KARACHI, Pakistan – In the back of a jeep driving through Karachi, a sign on the wall of the city's famous "Village Restaurant" caught my eye. It was just a little piece of frayed white paper plastered next to the restaurant's much bigger logo, tempting customers to "Experience the Exotic of Traditional Dining." 

But the printed sign expressed an increasingly urgent plea in this teeming port city, once Pakistan's capital: "Save your city from Talibanization," it said in English. 

But could the Taliban really be taking over Karachi? Karachi is Pakistan's biggest city, far from the lawless tribal hinterland along the border between Pakistan and Afghanistan. 

Out there, Taliban and al-Qaida militants have carved out an independent state. In the mountains, militants have their own courts and even issue licenses to local business. Last week in the tribal area, the Taliban publicly executed a group accused of murders. In another village square, they flogged several butchers for allegedly selling the meat of sick animals. That is Taliban justice. 

U.S. military and intelligence officials consider that border area to be the world's biggest, most dangerous safe haven for Taliban and al-Qaida fighters. Osama bin Laden, Mullah Omar and nearly all of their deputies have been based, and may still be based, in this often impassible mountain terrain. 

But I was in Karachi, a giant city on the Indian Ocean. If Karachi is being 'Talibanized,' Pakistan is in real trouble, and so is everyone else. 

Growing radicalism

Karachi has a history of Islamic radicalism. Wall Street Journal correspondent Daniel Pearl was kidnapped in front of the Village Restaurant in 2002. Pearl had been meeting contacts here. They were supposed to help him investigate Richard Reid, the "Shoe Bomber" who tried to blow up an American Airlines flight from Paris in December 2001. 

But Pearl's meeting was a set up. The "contacts" turned out to be fanatic militants who kidnapped and beheaded him. I was about to discover the radicals' presence in this city appears to have grown since then.

Traveling in Karachi is both overwhelming and exhausting. It is a colorful, chaotic and undeniably dirty city. Flocks of vultures circle the sky all day. Trash lines many of the streets.  As we drove from the Village Restaurant, our jeep darted around swarms of motorcycles, pickup trucks, rickshaws and even a sad looking camel pulling a cart stacked with barrels. 

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An empty street in Karachi, Pakistan.Â

We were headed to a neighborhood in west Karachi where I had been told al-Qaida and Taliban militants had established a safe haven. Many Pakistanis make little distinction between al-Qaida and the Taliban.  Both want to destabilize Pakistan and Afghanistan, establish an even bigger base of operations and spread their aggressive, intolerant vision of Islamic law. 

The majority of people in Karachi want no part of it. Karachi is Pakistan's cultural capital, the center of the nation's fashion, high-tech and media industries. But that Karachi is under siege. 

After about 30 minutes in traffic, our jeep arrived at the office of a local contact in a slum in west Karachi. Fearing for his safety, he didn't want to be identified. I'll call him Malik. He would take us deep into the alleys on the outskirts of Karachi, a neighborhood filled with brick homes built around cliffs and marble quarries. It would be unwise, Malik said, to venture in alone.

"It is too dangerous," he said. "The Talibans have their checkpoints, bunkers and snipers. At night, they patrol, sometimes on horses. They are always coming out with their weapons and RPGs intimidating people."

Malik said radicals have been flooding into Karachi since this spring, moving in from the border region. The border region is now a warzone, under attack by the Pakistani military and, controversially here, by U.S. drones and Special Operations Forces (SOF) that carry out raids from bases in neighboring Afghanistan. 

The Pakistani and U.S. military offensives have killed hundreds of militants, but scattered many more. Increasingly, they are settling in Karachi. Estimates of Karachi's population range from 12 to 18 million. The lack of accountability makes the city a great place to hide, unless you look like I did as I descended from the jeep dressed in khakis and a blue shirt.

Malik and I were standing in front of one of west Karachi's madrassas, a traditional Islamic school for boys.

"Are there any students inside," I asked a guard. He stared back at me blankly.  In less than a minute there were about 15 people around us. Several appeared to be madrassa students who had come out to see what a foreigner could possibly want from them.

"Are you all students at the madrassa?" I asked. A few said they were.

'God willing, we will fight them'  
Many Pakistanis attend madrassas because they offer free education, supplementing the government's lacking public school system.  For centuries madrassas were the only form of education in the Islamic world.  From Morocco to Indonesia, most madrassas have a similar layout, with a mosque at the center and classrooms upstairs.  The vast majority of madrassas are moderate charities that teach religious values, the Koran and the traditions of the Prophet Mohammed. 

But some madrassas in Pakistan have churned out suicide bombers indoctrinated in jihad and a paranoid but widespread philosophy that they must attack innocent civilians to defend their faith from the United States, Israel and other modern-day "crusaders."  

Former President Pervez Musharraf promised to reform and regulate Pakistan's hard-line madrassas.  It never happened.  According to Karachi's former mayor Farooq Sattar, there are now more than 2,000 illegal madrassas in Karachi alone. This was one of them.

"What do you think of the Taliban and their influence here?" I asked the students.

More blank stares.

"What do you think about the U.S. incursions?"

That got a reaction.

"God willing, we will fight them," said one teenager with a purple scar on his chin. "They are the enemy," he said and launched into a long explanation of America's goal to occupy Muslim lands and undermine Islam. I've heard the same speech from Cairo to Lebanon, Baghdad to Riyadh. God bless the Internet.

A few minutes later my driver/fixer, a very tough guy from a very tough part of Pakistan, tapped me on the shoulder.

"I think you have been here long enough," he said. It was time to go.

But I still hadn't seen any Taliban.  

Malik suggested we go deeper into the slum, to the neighborhood right under the cliffs and quarries.  He was nervous about taking a foreigner, but had an idea. There was a graveyard in the area.

"We can pretend to be offering prayers for the dead," Malik suggested.  "I'll pray over one of the graves and you can see the neighborhood for yourself."

Malik said praying at a gravesite would give us an excuse to be in the area and raise less suspicion. 

'You should not be here'

It didn't exactly work. As soon as I stepped out of the jeep by the gravestones, I was again surrounded by a group of people. They didn't have weapons or appear threatening, but didn't attempt to hide their sympathies for the Taliban. One man proudly told me several suicide bombers had prayed in a nearby mosque.

But others were scared of the Taliban. A man who spoke English told me the Taliban were in control of the area.

"Do the Pakistani police or soldiers ever come here?" I asked him.  "No, they can't come here."

"How do people feel here?"

"We are all frightened. The Taliban has taken over."

More men, athletically built in their 20s and 30s, started to arrive.

"Who are these people?" I asked the English speaker.

"They are Taliban."

"Do they understand what we are saying?  Do they understand English?"

"No, but you shouldn't stay here. It is not comfortable here. You should not be here."

"Who runs this neighborhood?"

"They do." 

The new arrivals didn't want to be interviewed.

"Stop asking them questions," the English speaker advised. 

We left a few minutes later. 

"We couldn't come here at night," Malik said as we were driving out of the neighborhood.  "Now we had an excuse to come to the graveyard.  But at night, there would be no reason to be here."

'It's sad'

Driving back to the hotel, I kept thinking how a neighborhood in Karachi could be so tense and apparently out of control. In less than two hours, and without any prior arrangements, we'd managed to get to an area full of Taliban supporters and where many locals were clearly terrified.

As I walked back to my hotel room, I passed an old man in the hallway. 

"I didn't know you people were still coming here," he said.  By "you people" I assumed he meant foreigners.

"Yes, a few. Not many of us," I admitted.

"I didn't think anyone would be coming anymore," he added, saying he was upset by the bombing of the Marriott Hotel in Islamabad, one of the centers of social life for Pakistan's shrinking expatriate community.

"It's sad," he said. "It's sad it's come to this."

"Yes, it's sad," I agreed.

By NBC News' Karim Hilmi

BAGHDAD – A few weeks ago, Arab satellite channels were airing live coverage of the Democratic Party convention. At a cafe in my Baghdad neighborhood, the TV was tuned into the goings-on in Denver.

