President Barack Obama took a break from business during his four-countries-in-eight-days Asian trip on Tuesday to turn tourist with a quick visit to Beijing’s Forbidden City. He seemed to relish the sightseeing trip, which took about 45 minutes, squeezed in after negotiating sessions with Chinese President Hu Jintao and before a meeting with U.S. embassy staff and a state dinner.

The sprawling Forbidden City, in the heart of Beijing, was built in the 15th century and home to China’s emperors for 500 years. The 980-building complex was called “Forbidden” because no one could enter without the emperor’s permission. Now a museum and a UNESCO world heritage site, it is normally thronged with visitors, but it lived up to its name when Obama visited, as no one was allowed in except his party, journalists and lots of security.

Guided by the Forbidden City museum director, Zheng Xinmiao, Obama walked through doorways and courtyards with names like “The Gate of Continuing Harmony,” a soothing thought after talks on trade policy, global warming and denuclearization. However, he ended the visit in a spot with a name perhaps less benign, given that China is the largest holder of U.S. debt: “The Courtyard of Loyal Obedience.”

Obama changed from a business suit into a brown leather bomber jacket for the outing on the sunny, but chilly, November afternoon.

“What a magnificent place to visit,” he said. “It’s a testament to the greatness of Chinese history.”

A Chinese journalist asked if he would like to come back. “Of course,” Obama answered, “with my girls and my wife,” referring to his daughters Sasha and Malia and first lady Michelle Obama, who are not on the trip.

Obama, who was been in Alaska, Singapore, Shanghai and Beijing since leaving Washington on Thursday morning, leaves Beijing for South Korea on Wednesday and spends one night in Seoul before heading home.

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Reuters photos by Jim Young (Obama tours the Forbidden City on Nov 17, 2009)

Internet-savvy President Barack Obama told Chinese students that he is a big fan of the Web, though he doesn’t Twitter.
    
At a town hall forum in Shanghai, a student who sent in a question by email pointed out that China has a huge online community with 350 million Internet users and 60 million bloggers.

He asked what Obama thought of the Chinese government’s “firewall” that blocks objectionable Internet sites and if he thought the Chinese should be able to “Twitter freely.”
    
“First of all, let me say that I have never used Twitter,” Obama replied. “I noticed that young people — they’re very busy with all these electronics. My thumbs are too clumsy to type in things on the phone.”
  
But he added, “I’ve always been a strong supporter of open Internet use. I’m a big supporter of non-censorship. This is part of the tradition of the United States.” Obama said a free Internet allows people around the world to think freely and hold their governments accountable.
    
Obama’s election campaign was credited with using the Internet in innovative ways — Facebook and texting — to raise money and rally a huge network of volunteers.
    
Traveling in China as part of a nine-day Asia tour, Obama made a point of highlighting the Internet at the town hall. He took questions from the students in attendance at the event as well as questions submitted over the Internet.
 
The question about the Chinese firewall was one of more than 1,000 submitted by email through the U.S. embassy. At the request of the White House, which did not want to be in the awkward position of pre-selecting a question, Bloomberg reporter Ed Chen, the president of the White House Correspondents Association, chose the question randomly by picking a number and relaying it to White House press secretary Robert Gibbs.

Reuters photo by Jason Reed (a student poses a question to Obama at the town hall-style meeting at Shanghai’s Museum of Science and Technology, Nov. 16, 2009)

Sen. Christopher Dodd of Connecticut and Columbia University economist Jeffrey Sachs are two guys who think President Barack Obama better embrace new structural reforms if he wants a growing economy that isn’t hard-wired to go bust.

Dodd, a Democrat fighting for his political life at home, proposed sweeping regulatory legislation this week that would curb the Federal Reserve’s bank oversight powers, strengthen consumer protection and keep a sharp eye out for systemic problems like housing or stock market bubbles.

The 1,136-page measure reflects Obama’s policies in some ways — for example, it supports the White House call for a Consumer Financial Protection Agency — but it also charts new regulatory waters.

“What we have (now) is a hodgepodge that has grown over the last 80 years, some of it dating to the 19th century and early 20th century regulatory structures,” Dodd told MSNBC.

“These agencies basically have provided a forum for financial institutions that look for a weak charter, in a sense. They shop around and get it. So we need to eliminate or change that fundamentally.”

“I think you’re really on the right track,” Sachs told Dodd in the same broadcast.

