from side to side, like Levi's prisoners returning from hard labor: "stiff puppets made of joint-less bones." We edged further down the narrow, dim tunnel, pushed from behind into the backs of the person in front.

I thought of Levi and Wiesel. Sixty years ago, Jews would have been naked and shivering, limping along an icy, muddy path, to a concrete room, with pipes and taps and no windows. Some really would believe that it was a place for a nice, hot shower. Others would understand: their destination was a gas chamber and their bodies would be burned in the crematorium next door.  

Levi wrote that everyone in Auschwitz knew there was only one way out: through the chimney. But it didn't matter what they thought because the end was the same for everybody; inevitable, inescapable, and, by the time it came, a relief.

The strength and will to survive
The experience in the stadium tunnel led me to other thoughts. If I had gone the way of my grandparents, would I have known how to survive? Would I have willed myself through such horror to bear witness, like Levi and Wiesel? 

Thank God I'll never know, but for one moment, trudging in a low tunnel with a thousand Jews, a chill went through me.

VIDEO: For coalition troops in Iraq, careful preparations can be the difference between life and death. NBC correspondent Tom Aspell and cameraman Steve O'Neill travel along with Charlie 25 as it gets ready to escort VIPs from Baghdad's International Zone to the Sadr City neighborhood. 

 

During my recent hunt for a new apartment in

The little girl, maybe 6 years old, was shoeless in the scorching sand. I looked closely at her feet, struck by how old they appeared, wrinkled and calloused gray, and it occurred to me, she's probably never worn a pair of shoes.

I saw her near Nyala, in Sudan's Darfur region, in a camp for displaced people called al-Salam, Arabic for peace, it is a place surrounded by war

NBC NEWS VIDEO: Desperation in Darfur

Now, 700 camps like this one dot Darfur, and the majority of the people in them are children. Glimpsing a brand new baby in one camp, when the wind caught the fabric of her mother's headdress, I wondered how one keeps a child alive in this hell.

Click here to read the rest of Ann Curry's blog in The Daily Nightly about the children of Darfur.

Four hours at a birthday party decorated with Teletubby images and littered with Teletubby aerials, and I've become a 3-year-old again.

My camera crew and I have been passing the time by munching on Cadbury chocolate mini-eggs and sucking down radioactive green-colored fruit punch, waiting for the big moment – when the Teletubbies appear on a stage here to be presented with passports.*

(*Apologies to our serious-minded readers:  As one colleague put it to me, it's hardly the stuff of "weighty geopolitical issues of our day," like the war in Iraq or the environment, but maybe we could all use a bit of levity now and then.)

Anyway, this is groundbreaking. Really.

Adrienne Mong / NBC News

Teletubbies hold onto their new passports and Dipsy gets a breath of fresh air while preparing for a photo-op.Â

The birthday party is for Tinky Winky (the purple one), Dipsy (green), Laa-Laa (yellow), and Po (red), who are marking their 10th year anniversary as the Teletubbies. 

And to celebrate the occasion, the colorful quartet is setting foot for the first time outside their studios (aka Teletubbyland) in Stratford-upon-Avon. They're going far, too.

This weekend they will fly to New York, where – also for the first time – the performers will be unmasked and introduced on the TODAY show next Wednesday.

Big business
So here we were, at their anniversary-cum-bon-voyage party, at a west London restaurant.

"It's our one opportunity to bring [the performers] back together that we probably won't get again," said co-creator Anne Wood. Production for Teletubbies ended in 2003 so the four actors have not worked together since.

Also, "the audience for whom it was first made – [the children] who were three and four," continued Wood, "now it's a very interesting age [for them] looking back on it."

"In a way they've become icons themselves and we're going to, if you like, the city of icons, New York," added co-creator Andy Davenport. That includes stops at the Empire State Building and the Statue of Liberty.

Calling them icons isn't a stretch.

It's big business.
The brand has generated over $200 million for BBC Worldwide, which held the show's rights globally apart from in the United States, in merchandise and overseas sales to broadcasters in 120 countries, according to local newspaper reports.

It was all business at the anniversary/bon voyage party, too.

Cameraman Marcus O'Brien and I had to negotiate with Andrew Kerr, a senior vice president at Ragdoll -- the production house behind Teletubbies -- over the interview backdrop because the creators were concerned about sending conflicting messages to their young audience.

Plus, we were under strict – but understandable – orders to film the Teletubby performers in full costume or full civilian get-up. "We don't want on our heads the responsibility of having traumatized little kids everywhere by showing a decapitated Teletubby," as Brian Balthazar, the TODAY show producer who arranged our access to the group, very helpfully put it.

It's hot under there
Admittedly, it was a little traumatizing for us to see Teletubby heads lying around the ground when we tiptoed through the dressing room. The four actors slumped beside them, sweaty and wan-looking.