The cafe was full, as it is usually is after working hours. But hardly a head was pointed in the direction of the TV as the Democratic Party raised its collective voice to welcome Barack Obama. Most just kept playing dominos, backgammon, cards and drinking tea and Pepsi.

VIDEO: Iraqis not holding much hope for change with U.S. election

That's despite the fact that Obama has some Islamic roots – his father was raised a Muslim and the presidential candidate spent four or five years in predominantly Muslim Indonesia as a child – and that he and his Republican opponent, John McCain, have divergent opinions on their handling of Iraq's future.

Why? Busy lives – and a weary fatalism born of 25 years of Saddam Hussein and five-and-a-half years of American occupation.

'Merely faces to be changed'
Just a few friends sitting near me in the cafe talked about the election, and only then because they were prompted by my questions as to who they would prefer as the next U.S. president.

"I don't give a crap who wins or loses," said Safa, a mechanic in his mid-30s. "What good did Bush do to the Iraqi people? Only death and devastation."

The conversation started to warm up a little. "Don't you forget that Bush made us get rid of Saddam, or else we would still be ruled by him and his party and wearing khaki," said Adnan, a plumber, referring to the military uniform he wore in the Iraqi army for about 15 years.

"But don't forget also that Saddam used to give power, water and full foodstuffs through the ration card," chimed in Saman, who is a member of the peshmerga, a Kurdish paramilitary group that fights for a free Kurdish state. "But this government robs us and makes us die in life."

Khalid, a merchant in his late 50s, jumped into the mini-debate.

"In my opinion Saddam, the Americans and the new Iraqi government are all the same – they have done nothing to help Iraqis.

"Bush, McCain or Obama, they are merely faces to be changed," he added, "but the policy is the same and the non-actions and honey promises will be the same."

And then just as quickly the debate died.

''I hear the sound of the mill," said Akram, the owner of the café, "but I don't see any flour."

BEIJING – Last week, three books about Barack Obama were published in China – to little fanfare.

Despite being prominently displayed inside one of Beijing's larger bookstores, the books – two were his own and the third was a collection of his speeches and writings – attracted little interest the day we visited.

The shop clerk said sales were "healthy" for a new release, but "The No. 1 Bodyguard in China," a biography of a former Chinese security guard, sitting next to "The Audacity of Hope," drew more curiosity. No books by John McCain were available; apparently his writings have yet to be translated into Chinese.

Adrienne Mong / NBC News

Books about Barack Obama were just translated into Chinese.

"At the average person's level in China, I've just found [the U.S. presidential election] to be less interesting than any other thing – the Olympics, the earthquake, other things going on in China that are of huge historical importance to China itself," observed James Fallows, who's been based here for two years writing for The Atlantic Monthly.

Apart from the events he mentioned, there were also the winter storms that paralyzed half the country; the Tibet riots; torch relay protests; violence in Xinjiang; and now the melamine-tainted milk scandal. No surprise then that most Chinese have been focusing on domestic events.

But, as usual when it comes to China, it's never that simple. As we talked to people about the American election, we found varying levels of interest and curiosity.

'It's just for fun'

"Many people pay attention to the election but with different motivations," said Professor Jin Canrong, Associate Dean at the School of International Studies. According to Jin, interest in China is broken down into three broad categories: official (government), intellectual (academics and policy analysts), and laobaixing (ordinary people).

"For intellectual communities, they want to learn something from the process and try to improve China's approach of governance," said Jin. "But for the average people, especially young people, it's just for fun."

"It's entertaining for an outsider," agreed Li Xin, a young woman who edits an economic magazine. "That makes you want to watch and follow and see what's going on next."

VIDEO: Chinese weigh in on the U.S. election

And while the government and think tanks have a sophisticated grasp of how the U.S. election campaign works, ordinary Chinese seem bewildered by the process. "I think the election process is quite complicated with all the rules of caucuses, primaries, and the general election," said Li.

Especially the election conclusion. One Chinese acquaintance told me he was stunned, when he first witnessed a presidential election after moving to the United States, to see a candidate concede defeat. "The only form of democracy we Chinese have ever seen really is what is in Taiwan," he said. "And that is completely different. The loser never just gives up."

Personality, not policy

"We noticed some differences in their policy towards China," said Jin. "For John McCain, he will pay more attention to [the] so-called military build-up of China, the religious freedoms, and Taiwan…. For Obama, we have some concern about the possible trade protectionism, some dispute around climate change, human rights, especially the human rights issue relating [to] Tibet."

But because the policy differences at this stage seem minute or elusive to most Chinese, they focus instead on the candidates' personalities. "McCain, he's a veteran, he's very patriotic, and he's 70. He's got all this old stuff going on," said Annie Gong, a 20-year old college junior. "Obama, of course, he's young, cute…but I think he's kind of lacking in experience."

In general, young Chinese, however, seem drawn to the Illinois senator. "I think Obama is really exciting," said Li, who is 29. "He represents the fresh face of America. The typical American dream."

And in a country which counts 253 million people as internet users – more than in the United States – Obama's internet savvy has been noted. "His team is very skillful in communicating with young people by the internet," observed Jin.

But for older Chinese, Obama's race is a stumbling block. "I've been struck by how many high-level people in China are sort of thrown off their feet by the idea of a black person possibly as the president of the U.S.," said Fallows.

Racism isn't enough to explain their reaction to Obama. Throughout the Cold War, the Chinese were fed a diet of anti-capitalist propaganda, a narrative that portrayed the U.S. political and economic system as corrupt and immoral. American capitalism, according to this viewpoint, was the root of its manifold social ills: inequality, sexual immorality, urban poverty, violence, and, especially, racism.

On Wednesday, one of our interns noticed that a translation of a U.S. article discussing how race could cost Obama votes was being widely circulated on some of China's popular websites. 

The fact of Obama as a U.S. presidential candidate creates anxiety for this older generation of Chinese. "How is it possible that someone who grew up in that system can succeed?" a local Chinese journalist asked rhetorically."I think his success upsets those people's world view – their understanding of what American society is."

U.S. - China relations

So far, the Chinese government has stayed mum on its preferences. The leadership in Beijing appears to favor neither candidate, but "If there were a huge debate over the future of Taiwan, huge U.S. debate over a military rivalry with China, it might be different," said Fallows.

Also, relations between Beijing and Washington have been on a stable course in recent years. 

"People tend to think, there will be no dramatic change in policy [with the incoming administration]," noted Jin.

But whoever ends up as the U.S. president, one thing remains clear to those living here: he will need to cooperate with the Chinese leadership. "There is such thoroughgoing connection that it just is fantasy that one can go without the other," said Fallows.

Ultimately, though, what is important to the Chinese is that America stays a true friend. "As a Chinese, I will be very happy if I saw one candidate say he [wants to] establish a very good contact with China," said Edmund Lu, a business school student. "But if he says he doesn't like China or he supports Taiwan independence, I will feel very sad. I will not support him."

BEIJING – As if having 1.3 billion people on the planet weren't enough, China has sent three men into space.

In the country's most ambitious space mission yet, the Shenzhou 7 spacecraft launched on Thursday from China's Jiuquan space center in the remote northwestern province of Gansu. It was manned by the three astronauts – or "taikonauts," as they're called here – one of whom will attempt the country's first spacewalk ever. It would make China only the third country to attempt it, after the U.S. and Russia.

Getty Images

People watch the live broadcast of the launch of Shenzhou 7 spacecraft in the Cultural Square on Sept. 25 in Changchun, Jilin Province, China.Â

It's also the second stage of a three-step space development strategy, following up on missions that put taikonauts into orbit in 2003 and 2005. The Chinese hope Shenzhou 7's spacewalk will help set the stage for building a space laboratory and, later, a space station.

But that's not all. Many Chinese officials – including Ouyang Ziyuan, the country's chief scientist for lunar exploration – reckon that now that they can send humans into space, it's time for them to push on with exploring the moon and eventually perhaps even Mars.

A long-term view 
Launching humans into space has ranked high among the dreams China as a nation has aspired to achieve – right up there with hosting an Olympics, building nuclear weapons, and mastering the Yangtze River. And so far, it looks like it's on track.

