• BBC coverage
• Wikipedia: Swat Valley

Read the Transcript
This text below is a phonetic transcript of a radio story broadcast by PRI’s THE WORLD. It has been created on deadline by a contractor for PRI. The transcript is included here to facilitate internet searches for audio content. Please report any transcribing errors to theworld@pri.org. This transcript may not be in its final form, and it may be updated. Please be aware that the authoritative record of material distributed by PRI’s THE WORLD is the program audio.

MARCO WERMAN:  I’m Marco Werman, and this is The World. Pakistan matters. Much of Al Qaeda has apparently relocated there from Afghanistan, and insurgents seem to be gaining in strength in Pakistan, judging from the increasing number of attacks. Today, a suicide car bomber killed more than 40 people in Pakistan’s Swat Valley. Military officials say most of the dead were civilians. The BBC’s Aleem MaqBool is monitoring the story from the Pakistani capital, Islamabad.

ALEEM MAQBOOL:  What we’ve been told by security officials is that a car that was packed with explosives rammed into a Pakistani military convoy blew up. And this happened in a place called Al Puri, just to the eastern part of the Swat Valley.

MARCO WERMAN:  And any claim of responsibility?

ALEEM MAQBOOL:  Now as yet, but, I mean, the most likely culprit of course in the Swat Valley is the Taliban. The area was under Taliban control until a few months ago, when the Pakistani army launched a massive offensive in Swat to rest it back from Taliban control. But the army always said, it was gonna be very difficult to defend people against individuals who had no regard for their own life and were prepared to blow themselves up. Having said that, the army had been saying very recently that it was safe enough for people to return to their homes, and they encouraged everyone who had left the area, to go back there.

MARCO WERMAN:  Right. I guess, I’d like to know what this says about the state of affairs in the Swat Valley, this latest violence.

ALEEM MAQBOOL:  Well, you know, there have sporadic attacks over the last few weeks, but it’s not just Swat, this is the fourth major attack in Pakistan in the last week. A week ago there was a suicide bombing in the UN offices, here in Islamabad. Then on Friday there was a massive suicide bombing in the city of Pacharu in marketplace there where around 50 civilians were killed including school children on their way home. Then over the weekend an extraordinary attack on the very heart of the military establishment here in Pakistan, their main headquarters. Militants managed to infiltrate the compound and take 40 or so hostages. And it only ended when commandos stormed that building, but a massive embarrassment for the army to be hit in its own headquarters.

MARCO WERMAN:  So, with the government, with the Pakistani government claiming that they’ll avenge these attacks imminently, one gets the impression that they’re actually on the defensive in playing catch up. Is that the reality on the ground?

ALEEM MAQBOOL:  Well, it’s certainly seems that way, if you look at the events of the last week. The government says it does intend to go to this tribal area of South Waziristan, a place where the Taliban has its strong hold, but also where they’ve given safe haven to Al Qaeda, to attack foreign troops across the border in Afghanistan. Now, the public, they know if the army goes in there, then the reprecautions are gonna be felt in the towns and cities, that’s where the militants will strike back. So, a lot of Pakistanis are nerved by the events of the last week, and worried about the potential outfall of any strikes against the Taliban in the trouble areas.

MARCO WERMAN:  Mm, understandably so. The BBC’s Aleem MaqBool in Islamabad. Thank you very much.

ALEEM MAQBOOL:  You’re welcome.

Copyright ©2009 PRI’s THE WORLD. All rights reserved. No quotes from the materials contained herein may be used in any media without attribution to PRI’s THE WORLD. This transcript may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, without prior written permission. For further information, please email The World’s Permissions Coordinator at theworld@pri.org.

• See photos
• BBC coverage

Read the Transcript
This text below is a phonetic transcript of a radio story broadcast by PRI’s THE WORLD. It has been created on deadline by a contractor for PRI. The transcript is included here to facilitate internet searches for audio content. Please report any transcribing errors to theworld@pri.org. This transcript may not be in its final form, and it may be updated. Please be aware that the authoritative record of material distributed by PRI’s THE WORLD is the program audio.

MARCO WERMAN:  I’m Marco Werman, and this is The World, a co-production of the BBC World Service, PRI, and WGBH in Boston. Tens of thousands of German soldiers defied the Nazis during World War Two, and they were convicted of treason. This month Germany overturned their sentences. The move comes too late for most of the fighters. Almost all of them were executed, or died in concentration camps, or were killed in so-called death battalions during the war. Still, exonerating these rebellious ranks has symbolic importance for a country that’s still dealing with its Nazi past. The World’s Gerry Hadden met one of the three surviving German traitors.

GERRY HADDEN:  It was 1942 in German-occupied France. A 21-year-old German sailor named Ludwig Baumann was stationed in the port of Bordeaux. His assignment was to pace the deck scanning the sea for enemy boats. He had a lot of time to think, he says, and that’s when he began to question Hitler’s war.

LUDWIG BAUMANN:  [TRANSLATED TO ENGLISH] I was non-political at the time, but whenever I heard Hitler on the radio demanding more room for our people in the east I wondered, what about the people already living there? Are they going to be destroyed or what? Then our army began invading country after country. I saw newsreels of hundreds of soviet prisoners huddling in a field in winter. I thought, those people are surely going to freeze to death. I didn’t want to be part of this great crime. I just wanted to live.

GERRY HADDEN:  In Bordeaux Baumann and another young sailor named Kurt Oldenburg became friends with some of the French dockworkers. When the Germans told them they were thinking of deserting, the French offered to help.