The costumes are extremely large and difficult to breathe through. One outfit alone weighs more than 60 pounds and contains within it myriad wires enabling the performer to make various gestures and movements. 

The costumes are so cumbersome that the actors can only perform for 10 minutes at a time before they have to take off the heads and, literally, take a breather. During one last photo-op that went on a fraction too long, production assistants came rushing out with what looked like oxygen tanks, pumping air into the giant mouths of the Teletubbies.

I chatted briefly with one of the actors, John Simmit, who plays Dipsy (the green one with the dancehall moves). Simmit, of Cuban-Jamaican descent, is a professional stand-up comedian noted for helping to put black British comedy on the entertainment map.

"It's surreal to see little figures of yourself when you get off the plane in places like Egypt," he said. "The show's been a much bigger success than I expected, but it feels absolutely great being part of such a cultural institution for kids."

It's pretty clear how important they still are to young children. 

When the Teletubbies make their first live appearance before a crowd of tiny tots, they stare, open-mouthed, at the sight of their favorite TV characters come to very large life.

Their reaction overwhelms the co-creators. "It's so moving to see their faces," said Davenport. "It's the first time for us, you know, to see the kids' reaction live."

News in Israel is never that far away from home -- especially since it is, in fact, a very small country.

Sitting at my home computer Tuesday morning, I was mildly annoyed by the sounds of helicopters flying around. I say mildly annoyed because I hear Blackhawk and Apache helicopters all day long as they fly up and down the coast on their daily missions. But this was different, the helicopters were right over the house, or so it seemed.

Then I heard the sound of bullhorns admonishing people to stay back and to stay in their cars. That's when I jumped up grabbed my cameras and took off out the door.

Head towards the action
I live in small community off the main traffic artery heading north out of Tel Aviv.  It's pretty quiet most of the time, so I was a bit startled to hear all the commotion. 

As I headed out, the neighbor's gardener asked me what was up. He knows I'm a cameraman for NBC News and naturally thought I would know the answer. I shrugged my shoulders not knowing the answer and sprinted toward the car, cameras banging against my hips. 

I drove toward the sound of the choppers and the bullhorn. I thought, who knows, maybe it's a car accident, but you never take much for granted here, so I kept going.

There are fields of purple irises and potatoes growing between the highway and the road on the way out of town. As I rounded the corner I could see what seemed to be hundreds of police lights and just as many policemen. 

I parked, leapt out of the car and ran across the fields, no doubt upsetting the farmer who was sitting on his tractor waiting for the ruckus to end so he could finish spraying his crops. 

Jeff Riggins / Nbc News

Israeli police and bomb squad officers examine a suspicious mini-van for explosives.

Get as close as you can
Cars were backed up in both directions as far as I could see. I was crossing the potato fields when a policeman started shouting at me to go back. Of course, that's like waving a red cape in front of a bull for a cameraman. We're just arrogant enough to think we know everything. But, since he had an M-16 slung on his shoulder, I thought maybe I should heed his call.

In the midst of the mass of police cars was a mini-van called a Sherut. A Sherut is a kind of bus-taxi operated by people who drive up and down the road and pick up other people traveling to Tel Aviv and beyond. One can travel anonymously in one of these vans -- and in the past suicide bombers have used them to move around the country. 

The Sherut was blocked in by police cars and bomb squad officers outfitted with blast suits, flak jackets, helmets and eye protection were heading toward the mini-van. OK, I told myself, we have a bomb scare or a terrorist alert. 

I started shooting pictures, stills and video, slowly working my way around the scene and circling in a bit closer as I went -- careful to stay out of eyesight of the police who by now had everybody well back from the scene. I stayed at what I felt was safe distance and carried on filming what little action I could see. 

The bomb squad guys were going through the van and removing items one by one after determining that they were non-lethal. No explosives were found, but three arrests were made, according to authorities. 

As I safely returned home, after checking out the action no more than 400 yards from my apartment, I thought to myself that sometimes one needn't go far in Israel to find news stories, sometimes they find you.  

It's past high noon in the center of Nassau, the well-worn Bahamian capital. A buzz is growing again around the old pink courthouse newly scrubbed to be shiny clean last week.

Again, dozens of tourists in pastels and clutching cameras have the place covered.

Why did they come here, and skip that unbelievably gorgeous beach? Two smiling spring breakers from Ohio say they are so fascinated by the Anna Nicole Smith saga that they had to stop by and catch a glimpse, hopefully a photo, of the now-world-famous players:  attorney Howard K. Stern (a surprise showing on Tuesday), ex-boyfriend Larry Birkhead (a crowd favorite who now enjoys cheers, well wishes and near-rock-star status on the island) and mom Virgie Arthur, who would like temporary custody of that little baby, Danielynn.

As the spring break girls tell it, they "just want to know who the father is!" And so does just about everyone here, locals included.

Spring break souvenir? An Anna Nicole tattoo?
It has been unusually chilly and windy, a strange feeling on an island where we're more used to broiling in sun-baked live shots and constantly wiping shiny foreheads, than putting on jackets.