For years, the government here has focused on building sophisticated satellite hardware and training hundreds of thousands of engineers and scientists. All this has been done with an eye to expand and strengthen China's economy, develop its resources and pursue other interests – through space technology – in decades to come. 

How much money the central government devotes to its space program is unclear. Much of it appears to be under the direction of the People's Liberation Army – making information that much harder to obtain, as the army's spending falls under the classified category of national security.

VIDEO: 3, 2, 1, liftoff! China launches space mission

At a press event in Beijing previewing the launch, several researchers from the China Manned Space Engineering Office – which boasts more than 110 institutes, academies and other bodies dedicated to space research and development – went through a tightly-controlled script, explaining the program's goals and detailing the Shenzhou 7's mission step by step. 

Special attention was paid to the debut of the "Feitian" spacesuit developed by Chinese scientists with some assistance from their Russian counterparts. But when journalists asked about the cost of the mission or the overall program, the researchers balked.

'Space race' 
China's space aspirations have aggravated suspicions and fears among neighbors like Japan and India, as well as others in the West. The headlines of Western media reports, in particular, tend to underscore the anxiety: "The New Space Race: China v. U.S.," "China Flexes Muscle in Space Race," and "The New Red Scare, Avoiding a Space Race with China." 

American national security experts maintain that U.S. space technology is still leagues ahead of China's, but they also urge against complacency. 

At a congressional hearing in May 2007, Dr. Joan Johnson-Freese from the Naval War College said, "Chinese human spaceflight activities have taken a slow, incremental approach and still managed to create the perception that China is 'beating' the U.S. in a new space race. While far from true, what China has that the U.S. does not is top-down political will."

China has bottom-up support, too. With wall-to-wall coverage of the Shenzhou 7 launch, the Chinese are riding the crest of a wave of patriotism and pride that gathered momentum all year leading up to the Summer Olympics.  And with the National Day holiday just days away, the spacewalk is just one more feather in their modern nation-state cap.

"Of course, I'll be watching tonight," said a Chinese friend.  "Getting a man up into space doesn't happen every day. It's really an achievement."

"The space story is really quite fun," enthused a fellow Western journalist. "It's something that happened in America 30 years ago, and yet here we are, about to witness an amazing historic event. It's like getting a second chance to witness history."

And it's certainly being treated as an historic event here. Amid great fanfare leading up to lift-off, local media devoted hours to the personal stories of the taikonauts: Zhai Zhigang, who will be walking in space; Liu Boming; and Jing Haipeng.  

Zhai, a 42-year old former fighter pilot from the northeastern province of Heilongjiang, was featured prominently in a documentary Wednesday evening.  A reporter from the state-run CCTV station could be seen interviewing the cosmonaut's elder brother and father. When asked what they hoped for Zhai, the answer was as modest as the nation's hopes have been ambitious. 

"I just want to see his space journey be safe and peaceful," said Zhai's father on camera.  "And, of course, for him to return smoothly."

WARSAW, Poland – Elzbieta Ficowska leaned forward to place red roses on a new grave in Warsaw's Powawazki Cemetery. The 66-year-old woman also lit two votive candles.

They were in memory of Irena Sendler, the person to whom she owes her very existence.

NBC News/ Krzysztof Galica

Elzbieta Ficowska places flowers on the grave of Irena Sendler at a cemetary in Warsaw, Poland.

Sendler, a Roman Catholic social worker, risked her life and survived torture to help save thousands of Jews after the 1939 German invasion of Poland. Sendler, who died earlier this year at the age of 98, led a group of 30 volunteers, the majority of them women, who managed to smuggle 2,500 Jewish children out of the Warsaw ghetto and gave them false identities.

'A truly heroic act'
Ficowska was spirited out of the ghetto in a wooden carpenter's box when she was just six months old. Hidden on a truck beneath a pile of bricks – arranged to allow air to reach her – she had been drugged to prevent her from crying. With her in the box was a silver spoon engraved with her name and date of birth, probably put there by the mother she never knew.

"It was a truly heroic act for my mother to give away her baby with no guarantee it would survive," Ficowska said. "That was the painful decision my mother made." She did so because thousands of Jews were being sent each day to the gas chambers at Treblinka and other death camps in occupied Poland.

The infant girl was brought to Stanislawa Bussoldowa, a Roman Catholic midwife who also delivered the babies of Jewish women in hiding. Bussoldowa, a member of Sendler's clandestine network, adopted Ficowska and raised her as a Catholic.

The only physical trace of Ficowska's rescue is the spoon, which she keeps in a dark-blue velvet box on her mantle piece next to a photograph of her late husband, Jerzy, a poet.

But there are other reminders, she says, one of which is her life-long fear of close spaces. "That's why I think I'm so claustrophobic," she said, reflecting on having been hidden in the wooden box. "I'm always opening windows and doors wherever I go."

Courtesy Iwona Hoffman

Irena Sendler, seen in her nursing home in Warsaw, Poland in 2005.

Two mothers

Like many of her contemporaries, Ficowska is still grappling with the emotional scars of having lived through the Holocaust and the uncertainty it left in its wake.

Interviewed recently in her spacious apartment in Warsaw, Ficowska, an imposing woman with sharply-defined features and neatly-coiffed dark-reddish hair, spoke slowly and haltingly, searching her memory. She had two mothers, she said: her Jewish mother and the Catholic mother who loved her so much that she didn't want to admit the little girl with curly hair was not really her daughter.

"My Jewish mother gave me my life and my Polish mother saved that life," Ficowska said. "But when I say 'Mommy' I am talking about the mother who raised me, not that I will ever forget the mother who brought me into this world."

Ficowska now seeks to help those less fortunate than herself. She is one of the founders of Children of the Holocaust, an international organization that assists survivors. Many of its members were raised without love, often in orphanages, and face old age alone, tormented by their traumatic childhood. Many of these survivors share their feelings in group therapy sessions.

The biggest shock for many who were adopted is to discover late in life that the parents who raised them were not their birth parents. "They learn that their birth parents were Jews, and that they were murdered in the Holocaust," Ficowska explained. "Sometimes Christian parents, just before they die, tell their children they were born Jewish."

Ficowska herself was devastated when told that both her parents were Jewish and had perished in the Holocaust. She was 17 when her adoptive mother confirmed rumors about Elzbieta's true identity and showed her the silver spoon. In fact, she was so deeply troubled by this revelation that she ran away from home.

Desperate to learn what being Jewish would mean to her life, she sought the opinion of a prominent Jew in Warsaw. "Forget you learned you are Jewish," he told her. "This kind of discovery never made anyone happy." She took his advice and is now comfortable as a Catholic.

NBC News / Krzysztof Galica

Professor Michael Glowinski in his Warsaw apartment.

'She saved my mother's life'

Another survivor saved by Sendler's heroic acts took a different path.

Professor Michal Glowinski, 74, always knew he was Jewish. When he was eight, he was taken out of the ghetto with his parents by a German soldier who had been bribed.

He recalls his childhood with intense clarity. "The color of the ghetto is the color of the paper that covered the corpses lying on the street before they were taken away," he wrote in his memoir, "Black Seasons." The book is a blend of two voices – that of Glowinski as a young child and as an adult.

We recently spoke in his narrow living room, the shelves crammed with books and scholarly journals. A professor of literature at the Polish Academy of Sciences in Warsaw, he described with animation how he and his mother pursued a tortuous escape route to avoid capture by the Gestapo.

Sendler eventually found his mother a job as a maid, using forged identity papers. "She saved my mother's life," Glowinski said. At the same time, Zegota, the umbrella organization of Sendler's underground railroad, arranged for him to be placed in an orphanage in eastern Poland where he was protected by impoverished nuns. Glowinski's father, meanwhile, found work as a day laborer, part of a deliberate plan to separate the family in hope of improving their individual chances of survival.

'Dominant element of my life'

In the orphanage, Glowinski said, he shut out the world that had existed before, never expecting his family to be reunited. He prepared himself only for bad news.

