By F. Brinley Bruton, msnbc.com staff

LONDON – As BP CEO Tony Hayward resigned under a cloud Tuesday, thousands of British motorists got an unexpected reminder of the oil spill that’s wreaked havoc in the Gulf of Mexico.

Protesters with the environmental group Greenpeace said they shut off fuel supplies at 46 BP gas stations across London just in time for the morning rush-hour. Small teams of activists used a standard shut-off switch to stop the flow of fuel oil at the targeted stations. The switches were then removed to prevent most BP outlets in the capital from opening.

Leon Neal/AFP/Getty Images

Demonstrators stand outside a BP petrol station, which they have barricaded with fences, in London on Tuesday.

And to ensure there was no chance of drivers buying gas, demonstrators in fluorescent vests and helmets locked green metal fences around some sites.

“What BP needs to do is not just change CEOs it needs to actually come up with a new strategy,” Greenpeace U.K.’s chief executive John Sauven said at one of the shuttered stations in Camden, north London.

Sauven said BP must live up to its pledge to move “beyond petroleum” and stop focusing on squeezing oil from places like the Gulf of Mexico, Canada’s tar sands and the fragile Arctic wilderness.

‘Holding us to ransom’
Anna Jones, who was one of the handful up at dawn to ensure gas stations were shuttered, took a harder line.

“Big companies like BP are holding us to ransom, chasing profits at the expense of us,” the 29-year-old part-time dance teacher said. “The generation before us is largely responsible and the next generation coming up will have to deal with the consequences.”

A BP spokesman described the group’s protest as “an irresponsible and childish act which is interfering with safety systems.” The firm claimed that only a handful of stations had been prevented from opening.

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Londoners had mixed views on Greenpeace’s actions.

Daniel Watson, a 41-year-old teacher and tuba player, said BP should recognize the problems of global warming and dependence on petroleum products.

“We are still living in the illusion that we can live on fossil fuels indefinitely,” he added. “There is this kind of approach that it is somebody else’s problem.”

Golden handshake
Big firms also need to stop handing out big packages to disgraced executives, he said. Hayward’s golden handshake included a .6 million payoff and pension pot valued at about million.

“We need controls so that doing a bad job doesn’t get rewarded,” Watson said.

Steve, who has driven a London cab for 37 years and only gave his first name, said he wanted to do something to “save the whales” but branded the protests targeting gas station as “stunts.”

However, Hayward’s payout and the behavior of many other executives left the cabbie annoyed.

“Some of cleverest guys can be the stupidest when it comes to the real world – I see that in my job all the time.”

But not everyone thought Greenpeace was on the right track.

“Is everybody going to skip driving cars, heating our houses, flying? Get a grip,” said Kathy Wallace, a Canadian who was on her way home to Scotland. “The environment is going to hell anyway, we’ve already ruined it. All we can do is control the situation.”

By Bo Gu, NBC News

BEIJING –”Say no to Mandarin!” thousands chanted in Cantonese in a busy district of Guangzhou, capital of China’s southern Guangdong province, Sunday afternoon.?

Residents of southern China have long been known for being vocal about their opinions – from mass protests against a local chemical plant in Fujian province three years ago to a series of strikes by migrant workers calling for higher wages in Guangdong earlier this year.

But Sunday’s protest was unique – Guangzhou citizens were walking in the street to protect their native language:Cantonese.

It was sparked by an announcement earlier this month by the local China People’s Political Consultative Conference (CPPCC), a political advisory body, encouraging the local government to promote Mandarin language content on Guangzhou’s prime time TV news programs.

With Cantonese serving as the primary language in Guangdong province, as well as Hong Kong and Macao, it’s spoken not just by millions locally, but also by millions of Chinese emigrants around the globe.

Dialect equals identity
Mandarin, China’s official language, is based mainly on northern dialects, primarily, the Beijing dialect. It was not adopted as the country’s national language until the1950s, when the fledgling Communist government took power and began to enforce it as the standard language to be used in education, media and by the government.?