LUDWIG BAUMANN:  [TRANSLATED TO ENGLISH] One night after dark we left the ship. Our French friends were waiting for us in a truck around the corner. They gave us civilian clothes and Basque hats, and drove us to the no man’s land between occupied and non-occupied France. They dropped us there and drove back to town.

GERRY HADDEN:  The plan was to slip past German patrols and reach a safe house, then continue on to Morocco and finally to the United States.

LUDWIG BAUMANN:  [TRANSLATED TO ENGLISH] But unfortunately we walked right into the arms of a German patrol. We had our side arms locked and loaded. We could have shot them right there on the spot but we couldn’t bring ourselves to do it. They took us back to base and that’s where our suffering began.

GERRY HADDEN:  Like tens of thousands of German deserters, Baumann and Oldenburg were sentenced to death by a military court. Awaiting execution, they spent the next several months in prison where they were starved and tortured.

[SOUND CLIP]

GERRY HADDEN:  Baumann is eighty-eight years old today. His wartime story does not end in prison, but the frail, white-haired man takes a break from the telling. He’s still traumatized by his

experiences, he says, as he prepares coffee for visitors at his modest home in the suburbs of Bremen.

[SOUND CLIP]

GERRY HADDEN:  He then pulls out two documents. One, his death sentence, the other his pardon. After a year on death row his sentence and Oldenburg’s were commuted. But it wasn’t clemency. The two had been assigned to one of Hitler’s death battalions. They were to be sent on suicide missions designed to hold off the Soviet army.

LUDWIG BAUMANN:  [TRANSLATED TO ENGLISH] Hitler once said, German soldiers at the front might die, but the deserters must die.

GERRY HADDEN:  The death battalions were usually wiped out in a matter of weeks. The troops were forced out into the torched fields and towns the retreating Nazi’s left behind. Baumann says they became cannon fodder.

LUDWIG BAUMANN:  [TRANSLATED TO ENGLISH] One day we were under siege in a vast wasteland of ashes in Belarus. Most of us were killed, including my good friend Kurt Oldenburg. I only escaped because I was badly wounded and sent to the hospital.

GERRY HADDEN:  Baumann took a bullet in the back defending the very army he’d tried to desert. When the war was over, he figured he’d paid for his crime on the battlefield, but that was not the case.

LUDWIG BAUMANN:  [TRANSLATED TO ENGLISH] On the contrary, we were called cowards and deserters. I myself received threatening phone calls at home, my father too. He died of a broken heart. I myself, I took to drinking.

GERRY HADDEN:  Baumann says even German civilians who’d opposed the Nazis branded him a traitor. German historian Wolfgang Eichweder says such treatment was common.

WOLFGANG EICHENWEDER:  Because in the public memory of Germany, in the fourth decades after the Second World War, we made a strong difference between the regime of Hitler and the German army. A lot have been convinced for lot of years, that the German army has acted as normal soldiers. That means more or less in an honorable sense.

GERRY HADDEN:  Ludwig Baumann’s honor seemed lost forever. In the decades after his father’s death, he was shunned by society. He didn’t get sober until he was widowed and left with six kids to raise. He joined Germany’s peace movement, and founded an association called The Victims of Nazi Justice. He fought to clear his name but encountered obstacles. For years various German governments argued that desertion was an official crime at the time and therefore the convictions must stand. The second argument, Baumann says, struck him as scandalous.

LUDWIG BAUMANN:  [TRANSLATED TO ENGLISH] It went like this: an act of treason might have endangered the lives of other German soldiers, therefore we can’t absolve you. But what I say is, if only more soldiers had committed treason so many millions of lives could have been saved, in the concentration camps and so on. You can’t place the lives of some soldiers above all those millions who died. And until Germany recognizes this, it will not have broken with its Nazi past.

GERRY HADDEN:  Germany has in fact recognized this. Last month, it finally overturned the Nazi traitors’ convictions. Today Baumann is the only ex-convict left to relish this final legal victory, two others are still alive but suffer from severe senility. Baumann says there’s been no celebration.

LUDWIG BAUMANN:  [TRANSLATED TO ENGLISH] There was no one left to witness the reversal of the sentences. All of them are dead, executed. But these were people who morally and ethically acted in an honorable fashion. Some of them hid Jews or helped prisoners. They took great risks, so they should be especially honored. For us to be the last group of victims to have our sentences reversed is an outrage.

GERRY HADDEN:  An outrage, he says, that it took more than half a century. But Baumann says this was his dream. His honor has been restored. For The World I’m Gerry Hadden, Bremen, Germany.

Copyright ©2009 PRI’s THE WORLD. All rights reserved. No quotes from the materials contained herein may be used in any media without attribution to PRI’s THE WORLD. This transcript may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, without prior written permission. For further information, please email The World’s Permissions Coordinator at theworld@pri.org.

It includes the Antarctic Peninsula, the Ross Ice Shelf and the Orville Coast. Taken together, all of this land and ice lies in the Western Hemisphere.

Scientists are heading there as part of Operation Ice Bridge to try to get a better understanding of how climate change is affecting this polar region:

“This part of Antarctica is full of volcanoes, and its covered by the ice sheet that’s most susceptible to ongoing change because the bottom of the ice sheet sits below sea level and the warm ocean waters can reach up and warm that ice.”

We’ll hear more about Operation Ice Bridge in just a minute when we come back with the answer…

And West Antarctica — the part of Antarctica that lies in the western hemisphere — is the answer to our Geo Quiz. Climate scientists will soon be flying over this area to survey rapidly changing ice conditions.