"I had grown deadened and indifferent," he wrote in his memoir. As a result, he did not rejoice when his mother came for him suddenly in February of 1945. His father also survived the war, and the whole family was reunited later that year. Glowinski revived the love for his parents he had smothered as a defense mechanism during the war and even dedicated his memoir, "Black Seasons," to his mother and father.

But, his experience during the Holocaust still affects him deeply.

"If one spends his life in the ghetto and then hiding, locked in a closet or in a stack of potatoes, his whole life is marked by that experience," he said. "It is the dominant element of my life that puts everything else in perspective. The childhood trauma remains the most important element of my biography."

Glowinski and Ficowska are just two of the thousands of Jews who are the beneficiaries of Sendler's heroism. Her far-reaching legacy extends to today's children.

"If she didn't save you," Ficowska's 10-year-old grandson, Karol, told his grandmother, "my mother would not be here, and I wouldn't be here either."

Don Snyder was a longtime NBC News Producer who is now retired and is a freelance writer.

 SLUPSK, POLAND – For the citizens of the Polish city of Slupsk, the American election is personal.

Like the rest of Poland, the northern city has borne the scars of Europe's many wars and invasions. Now Slupsk is preparing for another potential conflict – as proposed host to a controversial U.S. missile site, one that has drawn the fury of Russia.

Slupsk, which had to be rebuilt after World War II, is central to a U.S.-led NATO expansion around and into the former Soviet Union, which is ratcheting up the tension between Moscow and Washington.

"The people of Slupsk are more interested than ever in the U.S. election," Mayor Maciej Kobylinski said.

VIDEO: Poles and a Gdansk-based American share their views on the U.S. presidential election.

The mayor backs the missile site, envisioning new highways, a small civilian airport, a water park and an Olympic-size swimming pool "not only for Polish citizens, but for the Americans that will come," he said.

He's dusting off the welcome mat for an estimated 1,000 U.S. military personnel, but the warmth toward the installation isn't unanimous – and opinions are divided over which U.S. presidential candidate will be best for Poland.

For Woytech Czajka, who sells "gold of the north" – amber jewelry – on the Baltic Sea boardwalk 20 minutes north of Slupsk, "George Bush was a very good partner in politics for Poland, but I've heard that [Barack] Obama wouldn't be as good."

Sipping Zywiec beer and showing off his resin pendants, Czajka, 21, said the missile site would protect his country.

"We are a free country now, but Russia doesn't accept that," Czajka said.

"I heard that Obama doesn't want to build it, so I prefer [John] McCain," he added.

A divided city 
Both candidates, in fact, back the plan. Obama, however, has said that he would want to test the effectiveness of the missiles before they are activated.

Under the defense deal, 10 missile interceptors will be placed in underground silos at Redzikowo airfield, on the outskirts of Slupsk.  By 2011 to 2013, they will work in conjunction with U.S.-run radar based in the Czech Republic to thwart a potential attack by Iran. In an attempt to quell the Kremlin's worries, The U.S. Missile Defense Agency says the system cannot be used for an offensive attack without obvious modification of the football-sized field it will occupy. 

Yet the proposal has divided this city of 100,000.

"No to the U.S. Shield," reads red paint on a wall next to a busy market in the heart of Slupsk.

"The Russians threatened to point their missiles at Poland," if the deal was signed, said Mariusz Chmiel, a district leader who said he hoped Obama would win.

"Six months ago, our politicians did not believe them, but today, after the events in Georgia, the Russians' threats should be taken seriously," he said, adding that three different surveys of the local population showed that 70 to 75 percent were against the missile shield site.

The local population's views appeared largely stratified by age; those who lived through a Soviet presence in Poland are anxious about having any foreign troops back in their country.

"Those who remember the communist time under the Russian Army that was stationed near here say, 'We used to have Russians and now the Americans are coming,'" said Krzysztof Pedzich, a local translator.

Slupsk is 65 miles away from Gdansk, home of the Solidarity labor movement which helped overturn Poland's communist system. Poland is now a member of the European Union and was among the handful of EU nations to back the U.S. invasion of Iraq.

"If you could see how it used to be before, the foreign army, any foreign army ... is treated like an intruder," said Pedzich, a father of four, who was studying in Gdansk during the anti-communist protests in the late 1980s.

Jennifer Carlile / msnbc.com

Graffiti on a wall in Slupsk reads "No to the U.S. Shield."

A conquered land 
The city's architecture tells of a tumultuous past.

Governed by Prussia and then Germany until the end of World War II, Russian forces razed most of Slupsk to the ground before the war's end. Out of the ruins, the 16th century castle was rebuilt, along with the Witches Tower, where 18 women prisoners had been put to death by 1714. 

During a recent trip, children were feeding ducks on a lush green riverbank alongside the tower, which now houses a funky, contemporary art gallery. On the other side, laundry hung in front of a low-rise Communist tower block with "Skinheads" scrawled on its façade.

From well-maintained city gardens to an abundance of EU buntings, civic and European pride abound. But, unemployment is high and the average salary is just 2,500 Polish Zlotcych ($1,022) a month – about one-sixth lower than the national average.

For Kobylinski, the city mayor, the missile site will mean jobs while drawing American soldiers and tourists to the area, which is not on most tourist itineraries (The 65-mile train ride from Gdansk can take more than 2 1/2 hours).

Kobylinski, a member of a left-wing party, is convinced that the missile site will be built no matter who becomes the next U.S. president. So he's backing Obama, because of what he sees as their shared liberal philosophies.

With lots of family and friends in the United States, especially in Obama's adopted hometown of Chicago, many here have a direct interest in the U.S. election, he added.

Jennifer Carlile / msnbc.com

Zbigniew Kramek guards the Redzikowo Airfield, where the U.S. missile site will be based.

Part-politics, part-Hollywood
For others, the process is part-politics, part-entertainment.

"The election in the U.S.A. looks like a big show, or Hollywood," said Aleksandra Rutkiewicz, 27, whose job is to promote Slupsk out of the 19th century city hall.

"I would prefer McCain because he's not such a showman as Obama," she said, adding that she fully supported the missile shield.

At the Redzikowo airfield only a couple of old planes and disused buildings could be seen behind a guard's fence.

For the guard there, the choice was more basic. Will one of (the candidates) make it so we can go to the U.S. without a visa?" asked Zbigniew Kramek. "He's the one I want."

By NBC News photojournalist Mike Simon

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan – "Be careful, Mike! These things usually come in pairs."

The words of my sound recordist, Bobby Lapp, ring as loudly as any memory of the attack.

There was no doubt what had just happened. A huge truck bomb had ripped apart the Marriott Hotel in downtown Islamabad. The shock wave started as a low rumble, then quickly blew through us, tearing apart every window pane and door jamb in our location nearby.

But once it passed, it was strangely quiet. No sirens. No wails of pain or children crying.

I know now that quiet is the sound of a country going into shock. The strange silence didn't last long before the night sky was filled with the sounds of chaos.

We were safe, though. Our previous hour had been spent with the security detail for Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari at his home, the presidential palace. The palace sits high on a hill behind the Parliament building. It is less than a kilometer from the Marriott Hotel.

Our interview with NBC News' Ann Curry and Zardari was scheduled for 9 p.m. But first, the country's presidential security detail had to inspect, search and scrutinize every one of our 34 pieces of equipment going into the palace. We arrived at 6:45 p.m. at the presidential palace compound gates so we could begin the laborious process of admission and screening for our interview.

Before we could even get into the compound though, we had to wait while a steady procession of diplomatic and governmental motorcades drove by us en route to a special dinner at the prime minister's residence, which is next door to the palace.

It is the Islamic holy month known as Ramadan. This means that Muslim faithful must fast for more than 14 hours during the day. The fast is broken at sunset and celebrated with a feast at night. On this night, the fasting ended at approximately 7:30 p.m. The feast is known as Iftar. It is usually a great party, and tonight, the prime minister of Pakistan was holding his own Iftar with plenty of dignitaries and diplomats.

While we waited, three presidential motorcades drove by. Our local fixer told us the president always travels in three motorcades so terrorists wouldn't know which one to hit. Not a bad tactic considering the many attempts made on the previous Pakistani president's life.