The island is certainly captivated by all this. Tourist buses now haul people slowly past us. We've slowly realized that we – the media – have become a mini-tourist attraction as well.

On Monday, I walked past some local men shooting the breeze on a downtown street corner. What were they talking about? Anna Nicole.

Every cab driver seems to have a more intricate conspiracy theory than the last. 

And most surprisingly, a tattoo parlor that caters to tourists is proudly – and hugely –advertising that the company is the one that did Anna and Howard's tattoos.  Photos of those tattoos, and tacky pink t-shirts sporting them, are also circulating round here.  Would that cause someone to stop in and grab a few tatts?  It does draw attention....

Larry Birkhead has just arrived for another day in court – and the cheers are even louder today.

"Go, Larry, go!" they are yelling. 

A strange spring break it is.

I was sitting in solid traffic in downtown Tehran when the rebellion began – a handful of honking horns, quickly rising to a deafening crescendo, as more and more cars joined in.

The traffic lights ahead had been red for several minutes, and were being controlled by a policeman. You could tell that because a large digital sign that usually contained a countdown to the change of lights had been replaced by the letters "PO," for "Police Operated" – and the hapless policeman was not changing the lights anywhere near fast enough for Tehran's impatient drivers.

The cars at the front edged forward like a herd of snarling beasts, horns blasting. Then one old Paykan taxi (a horribly polluting Iranian produced car that has been largely phased out, but which still make up the majority of taxis) led the charge across the junction, a stampede of metal close behind. The policemen, wisely hidden away in his police box, had little choice but to give way to the mob. The lights flickered to green.  

Ian Williams / NBC News

Traffic clogging Tehran's streets.

To me it seemed like yet another example of Tehran's traffic chaos, where lights are frequently regarded as discretionary, rules routinely ignored. But my driver could hardly contain himself, and between bursts of laughter he told me how satisfying it was to be able to break the rules – to thumb your nose at authority – and get away with it, since there are so few opportunities to do that outside the car.

A wonderful world of subversive opportunity
This wasn't the first time I'd heard this, others telling me how driving in Tehran was a great break from the shackles of everyday life, the car opening a world of wonderfully subversive opportunities.

The police may have noticed this too, at least up to a point. Earlier I'd seen one of their public service cartoons, which are broadcast on television here, urging driver to be more courteous. It showed two men leaving an office, holding the doors open for each other, and generally being extremely polite. But as soon they got in their cars, they were like men possessed, hurtling down the streets, cutting each other up and giving way to nobody.

What I can say for sure is that the traffic is diabolical here. Not only the number of cars and the perpetual bumper-to-bumper jams, but the chaos of it all, cars going for gaps, darting across junctions as if playing an endless game of chicken. It's not unusual to see cars reversing up motorways because they missed their junction, or driving the wrong way down a dual carriageway because the other side is gridlocked. Nobody seems to give way unless absolutely necessary to avoid collision.

I also noticed that once behind a wheel, the women of Tehran give as good as they get.

There are few cars that don't bear the scars of war. Motorcycles weave in and out, loads precariously balanced on their backs. Buses have no respect for anybody; it's almost Darwinian – survival of the fittest, or at least the biggest.

There are 2 million cars in Tehran, which is one of the most polluted cities on the planet. Accident rates are horrendous – thousands of people die on Iran's roads every year. Every day I've witnessed the aftermath of shunts or scrapes, cars sitting stationary where they hit, drivers arguing, the traffic snarled up even worse as a result.

I witnessed the aftermath of one accident, a bus having shunted a small car completely off the road, and into a ditch from which its rear end protruded.

Yet after three weeks here, I came to greatly admire my driver's ability to weave, push and jostle his way through it all – always with a smile on his face.

So I asked him what the four golden rules are for driving in Tehran. He thought for a moment before raising one finger:

I asked him why the traffic was so bad, all the time – particularly when compared with other cities, there wasn't that much to do in Tehran, especially after dark. He told me that most socializing takes place in private at home, which I guess does require a lot of driving, and sometimes in the cars themselves.

One or two of the city's major roads have become renowned for illicit dating, youngsters cruising and exchanging telephone numbers. And a good bit of gridlock can work wonders for the phonebook. As a result the Basij, a religious militia, and possibly the most feared people in Tehran, can often be seen in groups on the roadside, peering into cars for signs of illegal liaisons. In Iran this means any couple out in public who aren't related, though it is increasingly flouted.

Then I remembered that my driver hadn't told me his forth rule. "Oh, rule number four," he said, "is that there are no rules," which really did make him laugh.

Last week several generals, both Iraqi and American, made a point of describing how certain areas in Baghdad, especially some markets and shopping districts, were reviving due to the security crackdown.