But in a country as large and geographically diverse as China, promoting one standard dialect has been no easy task. It’s not uncommon for villagers living just 30 miles away from each other to speak different dialects – particularly in the south where the mountainous terrain helped lead to linguistic differences.?

Many people living in southern China have been speaking local dialects for centuries – the only time they even hear Mandarin is when they watch TV or listen to radio (assuming they watch or listen to either). As a result, the central government has gone to great lengths to try to unify what people speak.

“When I was in elementary school 11 years ago, we were not allowed to speak any Cantonese,” said a native Guangzhou girl who spoke to NBC News by phone and asked to be identified by her Internet chat room alias, Yinghuochong.?

“We were only allowed to speak Mandarin in the school, otherwise your daily achievement score would be deducted by teachers. They say it’s not civilized to speak Cantonese. I don’t understand. Why is it so civilized to speak Mandarin? What about English? Is it more civilized to speak English then?” said Yinghuochong.

Yinghuochong was not the only one angry about the CPPCC’s proposal. She joined thousands of other young people, mostly in their 20s, wearing white tee-shirts that said “I love Guangzhou” as they walked through the city’s streets to show their support for their dialect.

“Support Cantonese!” “Let’s speak Cantonese!” “Say no to Mandarin!” were a few of the slogans shouted out by the crowds.

The march reached a climax when a chorus of protesters sang “Glorious Time,” a hit song by the former Hong Kong band Beyond, in Cantonese.? ?

“Among dozens of the TV channels we can receive, only five or six are Cantonese channels. They are for people like my mom, who doesn’t speak Mandarin at all. She doesn’t have many options when she watches TV,” said Yinghuochong. “This is just not necessary at all.”

Su Zhijia, the deputy mayor of Guangzhou, denied that Guangzhou TV was planning to switch from broadcasting in Cantonese to Mandarin. In an interview with a local media he stressed that “the government has never thought about doing anything to weaken Cantonese.”

Su also argued that promoting Mandarin doesn’t necessarily mean Cantonese has to be eliminated. But his promises didn’t seem to calm the doubts and complaints from many Guangzhou citizens.

A form of ‘cultural deprivation’
Michael Anti, an active blogger and analyst, explained why he believes Cantonese is so symbolic in this region, which is one of just two places in China that is still permitted to broadcast television in its own dialect; the other is Shanghai.

“The official promotion of Mandarin is a sort of cultural deprivation,” Anti said. “The majority of the protesters are young people, who cannot afford to buy any property in this weak economic environment. They already feel economically disadvantaged and now they are more afraid of losing what they are proud of.”

And the outrage over the Mandarin proposal is not limited to the activists marching last weekend. The CPPCC’s web site sponsored an online survey asking respondents if they should add more Mandarin TV programs. The survey received a resounding “No” from 80 percent of respondents. The overwhelmingly negative results quickly became a major point of discussion in the blogosphere and on Internet chat rooms. ?

“Shame on a city without dialect,” said Feng Xincheng, an editor of a magazine based in Guangzhou. “Save Cantonese!” soon turned into the most used slogans on many microblogs.

Despite the outpouring, Yinghuochong is still worried. “The last time when 80 percent of people surveyed voted ‘No’ the CPPCC still said people needed to be guided. We only have one purpose: We don’t want them to crack down on Cantonese.”

ISLAMABAD – “I just heard it over the news and had to do something. I just wanted to help.” That was the resounding refrain heard in the densely forested hills surrounding Islamabad where a plane crashed, killing all 152 passengers Wednesday.

Without thinking, people just went to the crash scene. Ordinary people, dressed in local garb, not rescue gear, rushed to the crash to see what they could do to help.??

Photo by EPA/STRINGER

Pakistani Army soldiers and rescue workers begin their climb of the Margalla Hills near Islamabad on Wednesday following the plane crash that killed all 152 passengers aboard the flight from Karachi.

As our NBC News team reached the area, we saw these three doctors – two women and a man – coming down looking really muddy and very scruffy. I asked them if they were part of the rescue team.

“No, we’re not. We just came of our own accord. We heard there was a plane crash and wanted to try to get there to do what we can,” one of them said.