We may never know why the attackers chose the Marriott Hotel. Most here believe security near the Parliament and presidential residences was so formidable that they chose the softer target of a hotel packed with innocents enjoying the fruits of a day's fast. But clearly, if the bomb had been detonated close to the prime minister's party, it could have killed many of the politically elite of Pakistan and quite possibly have altered the course of the region forever.

 MOSCOW – "I'm against that one – the aggressive one – I'm for Obama," said Valentina Savina, a lottery ticket seller on the Old Arbat, Moscow's busy central pedestrian thoroughfare.

"[I'm] against McCain," she added when asked what her views were on the U.S. presidential candidates. "He's against Russia."

Alexander Maleshov, a cab driver in Moscow, agreed. "As far as I know, the Republicans are strongly against us," he said.

VIDEO: Russians watch the U.S. election

Savina and Maleshov are not alone in their views of McCain and the GOP, according to a recent poll of Russians conducted at the beginning of September by the Russian Public Opinion Research Center. The survey found that 27 percent of respondents would choose Sen. Barack Obama if they could vote in the U.S. elections, as opposed to just 6 percent choosing Sen. John McCain.

(According to the poll, 34 percent of respondents also said, "I wouldn't vote for anyone," and the remaining 33 percent responded that the question was "hard to answer.")

The results are partly a product of McCain's outspoken criticism of the country and its popular prime minister – and former president – Vladimir Putin. For instance, McCain has advocated excluding Russia from the G8 in response to "diminishing political freedoms" under Putin.

They are also the result of McCain being a member of the Republican Party. In a country where the Bush administration's policies, from the war in Iraq to the planned installation of missile defense systems in Poland and the Czech Republic, are highly unpopular, it would be hard for any GOP candidate to gain much of a following.

Georgia conflict has an effect

Also working against McCain is the conflict in the former Soviet republic of Georgia. The U.S. and Russia have supported opposite sides, with the U.S. voicing strong support for Georgia and Russia backing South Ossetia and Abkhazia, two separatist regions on Georgian territory.

In many ways the Georgia War was fought on the airwaves and the television screens as much as it was on the ground, and Russians' response to the candidates tend to follow what they heard in the Russian media.

And while both candidates were critical of Russia's military actions on Georgian soil beyond the separatist areas, many Muscovites I spoke with quoted McCain's statement at a campaign stop in York, Pa., when he declared that "We [Americans] are all Georgians," as one reason for their leaning toward Obama.  

"In both cases, it will be very hard relations between United States and Russia," said Anton Lopatin, 23, taking a lunch break on the Arbat from his job in financial services.

Many Russians agree with him. Less than a fifth of Russians respondents to the recent poll described U.S. relations as "friendly," "neighborly" or "calm." 

Opposite sides

Overall, the saber-rattling over Georgia has sparked a greater interest in U.S. politics and how it can affect Russia.

In the poll, 47 percent of respondent said they "closely" or "somewhat" follow the U.S. elections, up from 36 percent just two months earlier.

"America, it's the biggest country," said Natalia Golubeva, a 26-year-old who works in financial services, "so we are also interested in the policy … of your country."

MWANZA, Tanzania – None of the shopkeepers had change for a dollar, and I marveled, not for the first time, at how the gap between rich and poor plays out in real life.

I wanted to buy a tiny bag of peanuts while waiting for a ferry to cross a pretty bay on Lake Victoria in Tanzania.

Nagona, the woman selling the peanuts, didn't have change; so she went from stall to stall, waving the 1,000 Tanzanian shilling note, which is actually worth about 88 cents. But nobody could break it. This vendor had 60 cents worth of money, that one had 80 cents, but nobody had the resources to break the 1,000 shilling note.

And all the while they smiled and laughed and joked with each other. I asked how business was and they said good. They sold peanuts, small cartons of milk, warm, sweet, fizzy drinks, dry biscuits labeled "energy bars" and, of course, cigarettes.

One cigarette at a time, that is.

NBC News

A passenger on the ferry we eventually caught to go across Lake Victoria in Tanzania.

The waiting ferry passengers milled around, joking at the man who had a baby chicken inside a tiny cage made of twigs, which he had tied to his bicycle seat. The cage was so small the chick's neck was bent. When an old man's bicycle fell to the ground, scattering his load of pineapples and nuts, everybody laughed as if this was the funniest thing, and he joined in the gaiety, and then everybody helped him pick up his load.

One little boy was carrying boiled eggs in a tin container. You could dip the peeled eggs in some salt he carried. Two boys were checking an egg, tapping it, shaking it and listening, as if they were experts assessing the finest goods.

Two teenage girls approached me and my cameraman, Dave Copeland, smiling shyly and curtsying while holding pieces of paper and a pen, which they shared.

"It's for the orphan's education fund," said our translator. "They want 500 shillings or 1,000." Fifty cents or a dollar. Everybody smiled in appreciation, and a satisfied murmur went through the crowd as we handed over a thousand shillings each and wrote down our names and our contribution amount and then signed the paper. (In all my years covering stories in Africa, hailing back to when Zimbabwe was still Rhodesia, I have never seen any students who study harder than orphans.)

We waited an hour and a half for the ferry. It was hot and dust covered us each time another truck pulled up, its horn playing all kinds of zany tunes. Somebody's cell phone rang. The ring was a baby crying and everybody looked up in concern, and then laughed. Giant clumsy maribou storks hovered with beating wings and then settled on electric cables overhead, clacking.

In short, it was a typical scene in rural Africa.

NBC News

The picturesque scene crossing Lake Victoria in Tanzania.

Again, not for the first time, I reflected on a comparable scene in my world. I imagined the shoppers in a busy department store. How many would stop and help if a lady dropped her shopping? Would everybody laugh (with her, not at her)? And would she laugh, too? And would they then all stop their business to help?

We have plenty of money to spend, even if it is not as much as we would like, and most vendors, if pushed, could break a hundred dollar bill. But some people would probably be more concerned about the caged chick with the bent neck than with the people around them.

As for the peanut vendor, she never did raise the change to break my dollar bill. The shopkeepers had said it was a good day, but not that good.

It seemed condescending to say keep the change, so I bought six packets of peanuts and ate them all.

One of the big attractions at the Beijing 2008 Paralympics is wheelchair rugby. NBC News' Adrienne Mong meets the U.S. team and discusses how the sport is breaking down stereotypes and gaining new fans.

VIDEO: Wheelchair rugby draws crowds at Beijing Paralympics

BAGHDAD – Disembarking from the plane at Baghdad International Airport I was hit by a wall of heat and humidity, a complete contrast from the wet and cold fall day I had left behind in London less than 24 hours before.

This being my first Iraq assignment, I usually work as a foreign news editor in our NBC News London bureau, my eyes and ears where cued up the minute I arrived to take in the full Baghdad scene.

The airport was full of Western contractors and security types all looking a little battle weary. The absence of many Iraqi's, and any other women, was glaring.

After passing through immigration, I was met by our local Iraqi office manager and encountered my first taste of daily Baghdad life – the power went out and we stood there hopelessly in the dark waiting for the baggage belt to spring to life. No light, no luggage.

Baggage finally in hand, my first reality check came when we started driving down the notorious "airport road." Once one of the most dangerous stretches of highway in the world, earlier in the war, it was a killing ground where insurgents and suicide bombers made easy targets of anyone travelling to or from the airport. The road is now safer, partly as a result of the U.S. surge, and the numbers of attacks are down significantly.

As we were driving down the road, I was actually surprised by just how bleak and colorless Baghdad looks. Ailing infrastructure and crumbling shrapnel ridden buildings are everywhere, razor wire and 12 foot reinforced blast proof cement walls dominate the landscape.

After our carefully controlled trip from the airport, we reached the bureau and it was good to see the familiar faces of my colleagues in such an unfamiliar place. I was glad I had packed marmite, mango chutney and the latest issue of Vogue magazine – a few of the small requests my comfort starved colleagues had asked me to bring along from London.