"It's one of the ways we can measure success. Shops are re-opening their doors, market stalls are full of fresh fruit and vegetables, and people are flocking to these places to do their shopping because they feel safe," we were told. "It's a real sign of things returning to normal, especially where we've created pedestrian zones by blocking the streets off to vehicles, so car bombs have no access."

"It feels like walking around in Istanbul," said one major general. "I invite you to go and look for yourselves!"

"Let's go shopping," I quipped to our translators, which caused a mixture of hilarious and nervous laughter. I wasn't serious of course, because although it may be safe for local Iraqis to walk around a market, anyone looking Western is still a likely target for kidnappers and other criminals.

Not so fast
So we tried to get a military escort to one of these places. No luck this past weekend, military units which might have been able to escort us were busy with more important things. I asked one of our Iraqi producers to go with our local crew.

They voiced some concerns, but mainly about traveling to the area, so we decided to send some Iraqi security men with them to watch their backs.

We decided to go to Shorja market, Baghdad's most popular central shopping district, which has been bombed several times, including by a large truck bomb which killed 137 last month. It was turned into a pedestrian zone and was the area that the major general described as feeling like Istanbul now.

But the next day, Saturday, our cameraman, told me he checked with a friend who lives near Shorja market, where he was going to film, and he told him there are snipers operating in the area.

A man with a camera on his shoulder is an attractive and easy target. We cancelled the shoot and decided to wait until the military had time to go with us.

Hard to document signs of success
The next day, Sunday, a man tossed a hand grenade into a group of waiting workmen at Shorja market. One man was killed, another wounded. The suspect escaped. We considered ourselves lucky we weren't there.

Then on Monday, someone left a bomb behind the preacher's podium in a small mosque situated among shops at the same market and set it off after the prayers, killing eight and injuring 32. It's as if the culprits want to destroy any signs of normality and stop any claims of success.

And for us, it's becoming even more difficult to go out and document the signs of progress and normality the U.S. military say are out there.

You gotta love the names. They're so eager, earnest, and hopeful: Camp Prosperity, Camp Liberty, and Camp Victory are the names of just a few of the U.S. military bases in Baghdad.

But there are other names, other realities, in the ancient City of the Caliphs.

A few miles from Camp Prosperity is what some U.S. soldiers call the "Dora Killing Fields," a fetid trash dump where militias, insurgents, gangs, and anyone else with a grievance and a gun dispose of bodies, often discovered by little boys who play soccer there and little girls who tend goats.

Not far from the PX at Camp Victory, where soldiers can buy frozen vacuum-packed T-bone steaks flown in from the states and a Harley Davidson (which is pretty damn cool), there is a cozy little spot other soldiers call "Sniper Fields."

There are many faces of the war in Iraq and they have changed dramatically over time.

When I first arrived in Baghdad in January 2003, I thought I would soon rent a house and envisioned myself swimming in the Tigris to cool off after reporting in the city the caliphs called Madinit al-Salam, the City of Peace. A year later, I realized I wouldn't be taking any midnight dips— Madinat al-Salam no more. Now, I think I'll have to be lucky to walk away from this story without being injured or killed.

Click here to read the rest of Richard Engel's Reporter's Notebook about covering the war in Iraq for the last four years and to see excerpts from his upcoming the documentary "War Zone Diary." The complete documentary will air on Wednesday, March 21 at 10 p.m. on MSNBC TV.

How does one interview a man accused of unleashing genocide?

Flying now to Sudan, in a matter of hours I am to come face to face with President Omar al-Bashir, whom the world lays most of the blame for the atrocities in Darfur.

It was al-Bashir, international observers say, who armed Arab militias to put down a rebellion among the black African tribes in Sudan's Darfur region, encouraging old racial hatreds to burn out of control across the region. The toll is estimated at more than a thousand villages burned, more than 200,000 people killed and 2.5 million others displaced. The violence has bled across Sudan's western border into Chad, and it's southern border into the Central African Republic, theatening an entire region.

Click here to read more of Ann Curry's blog in The Daily Nightly about preparing for her interview with Sudan's president. Watch her interview on NBC's Nightly News with Brian Williams on Monday evening.

As Zimbabwe's President Robert Mugabe continues to crack down on the political opposition in his country -- disrupting its gatherings and beating and arresting its leaders -- NBC News' Jim Maceda spoke to Zimbabwean opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai, who was attacked March 11 at an anti-Mugabe rally. Click here to hear Tsvangirai speak out about the struggle for democracy in his country.

"Death to

The Cuban government rarely misses an opportunity to stay on message. Using President Bush's visit to

 Last night Tehran sounded like a war zone. It went on for hours - the thuds, pops and sometimes deafening bangs. Sparkling trails of rockets whizzed across the sky and bonfires raged in the middle of roads.

Crowds of mostly young people gathered along the streets and around the fires, mischievously rolling firecrackers under the feet of passers by - including, to our occasional alarm, the NBC crew.