But Sachs, who became famous for his economic work in the developing world, thinks Obama should adopt much broader structural change and says current White House policy is akin to using a morning-after drink as a hangover remedy.

“The Obama administration’s stimulus policies are not well targeted. The Republican alternatives are even worse. Both sides are missing the key fact: the U.S. economy needs structural change,” Sachs writes in an op-ed column in today’s Financial Times.

Sachs, who now focuses on sustainable development as director of Columbia’s Earth Institute, says the president is bent on restoring American consumer spending.

Instead, he says, the United States needs dollar depreciation, greater support for exports, a massive expansion in education spending and a robust conversion to a low-carbon economy.

“Move now, Mr. President,” Sachs says in the FT, “or we will spend our time digging out of the next consumer bust and buying our technology from China.”

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Photo Credits: Reuters/Jim Young (Dodd); Reuters/Reuters Photographer (Sachs)

An atmosphere of stale defensiveness has sunk over Kabul. The mood has been lowered by the protracted saga of the Afghan election count, almost two months on from the first round August 20 vote. It's a drama veering towards farce more often than post-modern play, as we wait endlessly for a result, that like Godot, does not want to come.

Winter has not yet arrived in Kabul, though the evenings are cold, quickly taking the heat of the sun out of the day. Afghan politicians are frustrated and twitchy, second-guessing the reasons for the U.N.-backed election watchdog's plodding. We are being solidly methodological to retain the confidence of all, says the Electoral Complaints Commission, as it examines thousands of dodgy votes. A thankless task, most likely. The ECC officials will be puzzling over whether a box of votes has been mass-endorsed for one candidate, and should not stand, or if the suspiciously similar ticks on the ballot paper are attributable to only one man in the village knowing how to write. Many of the rural voters will never have held a pen in their hand, argued one official. It is natural in such a tribal society for the village to establish a consensus on who to support. Do such ballot papers count? Remember Florida, and how 'hanging chads' and the U.S. Supreme Court gave George W. Bush the presidency over Al Gore? It's that kind of agony.

Behind the scenes the whispers are that hesitation and delay are because the outcome is excruciatingly close, too close to call. President Hamid Karzai, once set clear for victory, may find first round success ripped from his grasp by the disqualification of votes stuffed into ballot boxes by his supporters. He'll likely win a second round, if it happens, against his former foreign minister Abdullah Abdullah; but there will have been a loss of dignity, of self-confidence and of an opportunity to stabilise Afghanistan and get on with fighting the Taliban.

Other more fraught scenarios are possible, as outlined by my colleague. Would Karzai gamble that the West has no alternative to him in Afghanistan? And that he can therefore afford to ignore the opprobrium that would follow if he rejected an outcome he did not like? Or are the suspicions of chicanery, back-room pressure on election officials and string-pulling by all involved just a proliferation of nonsense to fill the void left by the lack of a clear outcome?

Eventually the result will be out, perhaps by the time some of you get round to reading this. Most likely I will be back in London, watching from afar. Optimists would have it that clarity will clear the air, the Afghan political mood will lighten and spoils to all will come from the haggling over the shape of the next government.

Meanwhile Afghanistan is Limbo-stan. Obama won't decide his strategy on Afghanistan until he sees what kind of Afghan partner he has to deal with. At least until then, and possibly longer, he won't say yes or no to the extra troops that General Stanley McChrystal says he needs to carry out the counter-insurgency strategy that he has prepared. (Though he'll carry out a different strategy, with no or fewer extra troops, if that's what he's ordered to do by his commander-in-chief). So in this limbo - the Washington policy void is filled with echo-chamber exhortations across the political divides; the Taliban is emboldened; Afghanistan's neighbours are positioning themselves to benefit or at least guard against strategic loss should Washington fold its tent; and Western publics are wondering if there is a real purpose to their boys getting their limbs blown off while trudging through the fields of southern Helmand.

Bill Clinton has tons of respect for Jimmy Carter. But he doesn’t agree that racism is a driving factor behind angry opposition to President Barack Obama’s healthcare reform agenda.

Like Carter, Clinton is a former Democratic governor of a Southern state who has spent years battling entrenched racism against blacks.

“I sympathize with where President Carter’s coming from. If you’re a white southerner and you’ve fought these battles a long time, you’re super-sensitive to any kind of discrimination based on race,” Clinton, a former Arkansas governor, said in an interview with ABC’s “Good Morning America.”