A couple of hours later I was on my way to get my media pass at the Combined Press Information Center in the International Zone. Our route took us past the "Hands of Victory" monument, an iconic symbol erected by Saddam to celebrate his "victory" over Iran after the Iran-Iraq War that was fought from 1980-1988.

That was my first fleeting moment of feeling like a tourist in a war zone. Entering the International Zone we passed through what seemed like dozens of heavily guarded identification checkpoints, vehicle searches and numerous body pat downs. I was astonished to learn that security had been even tighter in the past. It seemed to me to take such a long time to get anywhere.

I filled out the vital statistics and personal information questions requested by the U.S soldiers at the press center and biometric scans were taken of my eyes, face and finger prints.

I asked the soldier processing me why so much information was needed and was it a matter of security?

He replied, "Yes. And also if we find parts of you somewhere that need to be indentified Ma'am."

"That's reassuring," I laughed.

On the way back to base we had to change from our planned course due to an "incident" on a road ahead of us. Of course, there were also many other incidents that day – from bomb blasts to shootings to a cholera outbreak in the south of Baghdad due to a lack of clean drinking water.

I also experienced my first sounds of automatic weapons fire and the echo of exploding bomb in the distance and during my first night a major dust storm settled in. It's good to be here and I'm looking forward to covering the Iraq story for the next month.

I'm also looking forward to tonight's dinner, chicken curry, complimented by lovely mango chutney from London.

By NBC News' Shahid Qazi and Carol Grisanti

BABAKOT, Pakistan – In a tangle of bushes and trees outside a remote village in southwest Pakistan, six close male relatives of three teenage girls dug a 4-foot wide by 6-foot deep ditch, on a sweltering night in mid-July, and allegedly buried the girls alive.

The girls' crime: they dared to defy the will of their fathers and the customs of their tribe and choose their own husbands. The mother of one of the girls and the aunt of another were shot and killed while begging for the girls' lives, according to local media reports.

NBC News

A busy street in the village of Babakot, Pakistan.

The incident has touched off widespread condemnation from human rights groups, but also a sturdy defense from local officials. "This action was carried out according to tribal traditions," said Israrullah Zehri, a senator representing Balochistan in the upper house of Pakistan's parliament in the capital Islamabad. "These are centuries-old traditions and I will continue to defend them," he said. 

We visited the scene and interviewed locals to try and learn more about this gruesome crime.

Daring to defy tradition

Saarang Mastoi is the local journalist who broke the story. He told us that on July 14, Fatima, Fauzia and Jannat Bibi, aged 16 to 18, got into a taxi in Babakot, a small village of farmers and sheepherders in Pakistan's Balochistan province, and drove about one hour to the village of Usta Mohammed to meet their boyfriends. The girls were chatting in the back of the taxi about their plans to meet the boys at the local restaurant and then go to a civil court to marry them.

The taxi driver dropped the girls off and then drove straight back to Babakot to inform their families about the secret plans he had overheard in the back of his taxi, according to Mastoi.

The girls' decision to elope came after their male relatives and tribal elders had refused them permission to marry the boys of their choice because they were from another tribe.

The families of the girls belong to the wealthy feudal Umrani tribe in Balochistan. The uncle of one of the girls is a minister in the Balochistan provincial government and a deputy leader of the ruling Pakistan Peoples Party (PPP), according to an investigation into the incident by Human Rights Watch. 

NBC News

Ali Baksh, a shepherd in Babakot, who defended the punishment given to the girls.

Traditional justice

Almost immediately after the taxi driver's return, a posse of male relatives, including fathers, uncles and brothers, set out from Babakot for the village of Usta Mohammed to bring the girls home. The men arrived in land cruiser jeeps bearing Balochistan government license plates – one belonging to the district mayor, according to Human Rights Watch. 

The girls were kicked, punched and then pushed into the vehicles at gunpoint, Mastoi, the journalist, said. Once back at home in Babakot, the girls were beaten again and interrogated by their fathers and uncles for almost one hour before their "verdict" was announced.

They would be killed – buried alive.

The girls were dragged into vehicles and taken to the end of a back road in Babakot accompanied by two female relatives, according to media reports. The men dug ditches and ordered the girls to be thrown in. When the female relatives saw the ditches, they tried to intervene and begged for the girls' lives, according to local media reports. 

There was "pandemonium at the site," according to the findings of the Asian Human Rights Commission, and a tribal elder gave orders to shoot the two older women. They died immediately and were thrown into the wide ditch. The three girls, who were wounded in the gunfire but still alive, were then thrown in and covered with sand and mud.

In Pakistan's rural areas, male tribal councils decide the fate of women who bring dishonor to their family. In 2004, President Pervez Musharraf outlawed the practice, known as "honor killings" – violations of the law carry the death penalty. But the law is impossible to enforce because this centuries old custom for dealing with women is protected by powerful feudal landlords and tribal elders.

Mastoi, the local reporter, told NBC News that "powerful people" from the Umrani tribe had threatened him and warned him of consequences if he continued to report the story. He said that everyone in the village knew what happened and shortly after the murders, a couple of shepherds in the area had taken him to see the actual burial site. "Now everyone is too afraid to talk," he said.

'It's a man's world'

Only about 7,000 people live in Babakot, a run down and dusty place about 200 miles south of the provincial capital, Quetta. Donkey carts carrying women, children and poor farmers give way on the road to the shiny 4X4 Land Cruisers of the wealthy landowners and tribal chiefs.

Ali Baksh, a frail shepherd with a thin scruffy white beard, has been tending his sheep in the neighboring district of Naseerabad since he was seven years old.  When asked what he thought about the murders in Babakot, he stared blankly for a few seconds and then he said, "I am proud of our Balouch traditions and it was the right punishment for those girls who defied the will of their fathers."

Public outcry by human rights groups and lawmakers has forced the federal government in Islamabad to open an investigation into what happened in Babakot six weeks ago. 

NBC News

An elderly woman in Babakot who said, "It's a man's world and these things will never stop."

But the Asian Human Rights Commission believes a full accounting of the events may be impossible: "The Balochistan police have removed three of the five bodies and started destroying any evidence that might prove useful to an eventual investigation."

Back in Babakot, the reaction of an elderly woman to questions about the story seemed to confirm the human rights groups' fears. When asked about the story, she refused to give her name, sighed and waved off any hope for justice in this case. "It's a man's world and these things will never stop," she said.

BEIJING – Two weeks after the end of the Summer Olympics, the residents of Beijing have yet to wake up to their much-anticipated sports hangover.

In fact, if the vast crowds an NBC News crew and I witnessed on the Olympic Green this week are any indication, they are still lapping up the sports on offer at the 2008 Paralympic Games.

The Beijing Paralympics, which began last weekend, feature 4,000 of the world's toughest top athletes with disabilities from 148 countries competing in 20 sports – as varied as wheelchair rugby, sitting volleyball and blind soccer – until Sept. 17. 

Adrienne Mong / NBC News

Paralympians say they're getting a warm welcome in Beijing.

But as crowd-pleasing as some of these sports can be, we were still taken aback by the long lines of ticket-holders thronging the main southern entrance to the Olympic Green.

After all, China has not been known for its tolerance of disabled people. In a country with 83 million disabled (about the size of Germany's population), it's rare to see any of them in public.

Traditional attitudes perceive people with disabilities as cursed, making them social outcasts; an old Chinese phrase termed them "useless cripple" (can fei). In May, an official guide for Olympic volunteers was recalled after it was discovered it contained descriptions of disabled people as "stubborn and controlling." 

Until recently, public access and facilities for the disabled in major cities have been practically nonexistent, and state support for the disabled in the form of health care or jobs has been very limited.

Slowly shifting perceptions

But some of those old attitudes have begun to change – at least on a state level. In April this year, the National People's Congress enacted a law designed to bolster the rights of disabled people, specifically stating, "Persons with disabilities shall enjoy equal rights with other citizens in political, economic, cultural and social respects and in family life as well."