Cars cruised around town, music blaring, youngsters hanging from the windows, dispensing their arsenal of rockets and firecrackers.

They were marking Chaharshanbeh-Suri, an ancient Iranian festival that dates back to at least 1700 B.C., and is a prelude to the Persian New Year, which falls on March 21 this year. The eve of the last Wednesday of the year – last night - is supposed to be the "Eve of Celebration," the idea being that fire and light will bring happiness for the New Year.

On one road, crowds sang and danced around a huge bonfire, Iranian pop music blared from speakers on the wall of a nearby house, while a strobe light flashed behind. Young women, their compulsory headscarves well back on their heads, gyrated in the doorway. Then, as the fire got smaller, men and women lined up to jump over it. Children followed, some helped by the adults, a man banged out a beat on a drum beyond.

"It's tradition," one man told me, his young son on his shoulders. " But it can get a little out of hand."

A young woman, clinging to the arm of her boyfriend, told me candidly: "It's the only time of year we can get out and enjoy ourselves in public like this. Parties usually have to be held indoors."

I had noticed the groups of police, standing uneasily on street corners, and asked one man whether he was worried. "They won't bother us tonight," he said with confidence. "Not tonight."

When they jump over the fire, people are supposed to chant: "Give me your beautiful red color and take back my sickly pallor."

In Persian folklore, there's also a lot of stuff about good and evil, and visits by the spirits of ancestors, though these days it is really more of an excuse for young people to let their hair down and have a good and rare public party. Most older Iranians wisely stay indoors or watch the mayhem from windows of doorways into which they can beat a hasty retreat.

The occasional ambulance, lights flashing, winding its way through the heavy traffic, served as a reminder that it's perhaps not the safest way to party.

Still, young Iranians see it as  also a good opportunity to thumb their noses at the authorities, safe in the knowledge that on this day at least they are not likely to break up the fun.

Not that the mullahs are happy. Soon after the Islamic revolution they tried to ban Persian New Year as un-Islamic, which I suppose it is if you accept their definition of Islam. But to most of those taking part, that's the attraction, a chance to break, however briefly,  the usual strict limits imposed on their behavior.

Persian New Year is certainly pre-Islamic, which also rankles with the mullahs.

Some hard-line clerics still grumble loudly, but the government as decided, perhaps wisely, that the festival is so deep-rooted, it's best to allow it, though I'm told the parties get more raucous each year.

I have to confess that I had to pinch myself once or twice last night just to remind myself where I am. The Iranians really are fun-loving people, and given half a chance they can party as well as the best of us. Perhaps too well. When I returned to my hotel, I and lay in bed, kept awake by the thumping music, the firecrackers and the wild shouts and laughter from a courtyard party below by window.

But I wasn't about to complain.

An elderly lady, wrapped in her black chador, knelt in front of the grave, flowers in hand, while her husband washed the gravestone with a hose-pipe. Behind the stone, a glass-fronted cabinet carried a picture of a young man – their son. He'd been killed, at age 19, during the Iran-Iraq war.

"Something has to be done for Iraq," said the mother, "so that all these people didn't die in vain."

The Behesht-e-Zahra cemetery spreads from the main highway southeast of Tehran, seemingly endless rows of graves as far as the eye can see. The glass-fronted cabinets contain personal effects as well as photographs of the chillingly young men who died by the tens of thousands during the war.

Ian Williams/ NBC News

Shrine to Iranian soldiers killed during the eight-year war with Iraq.

Today, an Islamic holiday, the cemetery was packed with relatives of the dead. There are few families in Iran not touched in some way by the war, in which a million people died, and which has helped shape attitudes toward the problems in Iraq today – and the prospects of sitting down with America to solve them.

"Iran's done all it can to talk to America," insisted Hojat, who lost his uncle during the second year of the war. "It's really up to them now to come to the negotiating table."

Another young man, born after the war, and sporting a spiky hair cut, told us he's lost an uncle and two cousins. "America's only there for their own interests," he said. "And it's the innocent people who are paying the price."

The slogans on banners in the cemetery talk of bravery and martyrdom. In fact, the eight-year war, which ended in bloody stalemate in 1988, was as brutal as it was pointless. It was started by Saddam Hussein, and prolonged by Ayatollah Khomeini, who famously said that ending it was like drinking poison.

Iran sent waves of soldiers, some as young as 13, to clear minefields by treading on them. It was a grim war of attrition, with widespread use of chemical and biological weapons by Iraq. The West backed Saddam Hussein.

Outside the cemetery sits an old tank, a relic from the war, now a monument to it. A group of children climbed over the turret, and gave a spirited rendition of "death to America" for our camera.

The attitudes of veterans are more measured, though. We met Ali Reza Shiravi, a retired civil servant, who spent eight years as a prisoner of war in Iraq.

"Of course we have an interest in Iraq," he said. "They're our neighbors. We fought them for eight years. What happens there directly affects us." He said Iran and American should talk – "but only on a level playing field, with no preconditions."