Robin Bell is a geophysicist at Lamont Doherty Earth Observatory, listen to the interview:

Download MP3

Read the Transcript
This text below is a phonetic transcript of a radio story broadcast by PRI’s THE WORLD. It has been created on deadline by a contractor for PRI. The transcript is included here to facilitate internet searches for audio content. Please report any transcribing errors to theworld@pri.org. This transcript may not be in its final form, and it may be updated. Please be aware that the authoritative record of material distributed by PRI’s THE WORLD is the program audio.

MARCO WERMAN:  I’m Marco Werman, this is The World. We’re going to hear more now about Operation Ice Bridge. It’s a NASA research project aimed at getting a better look at what’s happening on and under West Antarctica. And West Antarctica, the part of Antarctica that lies in the western hemisphere, is the answer to our Geo Quiz. Climate scientists will soon be flying over this area to survey rapidly changing ice conditions. Robin Bell is a geophysicist at Lamont Doherty Earth Observatory. So starting any day now, a NASA DC-8 aircraft will buzz over West Antarctica Robin, what are you looking for?

ROBIN BELL:  What we’re looking for is to accurately measure both the top and the bottom of the ice, all those different kinds of ice that fringe Antarctica. The parts that are floating, the parts that are still stuck to the ground.

MARCO WERMAN:  So, we’ve seen dramatic satellite images of course of West Antarctica’s ice sheets collapsing. What is this low altitude flight mission able to do that satellite remote sensing cannot do?

ROBIN BELL:  Almost everything we know about how fast the ice sheets are changing, have come from NASA satellites. We’ve seen those dramatic pictures, but we’ve also measured how the ice surface is dropping, and the ice is speeding up. And we’ve actually even weighed it from space, and it’s losing mass. So we have an idea of how fast Antarctica’s changing, but satellites can’t see through the ice, they can’t see to the bottom. And the aircraft is a unique opportunity to actually see through the ice, and understand why the ice sheets are changing.

MARCO WERMAN:  But even at a low altitude, a plane can actually look under the frozen ice shells and see what’s going on in the water?

ROBIN BELL:  Oh, we have a whole [INDISCERNIBLE] of instruments on the DC-8, that let us look through the ice. One is a radar, similar frequencies to your microwave, and it shoots energy out through the bottom of the plane, and listens to it bounce back, kind of like an echo, and allows us to measure how deep the ice is. That doesn’t work everywhere because sometimes there’s water between the ice, and for that we’ll use gravity to measure what the changing mass is.

MARCO WERMAN:  Why do that now though with the coming summer south of the equator? Doesn’t ice normally break up now anyway?

ROBIN BELL:  Well, the ice goes through an annual cycle, but it’s important that we watch it every year. So we have a sense of how things are changing. So since the satellites aren’t gonna be in place for the next five years as they have been, sending the aircraft down at the same time every year will sort of be like having the ice sheet go for its annual physical.

MARCO WERMAN:  And why just West Antarctica? Is it especially susceptible?

ROBIN BELL:  West Antarctica is most sensitive to melting for two reasons. One is, it’s low sea level, the bottom of it. So it’s sort of more susceptible to global change because the ocean water wan warm the bottom. And the other reason is that this is the part of Antarctica where the ocean currents look like they’re getting up close to the ice sheet, and therefore warming both the surface and the bottom of the ice sheet. This aircraft will fly up and down, the part of Antarctica that are changing the fastest. By better constraining what’s going on at the bottom of the ice sheet, we hope to be able to make better models, so we can predict how the ice sheet will change in the future.

MARCO WERMAN:  Robin Bell, geophysicist at Lamont Doherty Earth Observatory, thanks very much for your time.

ROBIN BELL:  Thank you very much for having me.

Copyright ©2009 PRI’s THE WORLD. All rights reserved. No quotes from the materials contained herein may be used in any media without attribution to PRI’s THE WORLD. This transcript may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, without prior written permission. For further information, please email The World’s Permissions Coordinator at theworld@pri.org.

This image released by NASA shows what a team of scientist say is evidence that extensive areas of snow melted in west Antarctica due to warming temperatures. This images was obtained by NASA's QuikScat satellite and shows extensive areas of snow melt, shown in yellow and red, in west Antarctica in January 2005. (UPI Photo/NASA/JPL)

1

Read the Transcript
This text below is a phonetic transcript of a radio story broadcast by PRI’s THE WORLD. It has been created on deadline by a contractor for PRI. The transcript is included here to facilitate internet searches for audio content. Please report any transcribing errors to theworld@pri.org. This transcript may not be in its final form, and it may be updated. Please be aware that the authoritative record of material distributed by PRI’s THE WORLD is the program audio.

MARCO WERMAN:  The latest attacks in Pakistan are raising serious concerns about the security situation there, as The World’s Matthew Bell reports.

MATTHEW BELL:  Pakistan’s Army is the most powerful institution in the country, which makes this weekend’s braising attack on army headquarters outside the capital Islamabad all the more worrisome. South Asia expert, Christine Fair of Georgetown University says, the cracks of the problem is that Pakistan’s military has only declared a partial war on terrorism. That’s to say the army has decided to fight some elements of the Pakistani Taliban.

CHRISTINE FAIR:  But it has not declared a war on terrorism against a variety of other organizations, that operate collusively with the Pakistan Taliban because those organizations are asset to the state. And I’m specifically talking about the [INDISCERNIBLE] on Taliban, and I’m specifically talking about groups that focus their efforts and energies against India.