Carter, a former Georgia governor, raised the issue of race after U.S. Rep. Joe Wilson of South Carolina shouted “You lie” at Obama during the president’s healthcare speech to Congress this month. Thousands of conservatives also rallied in opposition to the president at demonstrations in Washington.

“I think an overwhelming portion of the intensely demonstrated animosity toward President Barack Obama is based on the fact that he is a black man,” Carter told NBC News.

Obama, the first black U.S. president, later said he believed some opposition had to do with race. But he denied Carter’s charge that racism was a leading factor.

Clinton sounded a similar note.

“Some of the extreme Right who oppose him on healthcare also are racially prejudiced,” said Clinton, who lost his own bid to overhaul the U.S. healthcare system during his first term as president.

“But I believe that if he (Obama) were not an African-American, all the people who are against him on healthcare would still be against him,” he said.

“What’s driving them is: they don’t want healthcare. They don’t want the government, one more time, to take care of people who are left out or left behind. They are philosophically or emotionally — or whatever — opposed to it,” Clinton added.

Clinton said he hopes the current debate will move the United States closer to universal coverage. He would specifically like to see greater use of electronic medical records, better management of chronic diseases that account for the bulk of healthcare costs and a system that encourages care over costly medical procedures.

As for his own foray into healthcare reform, the former president said it all came down to the strength of the Republican opposition led by former Senator Bob Dole of Kansas.

“Senator Dole decided that he wanted to kill all forms of healthcare and he had 45 votes, so he could lose four and still have a filibuster. That’s what really killed healthcare reform,” Clinton said.

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Photo credits: Jim Young/Reuters (Clinton and Obama); David Mercado/Reuters (Carter)

President Obama deeply disappointed his hometown Chicago when he announced that he would not go to Copenhagen next month to personally make the city’s case for hosting the 2016 Olympics, so he and first lady Michelle Obama, who is going in his stead, on Wednesday brought the Olympics to the White House instead.

Former Olympic and paralympic athletes, Chicago officials and local schoolchildren attended the event on the White House lawn, where the president and first lady both spoke and watched judo and gymnastic demonstrations. The president even joined in with some of the athletes, earning a gentle jibe from his wife.

“You should have seen the president in there fencing,” she said. “It was pathetic, but he passed the baton really well.”

Obama said he was too busy working on healthcare reform to travel to Copenhagen on Oct. 2 to lobby the International Olympic Committee, but offered an excuse.

“The good news is I’m sending a more compelling superstar to represent the city and country we love, and that is our first lady, Michelle Obama,” he said.

Michelle Obama is hugely popular — her approval ratings exceed her husband’s, which have sunk as he works to push through his sweeping healthcare plan — and it is speculated that she may make the trip to Copenhagen with Oprah WInfrey, the Chicago talk show host and media magnate who is consistently rated one of the most popular and admired Americans. But proponents of the city’s bid worry they will not be enough, as the other three finalists are all sending their heads of state to make their cases to the IOC.

King Juan Carlos of Spain is traveling to Denmark to argue on behalf of Madrid. Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva is making the case for Rio. Japan is sending its new prime minister and its royal family for Tokyo, backers of Chicago’s bid note bitterly.

“U.S. organizers have Michelle Obama and are working on Oprah Winfrey   — two of the most popular women on the planet,” the Chicago Tribune wrote in an editorial. “Still, it would escape no one’s notice if Barack Obama took a pass on securing the Olympics for his hometown.

“Mr. President, you need to be there,” the newspaper wrote.

PHOTO CREDITS: U.S. President Barack Obama is joined by first lady, Michelle Obama, and Olympic gold medalist Jackie Joyner Kersee (R) as they watch a Judo demonstration during an Olympic Games event on the South Lawn of the White House in Washington, September 16, 2009 and Obama uses a plastic saber to show his fencing stance. Both from REUTERS/Larry Downing

U.S. Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens has hired only one clerk for the term starting in October 2010, instead of the usual four, fueling speculation that he may be planning to step down next summer, the New York Times reports.

Stevens, 89, is the current court’s longest-serving member. Nominated by Republican President Gerald Ford, Stevens joined the high court in December 1975 and went on to become the leader of its liberal wing.

If  the Chicago-born Stevens steps down, President Barack Obama would have his second opportunity to nominate a justice to the court.

Or maybe Stevens is keeping his options open and planning to hire more clerks later, the New York Times article said. But the newspaper notes that hiring decisions may be an early warning system for hints about the justices’ retirement plans.