The cemetery sits beside the mosque where Khomeini is entombed. His successors want Iraq to be a fellow bastion of Shia Islam, though Iran's next move is more likely to be determined by pragmatism than ideology. Officials returning to Tehran from the Baghdad conference will be calculating whether sitting down with the United States at the next more senior conference in Turkey will help ease pressure on Iran over sanctions and their nuclear program.

This week, the U.S. State Department unveiled its latest report card on human rights progress in Cuba and invited a group of Havana-based journalists to review the findings.

It was not your typical news conference, nor was it staffed with your typical reporters.

Most attending refer to themselves as "independent journalists" – or in other words – dissident voices silent on the island in the face of strict government control of the media. They mostly publish for Miami audiences or Internet outlets the average person here never sees.

Most came by bus and two even hitched a ride on the back of a flatbed truck. As far as I could tell, there wasn't a car owned among them. Some spent hours traveling to the colossal building on Havana's winding waterfront drive that houses the U.S. Interests Section here.

Most of the attendees never trained as journalists. Instead, they say, they were driven to report the news otherwise ignored here. They come from all walks of life, ranging from two guys who work in sugar cane fields, to a retired college professor of literature, to a married couple who once worked as diplomats but were eventually hounded by the government to quit their posts.

The tools of their trade were simple. No fancy laptops or electronic organizers. Most didn't use spiral notebooks, just sheets of plain white paper. And they were glad of the free pencils the U.S. diplomats handed out at the start of the news conference. 

High cost of speaking out
But the event could not have happened without the benefits of some high-tech gear. Video conference technology beamed the image of Jonathan Farrar, Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Democracy, Human Rights and Labor, onto a large screen. For an hour he reviewed the U.S. government findings and answered questions while seated at a conference table somewhere in Washington.

Little has changed, Farrar said, since Fidel Castro temporarily stepped down eight months ago after undergoing intestinal surgery. The report charges that arbitrary arrest, detention and surveillance to harass government opponents continued. He pointed out that at least 283 political prisoners and detainees still linger behind bars and civil liberties that allow dissidents to protest remain restricted by Cuban law.

To the participants at the video conference, this wasn't news. Most everyone listening had paid a price at one time or another for advocating a different political way.

What about action?  
Perhaps not surprising, it was hard for these "independent journalists" to stay independent. Questions quickly evolved into critiques.

"I appreciate these reports but we never see any concrete action," said Juan Carlos Linares. "What comes next?"

Ahmed Rodriguez, a 22-year-old who writes for the Website "Cubanet," asked if Farrar believed the Cuban government would actually open things up as a result of this new report.

"I can't speak for the Cuban government," was the response from Farrar. "I would hope they would open things up. So far there's been no reaction from the government on the report."

Others at the video conference implied the report didn't go far enough.

Guillermo Farinas, a frail man leaning on a cane who embarked on a seven-month hunger strike to protest government controls over the Internet, wanted more emphasis on "prisoners of conscience" – political prisoners who are jailed for their thoughts and ideas, rather than their actions.  

Former political prisoner Oscar Espinosa Chepe took issue with the section that criticizes the government's strict control over who can surf the Internet by granting users access solely through "government approved institutions."

The problems are "far more grave than the manipulation of access to the Web," said Espinosa, an economist.  

"It's not enough to say Cubans have no access to the Internet when the issue is more basic. We don't have the right to buy a computer, even with money in our pockets, unless we buy it on the black market," said Espinosa.

Criticism not reserved for Cuba
His criticisms, though, were not restricted to the Cuban government. He blamed the Bush administration for obstructing the human rights agenda on the island by restricting the ability of Cuban Americans to travel back home. (Under current U.S. policy, Cuban Americans are limited to one visit every three years and first must apply for a government license granting permission to travel. They face heavy government-imposed fines if found to have broken the law.)

"There are Congressional proposals to loosen the travel restrictions on our compatriots living in the U.S. so as they can help their families. This is an important issue for us. It can inject considerable democracy in Cuba and spread the values inherent in U.S. society."

Pulling no punches, he asked Farrar point blank: "What are you doing about it?"

He was told that issue was beyond the scope of the State Department review — a reasonable answer but perhaps not the one this group of "independent journalists" was looking for.

 A few months ago, the watchdog group Transparency International published its yearly Corruption Perceptions Index. Out of 163 countries surveyed in 2006, only two, Myanmar and Haiti, were found to be more corrupt than Iraq. 

This country was described as "one of the greatest corruption nightmares on the planet."

"That has to change" was the message delivered earlier this week by Boots Poliquin, the American director of the Office of Accountability and Transparency (OAT) in Baghdad. "We want to try and develop [a] sense of accountability and transparency within the system of Iraq."