MATTHEW BELL:  First, take the Afghan Taliban, for example. This is the group allied with Al Qaeda that the US-led invasion of Afghanistan toppled back in 2001. The Afghan Taliban leader, Mullah Omar is now thought to be in Pakistan’s Baluchistan province. The American ambassador to Pakistan recently suggested that if the Pakistani military doesn’t get rid of Mullah Omar, then the US would do so. That was seen as a threat to begin American drone attacks in Baluchistan. Pakistan’s Army chief responded by saying that would not be allowed. Christine Fair says the episode is instructive.

CHRISTINE FAIR:  The Afghan Taliban continue to enjoy sanctuary in Pakistan, period, end of story.

MATTHEW BELL:  As for the other extremist groups in Pakistan, many of them have been historically focused on India, and they’ve received support from Pakistan’s intelligence service. Fair says Pakistan’s military is still reluctant to move against them as well.

CHRISTINE FAIR: And that’s the realization that Pakistan has not yet come to. And until it does, it is gonna deal with an increasingly vicious internal security problem.

MATTHEW BELL:  Pakistan’s foreign minister paints a very different picture. Makhdoom Shah Mahmood Qureshi spoke at the Council on Foreign Relations last week, and he said Pakistan does not distinguish between good terrorists and bad ones. Qureshi said Pakistan’s military is cracking down on militant groups in the country.

MAKHDOOM SHAH MAHMOOD QUERESHI: Because we want to clear our territory of all kind of mischief. These people have caused us more harm than anybody else.

MATTHEW BELL:  A new US aid package is already having political implications. Congress just approved an additional seven and a half billion dollars in military and economic assistance for Pakistan. The money would be delivered over the next five years. but only if certain conditions are met, including a demand to crack down on terrorist groups. Some of those conditions are proving to be controversial in Pakistan however. The head of the Army has reportedly raised objections. And the political opposition is portraying the conditions as an American infringement on Pakistan’s sovereignty. The foreign minister appeared to have the diplomatic standoff in mind last week when he said the US and Pakistan should learn to trust each other more. For The World, I’m Matthew Bell.

Copyright ©2009 PRI’s THE WORLD. All rights reserved. No quotes from the materials contained herein may be used in any media without attribution to PRI’s THE WORLD. This transcript may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, without prior written permission. For further information, please email The World’s Permissions Coordinator at theworld@pri.org.

Read the Transcript
This text below is a phonetic transcript of a radio story broadcast by PRI’s THE WORLD. It has been created on deadline by a contractor for PRI. The transcript is included here to facilitate internet searches for audio content. Please report any transcribing errors to theworld@pri.org. This transcript may not be in its final form, and it may be updated. Please be aware that the authoritative record of material distributed by PRI’s THE WORLD is the program audio.

MARCO WERMAN:  Pakistan’s neighbor, Afghanistan, continues to wrestle with charges of fraud in this past summer’s presidential election. And the Afghan government is widely seen as corrupt and incompetent. All this is a blot on Western perceptions of President Hamid Karzai. The World’s Alex Gallafent tracks the decline of the Afghan leader’s image.

ALEX GALLAFENT:  Secretary of State Hilary Clinton spoke yesterday with the BBC about, among other subjects, Hamid Karzai. Her praise for the Afghan leader was cautious at best.

HILARY CLINTON:  Mr. Karzai has been very helpful on many fronts.

ALEX GALLAFENT:  That’s a different tone from the one international leaders were striking in 2002. Then, it was as if Hamid Karzai could do no wrong. Here, it seemed, was a man who could bring Afghanistan together after years of turmoil and war, and that’s why he got the job as interim leader, says Robert Finn, the US Ambassador to Afghanistan at the time.

ROBERT FINN:  He was chosen because he seemed to be the most amenable party. He had no, and he had no enemies, he had no blood on his hands. He’s very genial and likeable. And if you recall back in 2002, he was known as Mr. Afghanistan because he was able to bring all of the parties together, and assemble them in his government, and have them sit around the same table and decide some things.

ALEX GALLAFENT:  As interim leader, Hamid Karzai quickly scored a series of diplomatic coups. He visited China and Saudi Arabia. He secured four and a half billion dollars in aid at an

international donors conference in Japan. And he was hosted at the White House by President George W. Bush.

GEORGE W. BUSH:  The United States is committed to building a lasting partnership with Afghanistan. We will help the new Afghan government provide the security that is the foundation for peace.

ALEX GALLAFENT:  Karzai responded with a rousing promise to vanquish the terrorists of Al Qaeda.

HAMID KARZAI:  The joint struggle against terrorism should go to the absolute end of it. We must finish them, we must bring them out of their caves and their hideouts. And we promise we will do that.

ALEX GALLAFENT:  That kind of rhetoric earned Karzai near hero status in the west. Even fashion designer Tom Ford described him as the chicest man on the planet, elegant and proud.

LISA CURTIS:  And then of course when he was elected president in 2004, there was again this sense of hopefulness.

ALEX GALLAFENT:  Lisa Curtis is with the conservative Washington think tank, the Heritage Foundation.

LISA CURTIS:  That he was the leader of the time, to take Afghanistan out of this war driven period, of, you know, away from the Taliban. And there was certainly a lot of hope instilled in this government, but I think what’s happened over the last couple of years is that sheen has worn off.

ALEX GALLAFENT:  That’s putting it mildly. President Karzai and his supporters stand accused of massive fraud in Afghanistan’s election in August. Karzai’s critics also say he’s done little to combat corruption in the country, or the trade in narcotics. But Robert Finn, the former US ambassador, says it’s important to remember that Karzai is an Afghan leader, and he operated like one in the election.