But because the terrain was so rough, they could only reach a certain point. There were no trails to the crash site. The area is very dense forest and due to the rain, it was extremely muddy and slippery. They said they tripped and fell quite a bit, so they finally had to abandon their mission, turn around and come back.?

Their intentions were good, but they regretted that they weren’t dressed properly and that the weather wasn’t better. The terrain is so bad that it required real trekking gear and hiking boots, which no one seemed to be wearing.

Despite the difficult conditions, there was a real sense of spirit and camaraderie among ordinary people trying to help.

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

I saw another man dressed in local dress that was completely muddied and wet. I asked him what the red on his clothes was from and he said that it was the blood from all the passengers he had carried.?

He wasn’t part of the official rescue effort, either. He said he was just a student who works in a shop in Islamabad. He said that when he heard the news, he ran out and trekked two and a half hours to see what he could do to help the emergency services. “I just had to do something. I just wanted to help,” he said.?

We even saw one man who works in the same office building as us and is a media executive. He just went straight to the scene in his fancy office clothes, which were completely covered in mud by the time I saw him. He also said he felt compelled to go to the crash scene to do what he could.

Slideshow: Deadly plane crash in Pakistan

By Yonatan Pomrenze, NBC News Producer

MOSCOW – If you want an air conditioner in Moscow, you’re too late.

Russia’s heat wave is almost one month old, and is showing no signs of letting up. Having lived extensively in New York and the Middle East, temperatures hovering around 90 degrees Fahrenheit are nothing strange for me, but it’s a different experience in Moscow.

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

The toughest part may be the scarcity of air-conditioning here, especially in residential homes. Maybe I should count myself lucky that the heat wave has coincided with the annual two-week hot water shut-off in my building (so that the utility company can do repairs on the pipes), as a freezing cold bath seems to be the only way to cool down at the end of the day.

Air conditioner suppliers caught by surprise by the high temperatures have run out of stock, and home appliance stores have back-orders of up to three weeks (two companies declined our request to film people looking for air-conditioners in their stores because they didn’t want us to show empty shelves).

Even though most of my friends back in the U.S. are knowledgeable enough not to ask me anymore if it snows in Moscow in the summer, the heat wave has still taken some tourists by surprise.

“We knew it was hot, but we didn’t expect it to be this miserably hot,” said Doak Simpson, a 48-year-old Motorola employee from Miami visiting Moscow with his family. “We’re from the land of air-conditioning. You can get out of it, and here there’s just no escaping it.”

Swimming – for better or worse
Muscovites still do a pretty good job of escaping it, though. Any part of Moscow that has water – fountains, the river, even barge canals – has been full of people swimming and sunbathing.

But the Russian Emergency Ministry’s web site shows perhaps the harshest measure of the heat wave: the death toll. Over 2,000 people have drowned in Russia since June 1. And this past Monday broke an unfortunate record: 71 people drowned in a 24-hour period.

According to Vadim Seryogin, a ministry official, many of the cases are due to people swimming while drunk.

“Of course, it’s good to swim during such hot days,” said Kseniya Kurus, a 19-year-old international law student, when told about the grim statistics. “But we shouldn’t drink alcohol during the summer. It’s dangerous.”

EPA/Yuri Kochetkov

Young Muscovites find some relief from the sweltering heat in a fountain at the All-Russian Exhibition Center in Moscow, Russia, on Friday.

And there’s no relief in sight. Forecasts predict the coming week to potentially break Moscow’s record of 98 degrees Fahrenheit.

And the heat goes beyond Moscow – it has also slammed Russia’s farmland with a crippling drought. Twenty-three grain-producing regions have declared a state of emergency and the Russian Grain Union reported that the drought has destroyed over 22 million acres of crops. Some forecasts see agricultural and farming losses by year-end topping billion.

Lying on a grassy bank after a swim in a canal, a group of students told me they’d had enough.

“It’s been good, but we don’t need a whole month of this,” said 20-year-old Igor Alexeyev. “It would be better to have two weeks on, two weeks off. Or even just hot weather every other day.”

