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...There are still a few things the U.S. can learn from Japan. One is its commitment to energy-efficient public transport. Anyone who sniffs at Obama's plan for high-speed railways should have joined me on the glide back to Tokyo. But the main lesson Japan can offer the U.S. today has nothing to do with rapid progress. It concerns the perils of inaction. (See pictures of Japan in the 1980s and today...
...problems to get solved. So it has been in Japan. The Japanese are wealthy enough that they don't suffer too much from the prolonged period of stunted growth. But Japan also stands as a warning to those who think tough decisions can be delayed indefinitely. Japan's public finally seems ready for something new. Voters last year tossed out the Liberal Democrats, who had governed almost uninterrupted since 1955. The new sheriff in town is Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama of the Democratic Party of Japan. He's at least talking new ideas: reforming the government, improving the social safety...
...bronze statue of a 10-year-old Barack Obama, shod in sneakers and holding aloft a butterfly, quickly turned into a tourist attraction. Foreigners flocked to the public park in Jakarta to honor the U.S. President, who lived four years of his childhood in the Indonesian capital. Locals visited, too, but they weren't as pleased. "Indonesians mostly came to protest," says park groundskeeper Yunus. "They didn't want the statue here." Less than three months after a local Obama fan club raised $10,000 for the monument, it was quietly moved in February to a nearby school where Obama...
...ranging from enforced Koran literacy for Muslim children to the as-yet-unenforced stoning to death for adultery - despite the fact that Indonesia is officially a secular nation. At Menteng Elementary School where Obama once studied, the principal and many teachers wear veils. The Muslim prayer room in the public school is much larger than it was when Obama attended classes there...
...warning that if the news leaked out before the president arrived in Kabul, the trip would be canceled. Following the regular pool rotation, Gibbs invited 14 journalists to travel on Air Force One, including a television crew from ABC News and reporters from the Wall Street Journal, TIME, National Public Radio and the three major wire services, Bloomberg, Reuters and the Associated Press...