ROBERT FINN:  What did he do, he got all the different factions as far as he could on his side, including some people that we didn’t approve of. We liked it when the government was set up in Kabul in early 2002, that all of these groups are there at the table. When, except for the Taliban in the country was there, that was good, that’s how parliamentary government begins, but it hadn’t developed the way people wanted it to.

ALEX GALLAFENT:  The problem, says Lisa Curtis of the Heritage Foundation, is that Karzai looks weaker as the Taliban look stronger.

LISA CURTIS:  If you had a secure Afghanistan, the Taliban was in retreat, he would probably not be looking so bad, but the fact that the security situation is bad, and he has done very little to try to dispel those perceptions of corruption, both of those are feeding into the widening unpopularity that he faces.

ALEX GALLAFENT:  Robert Finn says that might be true, but it’s not the whole story.

ROBERT FINN:  I think the blame should be shared. The things that are wrong in Afghanistan now were wrong back then. There weren’t enough troops, there wasn’t enough money, there wasn’t a development up in Afghan government, warlords were kept in place. All of these things were problems then, and they’re still problems. And you can’t blame them all on Hamid Karzai.

ALEX GALLAFENT:  Thing is, it is natural to identify a country with its leader, especially at a moment of crisis. Back in 2002, Hamid Karzai was so much the darling of the international community that it’s hard for people not to feel disappointed today. Again, Lisa Curtis.

LISA CURTIS:  We like to have our heroes, and we like to put all our hopes into one person, but I think, you know, we have to recognize that perhaps our hopes and aspirations for President Karzai, you know, were pretty high.

ALEX GALLAFENT:  But Curtis says the Bush Administration did not make a mistake in supporting Karzai at the outset.

LISA CURTIS:  What the mistake was, probably when things started going wrong, when there were increasing reports of corruption, when notable ministers started leaving his cabinet, like Doctor [SOUNDS LIKE] Ash Rafgani, Doctor Abdul Abdullah. I mean, these were both people who served with Karzai, when they started coming forward and saying they could no longer work within the administration how things were being done, that was when the mistake was made. I think we should have been more forceful maybe in our private discussions with him, about these problems.

ALEX GALLAFENT:  Public comments about Hamid Karzai’s government did harden by the end of the Bush administration. Here’s then-Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice encouraging the proper use of American financial aid.

CONDOLEEZZA RICE: This means successfully fighting corruption, improving accountability, and it means Afghan ownership of development. We strongly urge the Afghan government to intensify its commitment to these goals.

ALEX GALLAFENT:  For his part, Karzai defends his government’s record.

[SOUND CLIP]

ALEX GALLAFENT:  At a news conference in Kabul earlier this year, Karzai took aim at his foreign critics. He said, ”These foreigners have defamed Afghanistan so badly in terms of corruption, but it is not as serious as they say.” The Obama administration has been less enthusiastic about Hamid Karzai than the Bush Administration was. In February, President Obama said the Karzai government seems very detached from what’s going on. And just this week, Secretary of State Clinton said that if Karzai emerges from the flawed election as president, things will still have to change.

HILARY CLINTON:  We are very clear that if this election results in his being re-elected, there must be a new relationship between him and the people of Afghanistan, and between his government and governments which are supporting the efforts in Afghanistan to stabilize and secure the country.

ALEX GALLAFENT:  Efforts that, according to administration officials, are foundering. For The World, I’m Alex Gallafent.

Copyright ©2009 PRI’s THE WORLD. All rights reserved. No quotes from the materials contained herein may be used in any media without attribution to PRI’s THE WORLD. This transcript may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, without prior written permission. For further information, please email The World’s Permissions Coordinator at theworld@pri.org.

Read the Transcript
This text below is a phonetic transcript of a radio story broadcast by PRI’s THE WORLD. It has been created on deadline by a contractor for PRI. The transcript is included here to facilitate internet searches for audio content. Please report any transcribing errors to theworld@pri.org. This transcript may not be in its final form, and it may be updated. Please be aware that the authoritative record of material distributed by PRI’s THE WORLD is the program audio.

MARCO WERMAN:  I’m Marco Werman, and this is The World. The Los Angeles Dodgers have more than a passing interest in the ongoing series between the Rockies and Phillies. That’s because the Dodgers will battle the winner for the National League Championship, and the right to face the Yankees or the Angels in the World Series. One Dodger who’s going to have to be on his game in October is not a player, but an interpreter. Cyrus Farivar caught up with him outside the Dodgers clubhouse.

[SOUND CLIP]

CYRUS FARIVAR:  Kenji Nimura is now finishing his second season with the Dodgers as the team’s only interpreter. He mainly works with Hiroki Kuroda, one of the Dodgers’ key pitchers. Kuroda was injured in August and is expected to come back in time for the National League Championship Series. Or, if the Dodgers win, the World Series. Nimura is constantly at Kuroda’s side.

KENJI NIMURA: I have to be in the trainer’s room, I have to be out there on the field when he’s playing catch.  During the game I also have to be in the dug out. Once I’m here at the stadium, I’m pretty much with him the whole time.

CYRUS FARIVAR: Nimura explains that many Japanese baseball words come directly from English. For example, with names of pitches, like “slider” or “curveball”, there’s not much to translate. So what is the Japanese word for slider?

KENJI NIMURA:  Slider

CYRUS FARIVAR:  And curveball?

KENJI NIMURA:  [SOUNDS LIKE] Curvebaru. [LAUGHS]

CYRUS FARIVAR:  Is it just taking the English word and making it sound kind of Japanese?

