HONG KONG –If you aren’t a fan of rugby yet, International Olympic Committee President Jacques Rogge has a message for you: It’s coming, and in a format which might finally engage an elusive American audience.

Bobby Yip / Reuters

New Zealand’s Tim Mikkelson falls to the ground after failing to tackle Samoa’s Mikaele Pesamino on his way to score during the final of the Hong Kong Sevens rugby tournament on Sunday. Samoa beat New Zealand to win the championship.

In the six months since rugby “sevens” – a variation of rugby where the standard 15 players on a team is slashed down to 7 – was voted into the 2016 Summer Olympics, Rogge has been making the rounds selling the merits of the game to audiences all over the world.

It should come as no surprise then that Rogge was in Hong Kong last weekend to attend the Hong Kong Rugby Sevens, Asia’s oldest sevens tournament and what many rugby players have long considered the unofficial Olympic games for rugby sevens.

Though the decision to include rugby in the Summer Games has been cheered by fans and players alike in Hong Kong, many have been quick to condemn the IOC’s vision of an Olympic Sevens tournament that would be less inclusive than the extremely popular Hong Kong template. 

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TEL AVIV — Ahmed Khatib was shot dead by Israeli soldiers in the West Bank town of Jenin in 2005, when they mistook his toy gun for a real weapon. Practically the whole town of Jenin attended Ahmed’s funeral and the incident was major news in Israel.
But his father was determined to make sure something positive came out of the tragic loss of his son’s life, so he donated Ahmed’s organs to dying Israeli children. A Druze girl in Northern Israel received his heart, a Bedouin…(read more)

KABUL — President Obama came to Kabul to deliver a stern message to Afghanistan’s President Hamid Karzai, and, according to one close Karzai observer, it landed.

Haroun Mir, head of the Center for Research Policy Studies in Kabul, told NBC News that when Obama and Karzai spoke to reporters at the Presidential Palace Sunday night it appeared “from the tone of [Karzai's] voice, one could understand that he certainly received a very tough message. And he was not very comfortable.”

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 KABUL – President Obama’s unannounced visit to Afghanistan was the third secret presidential stop in a war zone that I’ve covered. Once before I was on the receiving end–in Baghdad when President George W. Bush had Thanksgiving dinner with troops in 2003 — and I was the television representative with Bush when he visited a U.S. air base in al Anbar province on Labor Day 2008.

These “secret squirrel” trips, as I call them, are carried out with strict operational security, which is sometimes hard to accomplish given the fishbowl a president operates in. Mr. Obama slipped away from Camp David in Maryland’s Catoctin Mountains, a relatively easy maneuver since it’s out of the public eye.

For his 2008 trip, Bush was driven from the White House to Andrews Air Force Base through holiday weekend traffic in broad daylight. The man who engineered that, then-White House Deputy Chief of Staff Joe Hagin, has promised to tell me how that was pulled off — someday.
The small group of reporters accompanying the president — the “pool” representing their colleagues who travel in a pre-determined rotation — are given a few days’ advance notice. When I went, we were summoned one-by-one to be told what was up. We could tell only our bosses and — if absolutely necessary — one family member. And those conversations had to be in person and alone, never by telephone.

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 KABUL – I’ve traveled around the world to some unusual destinations for work, but my first trip to Afghanistan was unlike any other I’ve taken.

It began as I walked out of the gleaming, modern Dubai International Airport into the aging Boeing 737 of Safi Airways.

First of all, there was the time change. I always set my watch to the time of my destination. That meant moving it 30 minutes ahead. Not an hour. Not two hours. But half-an-hour. As one who is ever-mindful of the time at “NBC News World Headquarters in New York” (as Michael Douglas intones at the beginning of “NBC Nightly News with Brian Williams”), I’m in for a lot of strenuous mental mathematics over the next four weeks.

Majid Saeedi / Getty Images

Afghan spectators watch as two fighting dogs attack each other during a weekly dog fight in Kabul on Dec. 11, 2009. Dogfighting is having a resurgence after it was banned under the Taliban for being un-Islamic. Click here for a slideshow of civilian life in Afghanistan

And there’s the English-language in-flight magazine. These publications are usually bright and cheery, touting the beauty and charms of the airline’s destination cities. The lead feature of the April/May edition, under the heading “Live Entertainment in Kabul,” is about what appears to be a major spectator sport in the capital city: dog fighting.

“Growling, snapping, leaping and grabbing, the dogs attack each other in swirling clouds of ochre-colored dust,” the article chirps. “Dogs may be a costly investment for the average Afghan, but they can also make their owners money.”

Then take the magazine’s city guide for Kabul, headlined “Full of Life,” which includes these helpful tips:

– At the airport “Taxis are available to the city center, but it is safer to be picked up.”

– “Westerners are occasionally targeted by criminals or Taliban sympathizers, and kidnapping can be a threat.”

– “Riots happen occasionally and are often accompanied by looting – stay well away from them as authorities will respond with lethal force.”

– “Kabul is generally considered one of the safer parts of the country, but bombings have increased somewhat.”

At least no one can accuse them of sugar-coating.

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