By Adrienne Mong, NBC News Correspondent

BEIJING – All summer, we’ve watched the U.S. news coverage of the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico from our Beijing perch.

When successive attempts to cap the oil failed early on, some reporters joked that it would be months before anyone would get a story from Beijing onto any American news broadcasts unless China sprouted its own leak.

Reuters

A worker cleans up oil at the oil spill site near Dalian port, Liaoning province, China on Friday.

In fact, in a brilliant example of satire, one enterprising journalist tried to imagine a scenario in which the BP oil spill happened in China. (In Pictures: Would BP’s CEO Have Been Executed In China?)? ?

Well, that scenario has almost come true – although with significant differences.

Oil began to leak into the Yellow Sea last Friday, after a pipe carrying crude oil from a Liberian ship to a storage tank blew up, setting off a second explosion at a smaller pipeline at Dalian Xingang oil port in the northeastern province of Liaoning.?

Both pipelines are owned by Asia’s biggest oil and gas producer and supplier by volume, the China National Petroleum Corporation (CNPC).

Some 2,000 firefighters spent at least 15 hours battling the fire all night. But even though they were able to contain the spill relatively soon, the incident unleashed a massive oil slick. With the aid of tides and strong winds, the slick quickly doubled in size, spreading to an area covering 165 square miles. Small compared to the Gulf oil spill, but still the largest disaster of its kind in China in recent memory.

Trying to contain the impact
Hundreds of fishing boats, specialized cleaning vessels, volunteers, even “oil-eating” bacteria have been mobilized to reduce the impact of the spill.

But reports from the ground say the efforts have been hampered by lack of equipment and expertise. In some instances, volunteers wear nothing but rubber gloves and rubber boots and use their hands to scoop out the oil or cloth to soak it up from the ocean. One firefighter drowned on Tuesday after a wave threw him into the water as he tried to clean a boat pump.

Environmentalists warn that two of Dalian’s critical industries, tourism and fish farming, have been hard hit.

Jiang He/ Greenpeace/ Handout

A clean-up worker swimming in the thick sludge of crude oil tries to rescue a struggling colleague in the Chinese port of Dalian, Liaoning province on Tuesday. The photo was released by the environmental group Greenpeace.

“In the areas worst affected, we’ve seen an oil slick as thick as 20 centimeters [almost 8 inches] in the water,” said Zhong Yu, a Greenpeace China campaigner who with five colleagues in Dalian has spent the past five days observing the clean-up efforts and researching the ecological damage. (The team has posted a series of dramatic photographs on their website, which msnbc.com’s PhotoBlog wrote about earlier in the week.)

Beaches at Dalian, one of the cleanest of China’s cities, were mostly closed after crude oil washed up on the shores. One local newspaper reported that oil had penetrated at least 11 inches into the sand at one beach.

“The most famous beach here, Jinshitan, used to have 150,000 visitors a day,” Zhong told NBC News during a phone interview from Dalian. “Obviously, now no one’s coming here.”?

In addition to the beaches, nature reserves, and tourist parks, Dalian’s aquaculture farms are also affected, Zhong added. More than 10,000 shellfish farms have been tainted with petroleum, and the price of local shellfish has dropped by 15 percent.

The clean-up will take years, she said. “This is long-term damage we’re seeing here.”

SLIDESHOW: China oil spill doubles in size

Minimal coverage?
Zhong and her Greenpeace colleagues have had complete access to the affected areas and have encountered no resistance during their research. However, the disaster hasn’t dominated the headlines in China (apart from the dramatic photo of two men, one appearing to be drowning, in the oil slick from three days ago). What coverage there is tends to focus on the repair of the pipelines and progress of the clean-up, but there has been minimal reporting on the extent of the environmental damage.

The government is known to be coy about how it manages its energy supplies while growing its economy at a blistering pace. It was quick to reject the tag as “world’s biggest energy consumer” by the International Energy Agency (IEA) earlier this week. The Chinese National Energy Administration suggested the IEA figures were not reliable, but another report – by BP no less – also ranks China as the number one consumer of energy now.?