KENJI NIMURA:  Most of it, yeah, but there’s some words that reflect the time when baseball was introduced to Japan in the late 1800’s. Japan was going through military mode, and the war against China, the war against Russia. So there’s a lot of baseball terms that kind of reflect that era in Japan. For example, double play, you could probably translate it as “double kill”, walk would be “dead ball.” Or– [LAUGHS]

CYRUS FARIVAR:  How do you say that in Japanese?

KENJI NIMURA:  [PH] Ju-sat-su.

CYRUS FARIVAR:  Nimura was born in Japan, but his father moved the family to Los Angeles when Kenji was 11 years old. At school here in LA, most of his classmates were Spanish speakers from Latin America. At first, Nimura didn’t know the difference between Spanish and English, and he became afraid of this group of kids who had a common language that he was excluded from.

KENJI NIMURA: Whenever someone’s speaking another language, you assume, as a kid that they’re speaking something bad about you. So I began to build this hate [LAUGHS] with the Latino kids and I wanted to get away from anything Spanish, anything Latino.

CYRUS FARIVAR:  When other kids called him “hermano,” Nimura didn’t realize that it meant “brother” in Spanish. He had thought they were taunting him. That changed after he took up Spanish in middle school.

KENJI NIMURA:  Surprisingly I understood a lot because I had been listening to these kids the whole time. But I began to realize how beautiful this language was.

CYRUS FARIVAR:  Nimura was so taken by Spanish that he wound up living in Spain for five years, teaching English. After returning to LA, he found himself at something of a loose end. But just before the 2008 baseball season, the Dodgers had signed Hiroki Kuroda.

KENJI NIMURA:  I needed a change in my life, and my friend told me that this new pitcher’s coming, so why don’t you send in your resume and your letter. And it’s what I did and I got a call back from them a week later.

CYRUS FARIVAR:  Now, Nimura interprets for Kuroda and also helps the Dodgers’ Spanish-speaking players. When he’s not interpreting, Nimura finds himself helping many of the Latin American players navigating American bureaucracy and culture. He’s taken many of them to the DMV to get their driver’s license, or to Western Union to wire money home. And because he himself is an immigrant, he knows what it’s like. He says it’s good to be bilingual. It’s even better to be bicultural.

KENJI NIMURA: That’s more important than speaking the language, because that’s something that you could only gain by living somewhere else. I mean, you can learn a language from textbooks, but being bicultural, you cannot do that unless you’ve lived elsewhere.

CYRUS FARIVAR: Nimura says that the next language he wants to learn is Arabic. That’s not terribly useful in the majors just yet. But Nimura has always been attracted to languages and cultures very foreign from his own. For The World, I’m Cyrus Farivar, Los Angeles.

Copyright ©2009 PRI’s THE WORLD. All rights reserved. No quotes from the materials contained herein may be used in any media without attribution to PRI’s THE WORLD. This transcript may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, without prior written permission. For further information, please email The World’s Permissions Coordinator at theworld@pri.org.

Read the Transcript
This text below is a phonetic transcript of a radio story broadcast by PRI’s THE WORLD. It has been created on deadline by a contractor for PRI. The transcript is included here to facilitate internet searches for audio content. Please report any transcribing errors to theworld@pri.org. This transcript may not be in its final form, and it may be updated. Please be aware that the authoritative record of material distributed by PRI’s THE WORLD is the program audio.

MARCO WERMAN:  Well, here’s a sport that could use a translator, someone to translate what the heck’s going on. It looks as if the competitors are playing a bit of chess, and then going into the boxing ring and blasting away at each other. Iepe Rubingh is a Dutch performance artist, and the creator of chess boxing. He’s in Berlin. And Iepe, the chess boxing championships were held in London this past week. And so I guess we could say, it’s kind of an established sport. But, what is it? Is it art or is it sport?

IEPE RUBINGH:  No, it’s definitely a sport. I mean, the idea was conceived as an art from, but even the first five, which I did myself, was already a sport then. And people were, as soon as you see the sport, you start taking it seriously because people fight for real, they play a real game of chess, and they’ve been training for a couple of months.

MARCO WERMAN:  [LAUGHS] I’m sorry I have to laugh, it’s just, it just seems, it just tickles me. The match–

IEPE RUBINGH:  [OVERLAPPING] There’s a lot of people that they start laughing actually. But if you see for, if you see the fight, and you see it’s for real.

MARCO WERMAN:  Okay, well lay it out for us. How does it start? Does it start with a round of chess, or a round of boxing?

IEPE RUBINGH:  It starts with a round of chess. It’s six rounds of chess, and five rounds of boxing. It’s [INDISCERNIBLE] of chess and boxing. So it starts with four minutes of chess, the referee will stop the chess clock, and the sport goes out of the ring. You put on your boxing

gloves and you box for three minutes. So if you survive the chess board [INDISCERNIBLE], than you continue the same game. You win by either checkmate or knockout, or exceeding the chess timer, whatever comes first.

MARCO WERMAN:  Right. So it sounds like it’s possible then to escape a checkmate in the chess match if you’re able to pummel your way opponent.

IEPE RUBINGH:  This is what happens basically, if you’re doing bad on the chessboard, you try to go after the knockout in the boxing [INDISCERNIBLE]. If you’re not doing so well on the, in the boxing, you have to make sure you win the chess round.

MARCO WERMAN:  So, allow me to launch into some potentially inaccurate stereotypes here. Chess players are nerds and get sand kicked in their faces at the beach, and boxers are all brawn and not known really for their terribly high IQ’s. Is the goal here to create a kind of–

IEPE RUBINGH:  [OVERLAPPING] Most of them are.

