[VOA]

"We have been on the road for the last six months and we did not watch television or
read the newspapers," Mr Makano told reporters.

So much for the ascendancy of The Empire of The Rising Sun.

I don't think we need to worry about Japan buying up the USA if this represents
even a small percentage of the new generation of Japanese.

(and some articles I've read would indicate they might be the poster children for
the long, slow, inexorable decline of Japan)

[Henk]

Or maybe, apart for localized areas of destruction, the West Bank hasn't been reduced to rubble as the press would have us believe.

[monkeyshine]

I heard two interesting pieces of investment advice about the future recently. The first piece was that Japan will be a hot place to put your money, in about 10 years. Their demographics are similar to ours, but their "baby boom" is a generation behind ours. This means the earning potential and compounding investment gains will start to ramp up in about 10 years, and we'll want to have a piece of that action.

The other one was that the hot investment for the future is a rice farm. The population in Asia eats mainly rice, but production cannot keep up with population growth. Buy a rice farm now, and in 10-20 years you will be making a fortune on it selling rice to Asia.