It's been harder to gauge, however, the turnaround of popular perceptions. Some shifts can be attributed to the visibility of the son of former Communist Party leader Deng Xiaoping. The 64-year-old Deng Pufang was paralyzed after falling out of a window during the Cultural Revolution. He's now the head of the China Disabled Persons Federation, which was instrumental in securing initial official recognition of disabled rights back in 1983.

Adrienne Mong / NBC News

Thousands of people crowded near one of the entrances to the Olympic Green this week.

However, just this week reports emerged that only two of 88 children orphaned by the May earthquake in Sichuan have been adopted. The China Daily, which initially reported there was only one adoption, quoted sources within the Sichuan provincial department of civil affairs as saying that "one reason for the slow response is that many of the orphans are handicapped."

So, staring at the long lines of ticket-holders at stadium entrances, we wondered: Were there more tickets available to the general public? Was someone giving out free tickets?

It was widely noted that some sporting events during last month's Olympics appeared to be playing out in empty-looking stadiums. High prices were sometimes blamed, but corporate sponsors who held onto tickets that then went unused were also at fault.

At the Paralympics, same-day tickets can be bought for as low as thirty yuan (roughly $4). And a volunteer I spoke to showed me two tickets that were being given out freely: a pass to the Olympic Green, home to most of the sporting events, and a pass to a specific venue, the Indoor National Stadium.

When we raised the issue about greater attendance to Sun Weide, spokesman for the Beijing Organizing Committee for the Olympic Games (BOCOG also runs the Beijing Paralympics), he denied there were more people present.

Cheering crowds 'blew us away'

Yet whether people have been drawn in by cheaper or free tickets seems less significant than what the attendance rate might achieve in the long run. Witnessing the ability, talent, and determination of these athletes can only have a positive impact here – not just on people with lingering prejudices.

At the main tennis stadium one afternoon, we came across a group of young Chinese children – some in wheelchairs, others visually impaired, but all with some disability – learning to hit a tennis ball with Paralympians from Nigeria.

"They've never seen people like themselves do these things," said Wendy Lee, a pediatric therapist accompanying the kids. Lee coordinated with a local Chinese orphanage specializing in special needs to bring 23 disabled children to a handful of Paralympic events. "They need to see other people like them to realize they can have a fulfilling life."

The other obvious beneficiary: the athletes themselves.

Members of the U.S. wheelchair rugby team said they have been bowled over by the reception – and this is before they have even played a single game in China.

"The people here have been friendly and warm and really curious," said Nick Springer, a 23-year old defensive specialist for the U.S. team. Springer was one of several players who went on jaunts through the city, drawing curious onlookers asking for photographs.

But nothing could prepare the American players for the crowd reaction at sporting events. The mass of people at the China-U.S. wheelchair basketball game Wednesday night "blew us away," said Coach James Gumbert.

"When the Chinese scored that final basket," he said. "It was like they'd won the Superbowl. Everybody was on their feet shouting."

This kind of response – for disabled athletes – is "like nothing we've ever seen," continued Gumbert. According to him, their most popular games back home attract just a couple of hundred spectators. The matches against Canada shown in the 2005 documentary, "Murderball," suggested there's a huge cult following, but Gumbert said the filmmakers shot "creatively" to give the illusion of large crowds of spectators when in fact there were only 500 or so people.

Here in Beijing, they're likely to play before several thousand when they face off the China team on Friday. And it's a safe bet the atmosphere will be electric.

Festive scene

Around the Olympic stadiums, the mood has been noticeably more festive – more so than any time any of us remembered from the Olympic Games. What had been a vast empty-looking Olympic Green is now overflowing with families wandering from one venue to another. People stopping to gawk at large-screen displays of a women's wheelchair basketball match and debate the finer points of ball bearings and wheels, as well as fans waving China or Paralympic flags at every camera that turned on them.

At times, we could hear the spiritedness echoing from inside the Bird's Nest, where track and field competitions were under way Wednesday.  Every chair looked filled inside the 90,000-seat stadium, where people roared with generous approval at virtually every athlete – not just the Chinese. 

Sometimes, their enthusiasm eclipsed newfound sensitivities to the disabled. When American blind sprinter Josiah Jamison won the 100-meter dash by a hair, people jumped up and down to cheer him on. And they leapt continuously out of their seats whenever an athlete completed a javelin throw – so often that the back row of disabled fans seated in wheelchairs grumbled about being unable to see.

Click here for more NBC News Sports coverage of the Beijing Paralympics

  BAGHDAD – President Bush announced plans on Tuesday to pull 8,000 more combat and support troops out of Iraq by next February, but not all Iraqis are happy about the security situation here.

At Baghdad International Airport a handful of returning Iraqis, who were recently denied residence in Sweden, blamed Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki for their disappointment. "He visited Sweden and painted too rosy a picture of conditions here in Baghdad. So Sweden is no longer accepting Iraqi applications for asylum, and we were sent back here," said one of the Iraqis at the airport who had been turned away.

To be fair, involuntary repatriation may not be the fate it once was. Baghdad's security has definitely improved. When I was traveling down the road from the airport to the center of the city recently there were fewer checkpoints than during my last visit in June. And the high-speed security convoys escorting important visitors now appear to have blended into the traffic streams. Dozens of shops abandoned by fearful merchants have been reopened and there is a noticeable absence of armed police patrols in the streets.

'Today we can go anywhere'
A trip to a USAID compound in the Mansour area of west Baghdad now takes about 20 minutes compared to an hour in June. The Iraqi government has reopened several key roads in the city, so choking traffic jams, during which you sit in a vehicle hemmed in on all sides by nervous drivers thinking about kidnappings and car bombs, are now just bad memories. 

The USAID officials we visited are working on an agricultural program to teach Iraqi farmers more efficient methods of working their land. They spend a lot of time outside Baghdad in the country.

"A year ago there was a sniper taking shots at us every time we left our base," said Brian Conklin, a USAID official. "There were 385 attacks in our area every week. Today we can go anywhere in our 1,300 square miles of territory without a problem."

Another official, Robert Dose, said the improved security situation had already allowed them to increase vegetable yields for Iraqi farmers in their area by 300 percent.

"We've been able to upgrade the infrastructure that allows farmers to get back into production," he said.

Bombers still at large
But as we were leaving the USAID compound, one of our drivers pointed to a blackened area on a street corner just opposite the main gate.

"Car bomb against Ahmed Chalabi here last night," he said. "Six bodyguards killed."

As it turns out, we found out later that Chalabi, a prominent opponent of Saddam Hussein's regime before it was overthrown in 2003, had not been in the convoy targeted by the bombers.  He was attending a funeral on the other side of Baghdad and had been about to leave when the mourners insisted he stay for Iftar, the breaking of the Ramadan fast. Chalabi agreed but dismissed his entourage so that they could get home to their families. It was the latest in a series of assassination attempts he escaped purely by chance, and a reminder that not all of Baghdad's bombers have been captured or killed by American and Iraqi forces.

A few days later we met the top U.S. commander in Iraq, Gen. David Petraeus, who is credited with overseeing the troop surge which stopped the sectarian violence and brought relative calm to Iraq.

"The sectarian violence caused horrific damage. We used to say it tore the very fabric of Iraqi society, and it's heartening now to see some of that actually coming back together," Petraeus told us.

VIDEO: Gen. Petraeus on Iraq: 'Doing the best I could'

Petraeus leaves Iraq in a week's time to take over Central Command, which is based in Tampa, Fla.  His new assignment will put him in charge of Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as another 24 countries in Asia and the Middle East.

After leaving Petraeus' office at the American Embassy we studied U.S. Army notes pointing out that there are now fewer than 200 attacks a month against American and Iraqi targets across Iraq, down from a high of 1,600 attacks per month two years ago.

But when we returned to our bureau we saw on our incident board that there had been 13 attacks recorded that very day. Eleven people had been killed and 35 others wounded in bomb blasts and shooting incidents across the country.

It was a reminder that Iraq is not yet fully secure no matter how safe it feels.

Asif Ali Zardari, widower of slain former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto and now the leader of her party, the Pakistan Peoples Party (PPP), is set to win a five-year term as president of Pakistan on Saturday.