His agency has been up and running for 45 days and Poliquin said he was extremely satisfied with the response and the cooperation he's received from the Iraqi authorities. However, the local culture, the ongoing cases against unscrupulous contractors, and Paragraph 136B of the Iraqi Criminal Procedure Code are likely to render his job almost impossible.

Different rules for elites
For years, corruption was taken for granted in Iraq. But like in many Middle Eastern countries, receiving or making a gift was not automatically associated with bribery.

Iraq is a tribal society where the elite -- maintaining decades-old practices -- support and promote their own. That was true under Saddam. It is still true today. Rules regulating conflicts of interest are non-existent. In other words, tackling "corruption" will require a complete change of mindset within the Iraqi society.

It was revealed after the war that Saddam diverted hundreds of millions from the U.N.-administered Oil-for-Food program. The corruption scandal stained the United Nations and was cited by the Bush administration supporters as evidence of the international body's failings.

But that program's successor -- the Development Fund for Iraq which was created after the fall of Baghdad -- is hardly a perfect example of transparency either.

In May 2006, a U.S. congressional report on work projects in Iraq revealed it was investigating 72 cases of alleged fraud and corruption. There have been numerous instances where contractors were caught overcharging the occupation authorities and out of the billions earmarked and spent on the rebuilding of Iraq, $8.8 billion remains unaccounted for.

Loop hole in criminal code
But the most serious handicap in dealing with corruption may be a small paragraph of the Iraqi Criminal Procedure Code, written in 1971 while Saddam was the driving force behind the powerful Baath Party, and still valid today.

Paragraph 136B stipulates: "The transfer of the accused for trial in an offense committed during performance of an official duty, or as a consequence of performance of this duty, is possible only with permission of the minister responsible."

What it means, explained Poliquin, is quite simple. "The ministers have the ability to say: I just don't want this case to go forward, invoke article 136B and the case stops. And that option is being invoked more often than we would perhaps like to see it invoked."

Does 136B represent institutional corruption? Maybe not. But it is clear that before long Iraqis will have to do something about this paragraph if they are genuinely prepared to stand by Poliquin and give him a hand in clamping down on corruption.

Since the Commission on Public Integrity in Iraq was established in 2004, 2,627 cases of corruption have been brought forward. Of those cases, only 17 percent were moved to the Central Criminal Court of Iraq, resulting in 80 arrests and 5 final adjudications. As long as this conviction rate remains so low, there is little chance Iraq will climb up the Transparency International list any time soon.

I was just finishing my work day Tuesday when a news flash came that a Garuda Indonesian Airways jetliner caught fire upon landing at Adisucipto airport in Yogyakarta, Indonesia, a popular tourist destination.   

Since my wife, Mahdiana Badri, is Indonesian, we make family visits there and I've developed a strong list of contacts. To help NBC News correspondent Michael Okwu update the Western Edition of Nightly News, I began to make some calls. Within a few minutes we had confirmed the crash and determined there were casualties. Survivors were being taken to local hospitals.

Once the smoke cleared, we learned at least 21 people died in the crash. At least 115 others survived. Among the victims were nineteen foreigners, including nine Australian journalists. An Indonesian television cameraman for Australia's Seven Network, Wayan Sudarka, shot dramatic video of dazed survivors scrambling off the plane before it burst into flames.

VIDEO: Fiery Indonesian crash landing

Small world comes home
That night, at home, I received a text message from my wife's relatives in Indonesia: "Reza survived the Garuda plane that caught fire upon landing in Jogja this morning ... he seems to have hurt his leg/waist and is being treated at a hospital in Jogja for further observation."

Only then, after a long news day did I have a moment to reflect: It's a small world and I have a big extended family. Reza Badri is my wife's first cousin.  

Reza is 32 years old and married with two small children. He was on the Garuda flight traveling to a business meeting. Seated in the emergency exit row, he was one of the first to escape after the plane came to rest in a rice paddy past the runway. Traumatized, Reza used his mobile phone to call home.

His family heard him say: "There was a crash landing... I'm now going to the airport hospital." His aunt told me he sounded frightened.

Reza spent the night in the hospital's intensive care unit. The next morning he was transferred to a monitoring room. "He is doing fine," a relieved aunt told me. "His injuries are to his legs and waist and are not serious. After a week of bed rest in the hospital, Reza will be able to come home." His wife and son have since gone to join him at the hospital. 

One of Reza's relatives summed up the horrible day best: "Watching the sad news of more tragedies befalling our beloved Indonesia, plane crashing; earthquake in Sumatra, who would have thought that it would be hitting closer to home, our own cousin is one of the victims. Suffice it to say though that, Alhamdulillah, praise be to God, we're all so glad and relieved he's one of the lucky survivors of that horrible crash."

Mike Mosher is an NBC News Producer based in Burbank, Calif.

Alawi is a skinny 13-year-old Shiite boy who lives near our Baghdad bureau. He has weak eyes and wears thick spectacles, and often shouts a greeting in English when he catches us going through the compound gates.

