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In Syria, girls march as timebomb ticks

The girls circle the stage in a nightclub outside of Damascus, holding hands in protective pairs as they march, always counterclockwise, at the same slow pace, one unenthusiastic step per second.   

It’s 3 a.m., but bright as a hospital ward in here.  The club owners leave on the fluorescent lights so customers can get a good look at what’s for sale.  The girls’ faces are painted in slashes of pink blush. Their lipstick is drab browns and beiges.  They want it that way, so it doesn’t distract from their eyes, accented with glittering splashes of emerald green and sapphire blue.  Many girls connect their thin, shaped eyebrows with a black pencil, and have orange and yellow plastic flowers in their long hair, blackened with henna.

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A suicide bomber's motive

Maha didn’t sound like the murderer she wants to be.

The 20-year-old sounded polite and soft-spoken as she told me about her plans to become a suicide bomber. Her motivation, as she told me over the phone (she was too scared to meet in person), is not political, patriotic, religious or even, like some male suicide bombers, bizarrely sexual; for her there would be no 72 houris, the dark-eyed female attendants some Islamic teachings say care for male martyrs in paradise.

Our talk took me back to a trash-filled street in Cairo where in 1997 I spoke with a group of young men, all poor, unmarried, undereducated Islamic radicals who were trying to convert me. They repeatedly stressed how virgins would dote me on me in heaven.  One of the men pulled a cigarette lighter from his pocket and held the yellow flame under my outstretched palm.  I pulled back my hand in pain.

"Does that hurt you?" he asked.

"Yes," I said.

Read more in our sister blog, "WorldBlog"

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Execution timing -- a religious debate

NBC Correspondent Richard Engel has posted a dispatch on our sister blog "Blogging Baghdad" about the timing of Saddam Hussein's execution being a religious debate rather than a legal one.

Click to read his blog

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More about the dreaded 'Jody'

Editor's note: Richard's story on Thursday's broadcast, about the stress U.S. troops face in the field and back at home, drew a considerable amount of response. One item in particular stirred up debate, so he wrote more about it in Blogging Baghdad. Here's an excerpt, with a link to the full post below.

How war has changed. Saigon: Comfort women, an embarrassing shot from the medic, booze, pot, secrets from wives at home. Soldiers here say, "not this time."

Now they're worried the tables have turned, and that the soldiers' wives are on the make while they live like monks on bases.

"The extent of our social lives is a trip to the porta-john with an FHM magazine," a soldier told me.  The troops here worry about "The Jody."

"Jody?"

I'd never heard of it. I know al-Qaida in Iraq, the Mahdi army, and other nefarious death squads that want to kill American troops. But Jody? I drew a blank. 

A soldier filled me in: "Jody is the guy back home with you wife or your girlfriend," he said, suddenly deadly serious. "He's the guy hiding behind a corner, behind the curtain, hiding in the closet."

Read the rest in Blogging Baghdad.

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Not the real thing

James Taranto raised a question Tuesday in his blog on WSJ.com about whether Richard Engel had overlooked a story in Sidon, Lebanon.

According to Taranto, one of his readers noticed what looked like uncut sheets of U.S. $100 bills on the ground in Richard’s report that aired Monday on Nightly News. Taranto wondered if Engel had stumbled across a Hezbollah counterfeiting operation that had been blown to bits.

Richard explained over the phone from Tyre, Lebanon, Wednesday that the bills shown were not real bills but photocopies. He said the bills were not on currency quality paper and were too small to be passed off as real currency.

He also explained that, often times when people are dealing with a lot of cash, as they would be at a bank, they photocopy the currency as a form of record keeping and to check out that the serial numbers are correct -– to make sure that the dollars they got were real dollars.

You can watch Richard's report from Monday for yourself here.

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Roadways turn to battlegrounds

The roads in Lebanon are now battlegrounds. We got a firsthand look at just how dangerous they have become as we drove on Monday from Beirut to Tyre, the war-torn city in Southern Lebanon. 

We left Beirut at around 8 a.m. this morning. Since we were not sure what exactly we were heading into, we all packed provisions for at least a week. We brought extra fuel, cans of tuna fish, satellite communications, a generator and clothing for a week. We marked our vehicles "PRESS" and we headed out in a convoy with some other journalists.

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American frustration grows in Lebanon

The students at the American University in Beirut are all disappointed in the American Embassy here. They feel very ill-informed and say the embassy has not been in touch as much as they would have liked them to be. They are very frustrated that they have to pay for their own evacuation. They have had to find promissory notes saying that they are going to pay for the ferry to leave this country –- about $300-500. And that they will have to leave things behind and will only be allowed to take one carry-on. But mostly, they ask, why is it taking so long?

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Taking cover in Beirut

This afternoon, we were standing on a hilltop -- our perch over the last several days that overlooks Beirut and is a good vantage point to see much of the city. While we were there watching the Israeli air strikes in southern Beirut, we suddenly heard a very, very loud explosion very close to us. It was loud, so everyone got down. And then, all of a sudden, something launched from the area and it looked like a missile. We saw it leaving the ground, spinning in the air and all of us watched as this thing that looked like a missile turned and started coming straight for us. 

Journalists started scrambling off of the hill and there were a couple of people screaming. It was sparking and spinning like a weapon out of control. It was coming right for us, burning in the sky. And then luckily, it just plummeted to the ground, landed at the bottom of the hill, and no one was hurt.

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Until this week, Beirut was back

BEIRUT, Lebanon — It's hard to believe, but until this week, Beirut was back!

When many Westerners think of the Lebanese capital, they think of all the kidnappings, of a city that was basically bombed out and burned up.

But for the last several years, it has enjoyed tremendous economic prosperity. Restaurants have been restored, tourists have been coming here, prices for real estate have gone through the roof, and it’s not uncommon to see sports cars like Ferraris on the street.

A few weeks ago, I was here and working on just that story — it was even called "Beirut is back." It was supposed to be about how the economy has revived, the restaurants are full, the nightclubs are hopping, and the beaches are full of women in bikinis.

Today I'm standing here wearing a flak jacket, watching the airport burning, and there are more strikes expected.

Editor's note: Read the rest of Richard's reporter's notebook, written for MSNBC.com, here.

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Adoption obstacles

So many viewers have written wanting to open their homes and offer Iraqi children new lives. Unfortunately, Iraqi lawyers, international child care agencies, officials at the U.S. embassy in Baghdad and the U.S. State Department in Washington all tell us adoption is not possible. Here is why:

Iraqi laws/Islamic laws
Adoption is not allowed in Iraq for both religious and Islamic reasons. It is illegal for a foreigner to an adopt an Iraqi child. It is illegal for a non-Muslim to adopt a Muslim child.

Guardianship
What is allowed in Iraq is a system of guardianship, in which a family cares for an orphan without the child actually becoming a son or daughter. Currently, it is not permitted for a foreigner to become a legal guardian of an Iraqi child.

Wartime
Aid agencies, including UNICEF and the U.S. State Department, also discourage adoptions from countries in crisis because it is difficult to establish if children are in fact orphans, or have just been separated from living relatives because of the chaos of war.

What to do
Most aid groups working with children tell us the best way to help orphans in countries in crisis is to try to place them with their extended families and provide those families the financial support and training to care for the children. UNICEF has agreed to earmark all donations it receives as a result of our story for this type of program in Iraq. Click here to visit their Web site.

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