MARCO WERMAN:  They are know for their high IQ’s?

IEPE RUBINGH:  Well no, no, no, but we’re looking for the exceptions. The amazing people, if you look at the biography of world champions, like we have now in Siberia, big [INDISCERNIBLE], and he’s 20 years old, he’s studying [INDISCERNIBLE] at the high school of space science in [INDISCERNIBLE]. The guy’s amazing.

MARCO WERMAN:  That’s a Siberian gentleman?

IEPE RUBINGH:  Yeah. Amazing I quality.

MARCO WERMAN:  Are you trying to create a kind of a master race of people who have brains and brawn here?

IEPE RUBINGH:  I’m living in Germany by the way.

MARCO WERMAN:  [LAUGHS]

IEPE RUBINGH:  This is the kind of a sensitive question. No. Basically chess boxing is a lot about control of aggression. We teach people like how to cope within a difficult situation, and still be able to think. You know, it’s a lot about aggression management. So, this is, this is the main thing in chess boxing, that’s why we say, fighting is done is done in the ring at war, so what you doing in the bar? So you don’t fight on the street, or in the bars, [INDISCERNIBLE].

MARCO WERMAN:  A new wrinkle in anger management. Performance artist and creator of chess boxing, Iepe Rubingh, thank you so much.

IEPE RUBINGH:  Thank you too.

Copyright ©2009 PRI’s THE WORLD. All rights reserved. No quotes from the materials contained herein may be used in any media without attribution to PRI’s THE WORLD. This transcript may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, without prior written permission. For further information, please email The World’s Permissions Coordinator at theworld@pri.org.

Read the Transcript
This text below is a phonetic transcript of a radio story broadcast by PRI’s THE WORLD. It has been created on deadline by a contractor for PRI. The transcript is included here to facilitate internet searches for audio content. Please report any transcribing errors to theworld@pri.org. This transcript may not be in its final form, and it may be updated. Please be aware that the authoritative record of material distributed by PRI’s THE WORLD is the program audio.

MARCO WERMAN:  Some of you seemed pretty angry after you heard our story Friday about President Obama’s winning the Nobel Peace Prize. Messages on our website and Facebook include: “I’m Flabbergasted”, “it boggles my mind”, and “ridiculous.” But listener Danny McGonigel wonders why it’s so hard for people in this country to be proud that Mr. Obama received the honor. He asks, “Are we so used to being criticized that we no longer are capable of being proud of ourselves?” We also heard from you about our story on a Swedish couple who named their son, Q, just the letter Q. A few of you said the baby’s name reminded you of the mischievous character, Q on Star Trek, The Next Generation. Others said the name reminded them of Q from James Bond. Civilia Morgan wondered about, “the silly parents out there who make life crazy for their kids by giving them names that are just fodder for the playground.” And, in fact, that was a bit of a problem for one of our listeners. She just so happens to be named Que. That’s spelled Q-U-E. Que writes, “My birth certificate was issued seven days late because they couldn’t get my name right, Sue, Lou, anything but Q. Given what some celebrities name their children today, Q is not bad. 49-years ago, though, it was a little rough, and I did get picked on at school. But I highly doubt that would happen now.” Whatever your name is, we want to hear from you. Go to the-world-dot-org, and post your comments. That website again, theworld-dot-o-r-g.

Copyright ©2009 PRI’s THE WORLD. All rights reserved. No quotes from the materials contained herein may be used in any media without attribution to PRI’s THE WORLD. This transcript may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, without prior written permission. For further information, please email The World’s Permissions Coordinator at theworld@pri.org.

Read the Transcript
This text below is a phonetic transcript of a radio story broadcast by PRI’s THE WORLD. It has been created on deadline by a contractor for PRI. The transcript is included here to facilitate internet searches for audio content. Please report any transcribing errors to theworld@pri.org. This transcript may not be in its final form, and it may be updated. Please be aware that the authoritative record of material distributed by PRI’s THE WORLD is the program audio.

MARCO WERMAN:  Lebanese have been riveted for the past few weeks by the arrest of a man people are calling the Middle East Bernie Madoff. The man’s name is Salah Ezzedine. He’s a religious Shiite said to have close ties to the militant Islamic group Hezbollah. Authorities say Ezzedine ran a pyramid scheme that bilked investors out of a billion dollars. The World’s Aaron Schachter has the story.

[SOUND CLIP]

AARON SCHACHTER:  Yarun is an idyllic spot in the hills of south Lebanon. It’s a village of large old homes and even larger new ones. That’s because almost all the families here have relatives earning money overseas that they send home. Many here had hoped to grow their money with Lebanese financier Salah Ezzedine. This investor, who owns a taxi company in Australia, didn’t want to give his name. He invested 50 thousand dollars with Ezzedine just three months ago. He admits it did seem too good to be true, but–

TAXI COMPANY OWNER:  Well, everybody look for the interest, mate, because he give the interest very high. That’s the problem. Everybody he’s stupid.

AARON SCHACHTER:  Well why did you give him money? Why did you give him money?

TAXI COMPANY OWNER:  Well I asked my friend, he said he gave him interest, that’s the problem. You know, I said maybe he’s alright, you know, I trust him. But this man maybe about eight years, I think, he [INDISCERNIBLE] business. But you can’t trust anyone.

AARON SCHACHTER:  Ezzedine was promising returns of no less than 40 percent, and as in any good pyramid scheme, a lot of people did get returns on their investments, for a while. Many investors, the vast majority fellow Shiites, gave their money to Ezzedine because of his reputation as pious and charitable, and because of his connection to Hezbollah, known among Shiites here as an incorruptible institution. But these men, whose families collectively lost more than a million dollars, say Hezbollah has nothing to do with the scandal.