He lives with his parents and five younger siblings. His father is out of work so Alawi feeds the family by selling black market gasoline and delivering cooking gas cannisters. He makes a few dollars a day, and sometimes a little extra by holding a place for a neighbor in a long line of people waiting at the local gas station.

He was there last week waiting to refill a gas cannister. Iraqi guards were on duty to protect the crowd from bombers who frequently target gas stations, bus terminals and gatherings of day laborers looking for work. Sometimes they'll even attack funerals to inflict as many casualties as possible.

One of the guards asked Alawi to hop across the street and fetch him a sandwich. He left his empty gas cannister in the care of a friend, took the guard's money and ducked through a police convoy passing by.

That's when the bomb exploded.

Read the rest of Alawi's story and more of NBC News' Brian Williams reporting from Iraq in the Daily Nightly blog.

NBC News' Truus Bos writes about the good and bad news that can work it's way into one day in Baghdad for the Daily Nightly. Click here to read: "A new life among all the lives lost," as well as more reports from NBC News' Brian Williams trip to Iraq. 

In the tribal areas of Pakistan, a shave may cost your life.

"The government is unable to protect us so we will abide by what the Taliban tells us to do and stop shaving beards," said Niamat, a barber in Khar, the headquarters of the Bajaur tribal agency along the Pakistan-Afghanistan border.

And the Taliban mean business, On Sunday night, bombs destroyed two barber shops and three others suffered partial damage after the owners refused to follow the orders.

"I am a Muslim and I know that no one can force me to shave or not to shave. This should be my decision," said Nasir, a regular customer, wearing a green turtleneck sweater and jeans. "But I was threatened. They asked if I will obey the new laws; I will obey because I am afraid."

Mushtaq Yusufzai / NBC News

A barber shop in the tribal region where the Taliban have banned shaves.

A couple of weeks earlier, in the middle of the night, someone slipped leaflets under barbershop doors throughout the Bajaur Tribal Agency. The warning was hand-written in Pashto, the language of the Pashtun tribes who inhabit the border regions of Pakistan and Afghanistan.

The leaflets read: "SHAVING BEARDS AND TRIMMING BEARDS IS UN-ISLAMIC AND IS FORBIDDEN. VIOLATORS WILL BE KILLED."

The customers panicked and the barbers panicked too. In almost every barber shop the owners put up signs begging their customers not to force them to give a shave.

Slow 'Talibanization' of tribal areas
A shave costs less than 2 cents -- but the Taliban edict forbidding barbers to shave or even trim beards will cause severe economic hardship, and put many of the 200 barbers in Bajaur out of business.

"Barbers are poor people, they have no other business," said Ikram, another regular customer. "If they can't give shaves, they will not be able to feed their children."

A group of barbers told NBC News that their business had declined by 70 percent since the Taliban issued the edict.

NBC NEWS VIDEO: Watch scenes from a barber shop in tribal Pakistan.

 But that's not all.

This latest threat by local Taliban militants comes on the heels of an announced ban on music -- music that is sold in CD shops or even played in somebody's car. If the Taliban are to be believed, this is one more sin against Islam and a crime punishable by death. It's one more alarming sign of the so-called Talibanization of Pakistan's tribal areas.

Bajaur is the smallest and perhaps the most inaccessible of Pakistan's seven Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA). The tribal areas or agencies, as they are called, are semi-autonomous and have always been just outside the laws of the government of Pakistan. This is a holdover from the British Raj; the empire that separated British-run India from Afghanistan before Pakistan was created.

The colonial British decided it was better to allow the fiercely independent Pashtun tribes that inhabit the tribal areas to run their own affairs, according to their own tribal customs and laws. And the Pakistanis continued this arrangement.

But it is this tribal culture and this "laissez-faire" policy of successive Pakistani governments that has nurtured sympathy for the Taliban and allowed these isolated border areas to become sanctuaries for the Taliban and al-Qaida militants.

It is rumored that Ayman al-Zawahiri, the number two man in al-Qaida, comes and goes as he pleases in Banjaur. In fact up until 2005, when the Pakistanis raided it, al-Qaida had its winter headquarters in Bajaur, inside the high-walled mud compound of a local cleric about eight miles from the Afghan border.

Meantime, a few customers are still demanding a shave.

"I am clean-shaven and I will remain so," said Ikram, from behind the long wooly beige scarf covering his face." He insisted the scarf protected him from the bitter cold weather and not from the Taliban threat. "All the barbers refuse to shave me now, so I do it myself at home," he said.

One of Ikram's like-minded friends even broke down the store-front glass window of a barber shop recently, and then threatened to break all the mirrors inside, when the barber, a man named Zareenullah, refused to even trim his small neat chin beard. But Zareenullah wouldn't budge.

"If we don't follow they will kill us," said Zareenullah, "What can we do?"

"I offer to give them haircuts," he said. "Haircuts are allowed."