It points out that Justice David Souter hired no clerks this spring, in what turned out to be an accurate signal of his decision to step down.

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Photo credit: REUTERS/Larry Downing (Justice John Paul Stevens sits for a photo inside the Supreme Court in Washington)

President Barack Obama is squeezing some reading into his week-long Martha’s Vineyard vacation. OK, a lot more than “some.”

The brainy president has brought along a stack of five books– three novels and two works of non-fiction — to amuse himself in between rounds of golf, visits with friends, activities with his family and the inescapable business of running the country while he is on the Massachusetts island.

Two of the novels are thrillers, but his reading list is hardly light, literally or figuratively, with a total for the five books of more than 2,300 pages.

Here’s what’s on Obama’s holiday reading list:

“The Way Home” by George Pelecanos, is a thriller set in Washington, DC, a city that should be familiar to a president and former senator. The crime novel by the best-selling author explores the relationship between a father and his son.

“Hot, Flat and Crowded,” by the New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman, is a non-fiction book that looks at one of Obama’s top policy issues — climate change — as well as what Friedman considers the United States’ loss of hope and purpose since the September 11 attacks.

“Lush Life” by Richard Price is another thriller, this one set on Manhattan’s Lower East Side in New York City.

The president’s fourth book, “Plainsong” by Kent Haruf, is the shortest of his choices, at just 301 pages. It is a novel about small town life in Colorado.

And the president’s fifth choice is about one of his most distant predecessors, David McCullough’s sweeping biography of the second U.S. president, “John Adams,” which comes in at 768 pages.

Reuters photos by Jason Reed (Obama waves as he plays golf, and a storefront sign welcomes the president and his family to Martha’s Vineyard)

One group of Americans who failed to support Barack Obama in his race for the presidency last year were “NASCAR Dads,” white, working-class Southern men presumed to be fans of the U.S. racing circuit. The president reached out to them in a big way on Wednesday by hosting a ceremony in honor of Jimmie Johnson, NASCAR’s 2008 Sprint Cup Champion, with Johnson and an array of current drivers and former NASCAR champions.

“You know, it is not every day that we have a championship stock car parked out on the South Lawn,” joked Obama, known more as a fan of Chicago’s basketball and baseball teams than as a racing aficionado.

“Fortunately, we got Jimmie to agree not to do any burnouts or tear up my back yard. ”I also suggested to Jimmie that, in exchange for free parking, he should let me take “the 48″ out for a few laps, referring to Johnson’s car. He said that was fine — but Secret Service didn’t think it was fine.”

Obama praised Johnson and the other NASCAR drivers for their charity work. Among those attending was Richard Petty, a retired NASCAR legend known as “The King,” whom Obama noted was “sitting right in the front row, where he belongs.”

Wounded soldiers from Walter Reed Army Medical Center attended the ceremony, as did children from the “Victory Junction Gang Camp,” a camp for terminally or chronically ill children in North Carolina supported by NASCAR’s Petty racing family.

Photo credits: U.S. President Barack Obama (L) and NASCAR 2008 Sprint Cup champion Jimmie Johnson stand beside Johnson’s car during an event honoring him at the White House in Washington August 19, 2009. REUTERS/Kevin Lamarque and NASCAR legends Richard Petty (R) and Darrell Waltrip (L) attend an event honoring NASCAR 2008 Sprint Cup champion Jimmie Johnson at the White House in Washington August 19, 2009. REUTERS/Kevin Lamarque

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President Barack Obama made a surprise visit to the White House briefing room on Tuesday to carry a plateful of six cupcakes topped by a birthday candle to Helen Thomas, the veteran journalist with whom he shares an August 4 birthday.

The president, who turned 48, led aides in singing a chorus of “Happy Birthday to You,” to Thomas, who turned 89, and then urged her to make a wish. “You’ve got to blow it out to make it come true,” Obama said. Thomas then blew out the candle.

Thomas, known as a tough questioner of authority while covering 10 U.S. presidents during half a century as a White House correspondent, did not say what she wished for.

Obama jokingly said, “Helen wished for world peace, no prejudice. She and I also had a common birthday wish. She said she hopes for a real healthcare reform bill,” plugging his political agenda. “I will leave it up to you how you want to distribute the cupcakes,” he added.  

The president posed for a smiling picture with Thomas, but left without taking questions.

Thomas spent much of her career as White House correspondent for United Press International and is now a columnist for Hearst.

Photo credit: REUTERS/Jim Young