THREE MEN: Nothing, no, no, no, Hezbollah no. People are stupid. People are stupid. Nobody tell you or push you to put the money from Hezbollah. No, no, no. No, no, no. No, no, no. I see a friend, he put the money, he get the money interest good, I said alright, I put a little bit more. Everybody like, you know, he’s a friend, tried to put more. That’s all.

AARON SCHACHTER:  But now Ezzedine is bust, and these men tell me more than half the village of six thousand is out money. They say losses here total a staggering 162 million, 504 thousand dollars, give or take. Despite these men’s protestations, some are now calling on Hezbollah to repay the money that Ezzedine is said to have lost, perhaps as much as a billion dollars. That’s a large chunk of change, even for an organization supported by oil-rich Iran.

[SOUND CLIP]

AARON SCHACHTER:  Hezbollah is still paying a hefty sum toward the reconstruction of homes, like these in the town of Bint Jbeil, after its devastating month-long war with Israel three years ago.

[SOUND CLIP]

AARON SCHACHTER:  Hezbollah’s leader has denied any connection to Ezzedine, but he’s assured investors he would look into the matter. Bernie Madoff’s investors have called him scum and much worse. Yet many people here who lost their savings don’t seem that upset with Ezzedine. One man in Yarun asked “Do you want me to go around crying all the time?” In Maaroub, where Ezzedine is from, people still regard him as a rags-to-riches hero. Hussein Ezzedine is a distant relative.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE:  [TRANSLATED TO ENGLISH] If you ask anyone here in the village they’ll say he was good. He helped everyone, the poor, people with diseases, and people with kids wanting to put them in school and couldn’t afford it. He built a soccer field here. He bought other things for the village, bought people tractors, and without ever asking anything in return.

AARON SCHACHTER:  No one seems to know exactly what Ezzedine did with the money he took, and most of his investors seem to feel that Ezzedine was a victim too. If the global economy hadn’t soured, he could’ve gone on indefinitely, and they could have kept making money. Ezzedine and a partner are now in prison, they’ve been charged with fraudulent investment, a crime punishable by 15 years in prison. For The World, I’m Aaron Schachter, Yarun village, southern Lebanon.

Copyright ©2009 PRI’s THE WORLD. All rights reserved. No quotes from the materials contained herein may be used in any media without attribution to PRI’s THE WORLD. This transcript may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, without prior written permission. For further information, please email The World’s Permissions Coordinator at theworld@pri.org.

Read the Transcript
This text below is a phonetic transcript of a radio story broadcast by PRI’s THE WORLD. It has been created on deadline by a contractor for PRI. The transcript is included here to facilitate internet searches for audio content. Please report any transcribing errors to theworld@pri.org. This transcript may not be in its final form, and it may be updated. Please be aware that the authoritative record of material distributed by PRI’s THE WORLD is the program audio.

MARCO WERMAN:  The Evening Standard has been sold on the streets of London for more than 180 years. On a typical day, you’d hear this at London underground stations.

[SOUND CLIP]

MARCO WERMAN:  But this is what London commuters heard today.

[SOUND CLIP]

MARCO WERMAN:  That’s right, the Evening Standard is now being handed out for free. The paper’s new owner says he hopes to improve circulation. The World’s Alex Collins went down to Temple underground station in central London during the evening commute. And he spoke with a newspaper vendor named Christine. She says people were grabbing free copies of the Standard and she didn’t have many left.

CHRISTINE:  This is all I’ve got left, I’ve got 29 bundles, and I’ve been at it trying to get rid of them. Free Standard. Free Standard darling? Free Standard?

ALEX COLLINS:  I assume it’s that thing because it’s free, people wanna–

CHRISTINE:  Oh I’ll tell you what, I’ve never seen such greedy people in my life. Free Standard. Thank you. Never, never.

ALEX COLLINS:  What do you mean greedy?

CHRISTINE:  Well, you know, like well I want something for nothing. [LAUGHS] You know, like these people down here were loaded, and I mean, here you go. Yeah, I know it’s the same, but take, yeah, you have one.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE:  No, I’m alright.

CHRISTINE:  Take one.

ALEX COLLINS:  And you never had to say did you? Free Standard.

CHRISTINE:  [OVERLAPPING] No, I’ve never, I’ve never had to say this before.

ALEX COLLINS:  Then you also then have to deal with the change, do you?

CHRISTINE:  No.

ALEX COLLINS:  The no money thing.

CHRISTINE:  Yeah. But they walk by like this. I’m supposed to be selling these.

ALEX COLLINS:  Selling what? Like the Guardian?

CHRISTINE:  Only the books and that. Everyone’s gone mad because they’re getting this. Free Standard. Thank you. Wait, you singe sot. He never buy a paper in his life.

UNIDENIFIED MALE:  I buy one always, you know?

CHRISTINE:  You bloody liar. Never bought a paper in his life. Free Evening Standard. Free Evening Standard. Here you go. No, it’s free, it’s free. Free. Free. Free.

MARCO WERMAN:  Once again proving that there’s really no such things as free. That’s Christine, a newspaper vendor, handing out free copies of the Easy Evening Standard tonight at Temple Tube Station in London.

Copyright ©2009 PRI’s THE WORLD. All rights reserved. No quotes from the materials contained herein may be used in any media without attribution to PRI’s THE WORLD. This transcript may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, without prior written permission. For further information, please email The World’s Permissions Coordinator at theworld@pri.org.