Alessandro Bianchi / Reuters

Amanda Knox, the U.S. student convicted of murdering her British roommate Meredith Kercher in Italy in November 2007, leaves the court during her appeal trial session in Perugia on Monday.

By Claudio Lavanga, NBC News Producer
 
PERUGIA, Italy – To journalists, a seat in Perugia’s appeals court for Thursday’s pleading by Knox’s defense team, and especially for this weekend’s verdict, is the hottest ticket in town.

At least 370 journalists from all over the world asked for accreditation. About a third of them have already crammed the small room in the basement of the local court in the heart of the city center for the past week. How the others will make their way in, it’s anyone’s guess.
 
Of course, there’s always the press room upstairs. But it’s so small it could soon be deemed a health and safety hazard. With so many people heading this way, a stampede is a likely scenario. Even for journalists, who are used to walking over each other’s bodies to get the perfect shot, it could prove to be dangerous.
 
The last act of the trial, which should decide whether American student Amanda Knox and her Italian boyfriend Raffaele Sollecito walk free or spend their lives in prison for the murder of Meredith Kercher, is proving a suited finale for a drama that has gripped journalists, locals  and the worldwide audience alike.

The setting couldn’t be any more appropriate for the dramatic trial to unfold: Perugia is a medieval jewel perched on top of a hill with breathtaking vistas over the rolling countryside of Umbria, a region in central Italy famous for its wine, truffles and for the past four year, a trial that has divided the nation and the world.

Is Amanda Knox really a “she-devil,” as she was recently called by prosecutors who say she killed her former housemate Meredith Kercher, a “Venus in Furs” who enslaved her young Italian lover into participating in the crime? Or just a “Jessica Rabbit,” as a defense lawyer called her, who “is not bad, but was just drawn that way”?

The question has been on every journalist’s mouth. Along with the taste of cappuccinos and truffles, that is.
 
Cramming the outdoor tables of cafes and restaurants, journalists have turned the center of Perugia into an open-air court. They animatedly debate court proceedings, DNA findings and the reliability of the body of evidence in such detail that by now many of them they might have enough legal expertise to apply for a job as a forensic scientist or a defense lawyer.
 
It’s difficult to blame them for their obsession, because wherever you are in Perugia, you don’t seem to be more than a few meters away from the murder case.

For instance, while eating a recent meal on a restaurant terrace overlooking Perugia’s rolling hills, word came out that one of the cooks was a Bangladeshi immigrant renting the room in Via della Pergola where Kercher was killed. On a separate night, while sitting at a bar sipping grappa, a street seller offering roses turned out to be another housemate in the “house of horrors.” 

So much for the house owner’s recent claim that she is suing for 100,000 euro in damages for the loss in value of Knox and Kercher’s former apartment and the difficulties in renting it out. Even if it’s unclear who exactly she would sue, it seems, instead, that every other person in Perugia lives in Via della Pergola number 7.  

The journalist’s camp is divided: on one side, most foreign journalists believe Knox is a victim of a flawed Italian justice system that turned the murder trial into a witch hunt. On the opposite side, mainly Italian journalists don’t believe in Knox’s innocence.

This is Italy, after all, and “drug-fueled sex orgies gone wrong,” as a local journalist pointed out, have been part of everyday life since the days of the Roman Empire.
 
But don’t blame the journalists for the sensationalism surrounding this trial.
 
The prosecutors and defense lawyers alike took turns in providing comical moments that turned the trial into a show worth paying for.

In one of her best performances so far, Manuela Comodi, one of the prosecutors, pulled out a new bra in front of the judges and jury to show them how Kercher’s bra was ripped by her assailant. The price tag from Intimissimi, a nearby lingerie shop, was still hanging off it, and one of the shop’s bags was on the prosecution’s desk.

One has to wonder is Intimissimi will follow Abercrombie & Fitch’s and Lacoste’s examples. The first offered to pay Mike “The Situation” Sorrentino not to wear their brand for fear of damaging its image. And Lacoste recently pleaded with Norway’s police to stop mass murderer Anders Behring Brievik from wearing their clothes.

Given the increasing fictionalization of characters involved in this trial and the dramatic plot getting richer by the day, this trial might soon be in need of a sponsor.

NBC News’ Amna Nawaz toured Pakistan’s flooded southern province of Sindh in a helicopter.  The area is still reeling from last year’s epic floods, and has been swamped by monsoon rains.  Click above to see her report from Pakistan.

KABUL— As with many episodes of violence, the news spread quickly.

Ahmad Muslim was driving home Sunday evening when he received a call from the office that something had happened at the U.S. embassy in the Afghan capital. 

“We heard different things about it,” said the 25-year-old, who works as a communications officer for the Aga Khan Foundation, a development organization.  “Some of the media was talking about whether it was local staff who had started shooting [at] Americans.  But some of them were also saying it was a Taliban rocket attack.”

A U.S. Embassy spokesman confirmed on Monday that a “shooting incident” took place at the embassy’s “annex” inside the grounds.  An Afghan employed by the U.S. government was identified as the attacker — apparently the lone one — who killed one American and wounded another.  The gunman himself was also killed.

But in a way, such details don’t matter to the Afghans living in Kabul.

“Every week there is something happening,” said Muslim, whose family comes from Wardak and who moved to the capital in 2003.  “It’s mentally disturbing.”

The shooting was the third high-profile assault in as many weeks to rock the city. 

On Sept. 13, insurgents sustained a day-long assault on another part of the American embassy and NATO headquarters, killing nine people. 

Last week, Burhanuddin Rabbani, former Afghan president and the chief broker of Afghanistan’s peace talks, was assassinated in his own home in Kabul by a suicide bomber who hid the device in his turban.

“No one is feeling secure in Afghanistan, especially the capital now,” said Zohra Kohistani, a young woman who was born in Kabul. She said the situation had deteriorated markedly in the past year.  Her workplace, the Central Bank of Afghanistan, was the target of an attack in June of last year when 15 people were killed by heavily armed gunmen.

A proxy war?
As one journalist covering Afghanistan put it, “The ease with which suicide bombers can infiltrate the Kabul police’s so-called ring of steel to attack hotels, lob rocket-propelled grenades at the U.S. embassy or kill prominent Afghans intensifies the increasing impression that this is a city up for grabs.”

“I think every generation like me, they all think about leaving Afghanistan, because…everything is different,” said Kohistani. 

No matter what precautions one takes, she said, “The problem is that you cannot know when it happens and how to stay safe here. Because you’re just in your car and traveling to your work and suddenly a man in a motorbike or another car comes and you see an explosion.”

Educated, middle-class Afghans like Muslim have tried to rationalize the violence. 

“Some of the people here are saying [it’s because] the Americans are putting pressure on the Pakistanis, and Pakistan is taking revenge on the Americans here in Afghanistan,” he surmised. 

And Muslim, who maintains that he is optimistic about his troubled country’s future, proffered a stark solution. It was time to stop allowing other nations to use his country in a proxy war between the U.S. and Pakistan, he said. 

“If we don’t say anything and wait for one side or the other to help us, we are wasting our time,” Muslim said. ”We have already lost thousands of people in so many years of war.  The Afghans need to stand up and do something. If the Pakistanis want war, then the Afghans should give them war.”

Related links: Taliban flex muscles with Afghan assassination