Asif Hassan / AFP - Getty Images

Asif Ali Zardari at a press conference in Karachi.

The two other candidates from rival parties have been unable to seriously challenge him because the PPP enjoys a comfortable majority of seats in the national assembly and in three of the four provincial assemblies – these groups will choose, by secret ballot, a successor to President Pervez Musharraf, who resigned from office last month.

The election comes as Pakistan is reeling from an economy in chaos, crippling power outages, an Islamic insurgency moving out of the lawless border areas into the cities, and public outcry over Musharraf's sacking of judges who opposed him.

Balance of powers
Zardari's critics insist he has ascended to power only because of the death of his wife and has neither the governing skills nor the experience to pull the country out of its present crisis. His supporters strongly disagree, insisting he is the best man to bring peace and stability to Pakistan because of the powers he will inherit from the military regime of President Musharraf and his role as leader of the governing PPP party. 

Armed with such sweeping powers, Zardari would become one of the most powerful civilian presidents in Pakistan's history. He would  have the authority to dismiss the government, sack the army and intelligence chiefs, appoint judges and control Pakistan's nukes. But he insists he wants to devolve the powers of the presidency and return Pakistan to a parliamentary system of government after nine years of military dictatorship.

"If I am elected president," he wrote in anopinion piece in the Washington Post, "one of my highest priorities will be to support the prime minister, the National Assembly and the Senate to amend the constitution to bring back into balance the powers of the presidency and thereby reduce its ability to bring down democratic governance."

Three of the judges that Musharraf deposed were re-appointed to their old jobs today. But the PPP-led government did not restore the deposed chief justice, Iftikhar Mohammed Chaudhry, deepening a rift with Zardari's political opponents.

Throughout Pakistan's history, power has always been concentrated in one man. Many Pakistanis worry that the country is just changing from a military dictatorship to a civilian one.

Pakistan's Information Minister Sherry Rehman said Zardari believes in the balance of power between the president and the prime minister.

"Mr Zardari is a political figure who has stakes in the stability of the system," she said. "The decade of manipulation of the Presidency has tilted the balance of power away from parliamentary forces. The system could only be corrected by individuals and institutions that have respect for the will of the people."

Dogged by his past
If Saturday's vote for the presidency was a popular ballot, rather than a vote in the assemblies, Zardari likely would have a tougher time securing the country's top job. He lacks credibility among many Pakistanis and is dogged by his past -- alleged corruption and money laundering charges amounting to millions of dollars in kickbacks from foreign companies during his wife's two terms in office, and for which he spent a total of 11 years  in prison. 

Widely known as "Mr. 10 percent" for alleged skimming of government contracts, Zardari at one time faced charges in Pakistan, the U.K. and Switzerland. He maintains the charges were all politically motivated and never proven.

All charges against Zardari and Bhutto were dropped last year as part of a U.S.-brokered deal with President Musharraf, which paved the way for Benazir Bhutto to return to Pakistan from self-imposed exile. That amnesty, known as the National Reconciliation Ordinance, is controversial and unpopular in Pakistan and allegedly the reason Zardari has gone back on his promise to restore the independent-minded judges. The restoration of the deposed chief justice would likely see the case against Zardari brought up again and the amnesty thrown out.

Zardari refuses to answer questions from political opponents who wonder how he acquired his vast fortunes given that he does not come from great wealth. Last week, London's Financial Times newspaper reported that Zardari had presented medical certificates to the English High Court as recently as last year stating he was suffering from severe psychiatric problems, including dementia. It is widely held that these medical statements were falsified to postpone Zardari's cases before the courts. If this were to be true, then he would have committed perjury.

"We cannot trust a President who is a liar and who does not honor his promises. Before he was Mr. 10 percent. Now he will become Mr. 100 percent and, who knows, next he may sell the country," said Muhammed Iqbal Tanoli, an Islamabad lawyer who took part yesterday in a sit-in by the country's lawyers in front of the parliament demanding Zardari restore the judiciary.

How can a person become president who does not fulfill his promises nor stand by his agreements?" asked Saqib Abbasi, a student leader at Islamabad College for Boys. Students and the civil society have joined the nationwide lawyers movement protesting the delay in restoring the deposed judges.

Ayaz Amir, a political analyst, said much more than Zardari's personal credibility is at stake in Saturday's vote. "Mr. Asif Ali Zardari will have to play a very balanced role to ensure political stability. Failure to do so will be a disaster for the whole system," he said.

'Zardari has a shot'
Despite this concerns, today's lead article in the English language daily, The Nation, argues that Zardari has a shot at becoming a legitimate leader: "Mr. Zardari's obvious handicap could also prove a window of opportunity for him. He can simply turn this into his biggest advantage by confounding his critics."

Pakistanis will now be watching Zardari's relations with the country's powerful army.

"Mr. Zardari will have to establish a close relationship with the army and win its trust," said Najam Sethi, editor of Pakistan's English language newspaper the Daily Times. "Whether he will be an effective president remains to be seen."

Zardari seems to have convinced the U.S. government that he will cooperate more fully than President Musharraf in going after Islamic militants. So far, Zardari's party has alternated between peace deals with the militants and highly unpopular military operations -- the majority of Pakistanis still view the war on terror as America's war.

He has promised the parliamentarians from the militant-infested border areas and the North West Frontier province to initiate a political process to deal with the insurgency. They will hold him to his word. Once he assumes the presidency, however, Washington will be demanding action and not peace deals.

"I thought American forces were in Afghanistan for our security," said Attiqullah, his voice trembling. "I could never have imagined that they would bomb my wedding party. They killed my entire family. I will never forgive them."

I sat with Attiqullah, who gives his age as around 15, near the graves where his family members are buried. He described what happened the day of July 6, 2008 -- his wedding day -- when his bride, two of his brothers and a sister, along with 45 relatives, were killed by a U.S. air strike on the remote village of Oghaza, in Nangarhar Province in eastern Afghanistan.

Attiqullah / NBC News

Attiqullah points out the bomb site

Attiqullah's father had sent the entire family to the bride's house the night before the wedding ceremony, as per Afghan custom. "The women were playing musical instruments and everyone was singing and dancing," Attiqullah said. "Then, according to our tradition, the entire groom's family must escort the bride from her house to meet the groom. Early the next morning everyone set out on the way to my house, walking in a kind of procession through a mountain pass. And then, the unimaginable happened."

"It was 6:30 in the morning and there were 300 of my relatives and friends gathered at my house waiting for the bride to arrive," he said. Attiqullah, by now his eyes brimming with tears, was barely audible and wanted to appear strong in front of me. He was fighting hard not to lose control as he told his story so he avoided my eyes and drew circles in the mud as he answered my questions.

"I was watching the cooks cut the meats, prepare the potatoes, and wash the rice," he continued. "This was all for me and I felt so happy and proud. I was day-dreaming of welcoming my bride, wondering how she would feel as she entered my house and also how I would feel. I was counting the minutes to her arrival."

"Then there was a loud explosion on the top of the mountain," Attiqullah, crying, explained what happened.  "I saw balls of fire explode in the sky, the mountain seemed to be burning.  I ran from the house and started climbing. I ran faster and faster. I could hear the cries of children and women. And then the second explosion."

Attiqullah / NBC News

Attiqullah prays in the graveyard

 Attiqullah's house, a simple structure of mud, rock and wood, is built along the side of the mountain. It took him a half hour to run up the mountain, his uncle running with him.

"And then there was a third explosion," he said.

"Oh my God!" Attiqullah was now sobbing uncontrollably. " I saw my bride and my family members; I saw the pieces of their bodies scattered all over the place."

The U.S. military is investigating the incident and said in a statement: "Any loss of innocent life is tragic."

"I assure you we do not target civilians and that our forces go to great lengths to avoid civilian casualties," U.S. military spokesman, 1st Lieutenant Nathan Perry said.

An investigation by the Afghan government concluded that 52 people died in that air attack - 45 women and children were killed. Afghan President Hamid Karzai ordered his government to pay $2,000 for each person killed and $1,000 to each injured person.

Attiqullah told me there was no offer of assistance to the family from coalition forces.