THE STRANGE JOURNEY OF SGT. JENKINS 

Here in Japan the Jenkins story is as a big as the Asahara story was a few years ago, press helicopters following every foot of progress of the chartered bus carrying the family from the airport to the hospital, where throngs of reporters stand waiting, microphones erect: a female Japanese abductee married in a rogue nation to an American deserter-- it too has all the ingredients of impossibility.  Big press vacuum for Koizumi, which I suspect is one reason he as Prime Minister of one of the world's great powers wasted big chits asking the US for clemency for Jenkins and practically prostrated himself before the portly leader of a sinister basket-case nation for the release of a US military deserter so he could be in Japan with his wife, formerly abducted by North Korea, when nothing at all had been done about the abductees themselves for decades; the sudden empathic interest is interesting...

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