Then there hugs, tears, final goodbyes and promises to visit each other. As I hugged Ermin and Vyk I realised that now all of us have eight homes in eight different countries. I had never imagined that I would know someone from Bosnia or have finger-licking Lithuanian food in Chicago or learn some Spanish from an Argentinian or teach swear words to a fifth-generation Indian from South Africa.

With these thoughts I bid farewell to my first room mate Sonia. Then I took my husband around the lakes. Somehow everyone seemed to look or sound like or just reminded me of the rest of the gang. It almost seemed like entire Minneapolis decided to go bald and look like Ermin or iron their hair poker straight like Antoinette. And it was at Lake Calhoun that suddenly I heard someone calling my name. There was Sonia riding a bike. Just three hours after I had said my final goodbye to her. Just when I was feeling bad that I would never ever be able to see anyone ever again. Just when I was wondering if my new friends would ever visit my country or not.

As Sonia and I hugged again a hope was rekindled. Maybe in some city of the world, somewhere sometime I hear someone calling out my name and I am pleasantly surprised to see you again. Goodbye and good luck my friends. See you soon.

My instant reaction was: "Food." Tati said food and music. Always-measured and the GPS of the group Vyk predictably said "nothing". And the ever-charming Ermin floored us as he said: "Of course my wife and my dog." And thats when I said: "Oh correction. Of course my husband too."

That was then. After four weeks of travel all over the US, the group is back home in Minneapolis. My husband joined me here yesterday. While I was waiting for him at the hotel I realised I was happy-sad. I was very happy and looking forward to seeing him. But then very sad that the programme would come to an end soon. Very soon. Just tomorrow.

So Tati right now I miss nothing. I don't miss home because I think I am quite at home in Minneapolis.

Forget about the "big government" spying on its own citizens under the Patriot act.

Forget even about Mike Huckabee accusing Barack Obama of promoting the ultimate threat that comes from Europe: "big government", grabbing liberty and destroying America's achievements.

The surest sign of the big government is nailed to the wall of the passageway leading to the Oak Street Beach in Chicago.

Warning that the beach is closed when there is no lifeguard on duty (it isn't: happy moms take their kids to the lake in the moonlight and companies of youngsters drink merrily) it asks the citizens to report other - disobeying - citizens to the police.

For all its liberties, this country seems obsessed with signs ordering people what to do and not. Just look at the abundance of excessive announcements.

This big government is patronizing its citizens like few others, and people do not seem to care.

Signs above traffic lights in New York tell drivers not to "block the box", as if anyone really did not know it was wrong. Announcements on Chicago trains ask riders to "keep your belongings off the seat next to you so that others may sit down", as if anyone would not know that in a packed train people are to be preferred to bags. Museum halls and restaurants display warnings on the number of people inside a room that is "dangerous and unlawful", as if customers would count the ones who are already in before entering.

No other Western country, with a possible exception of Britain, also prolific in signs, does not seem to mistrust the intelligence and goodwill of its citizens as does America. (In fact, some European countries even remove traffic signs making drivers think and thus reducing the number of accidents.)

And there is a good reason, of course. For all the innovative spirit, for all the critical thinking encouraged in schools and for the record number of Nobel prize winners, probably every foreigner has countless anecdotes to tell how clueless Americans can be when they are faced with situations that are only slightly outside the bounds of everyday routines.

Even my most favorite ones would take countless pages to tell.

So there it is, the big government, the force for good, the all-predicting guardian of order, taking care of everything in a very public way, allowing people to go about their affairs. A homo no longer needs to be much sapiens.

Of course, everybody sticking to one's own business might explain the legendary efficiency of the country where the conveyor belt was invented. But it also might explain legendary ignorance.

And a dangerous one at that.

The 9-11 terrorists breached this big government precisely because of their imagination and thinking outside the box. The government answer was, of course, more signs and more instructions what to do and what not.

But in New York's La Guardia airport the other week, I witnessed how a security officer seemed to blindly follow the rules and thus failed to check an object large enough to hide ten machine guns.

I did not say anything - there was no sign asking me to.

But exhibit after exhibit there show, ironically, how freedom has been attempted to be suppressed, and how controversial freedom can be in a country that thinks of itself as a beacon of the free world.

A very troubling thing is that some exhibits are very recent.

But even more troubling, they show that it is not only the government that seems to have been attempting to suppress freedom in this country from its inception (while claiming, in an orwellian way, to be defending it) - it is countless individuals and groups, the backbone of the American society.

Some are willing to renounce freedoms to win the proverbial "war on terror" (the subtle and not-so-subtle scare-mongering seems to have been successful, after all), some others force songs off the radio stations' playlists because of a single strong word, yet others flood with complaints a major network that has inadvertently shown a nipple, and the fine is imposed, leading to a sort of self-censorship.

Totalitarian trends seem to be very much alive here.

And then there is an even bigger picture.

Try googling a museum of freedom in any other county, and the only small museums of liberty that can be found are dedicated to the wartime liberation of cities such as Cherbourg in France or Bologna in Italy.

Other free countries do not seem to have the need to prove to anyone that they are free. (Much less a need to prescribe freedom to others, but this is another topic altogether.)

Even the biggest freedom controversy of the past decade, the prophet Muhammad cartoon scandal, did not lead to opening museums of freedom in Europe.

Not that other countries did not have historical tensions about freedom, or that they have no current issues, or that freedom should not be actively guarded. It just seems that, for better or worse, freedom by now is taken for granted elsewhere in the free countries just as air - and there seem to be no museums of air anywhere.

Probably it is not a coincidence that the self-described "leader of the free world" is only ranked number 48 in the most recent authoritative press freedom index, below countries like Ghana and Nicaragua, and even this is an improvement over the previous years (the survey, admittedly, is done by a France-based organization; a US-based organization constantly comes up with a different press freedom ranking, and has a different scale of measuring overall freedom).

So maybe that famous inscription in Washington is indeed right: Freedom is not free.

Come to the White House press briefing room - a spot that is on television every day - and just behind the cameras you will find something that will make you believe that both Barack Obama and John Mccain are right: this place needs change.

Someone please clean the spiderwebs between the window glasses.

Tear down this web.

Those thick webs might be a testament of how much of a lame-duck this president has become - not only Congress Republicans feel free to ignore their leader's pleas to approve the financial rescue plan but also the White House-keeping staff seems to ignore the need to let some more light into the building.

Or it might be a subtle reminder by the White House to the press what working conditions they deserve.

Or a statement by the press on what they feel about those eight years.

Or maybe no one cares?

When the reconstruction of the room started some two years ago and the briefing center was relocated across the street, the press felt very unsure if they would be allowed back to the White House grounds. Eventually they were - but now it seems that they were not the only ones who survived the renovation.

True, with the financial crisis, there might be more important things in the White House but wasn't this crisis also hastened by years of neglect on the part of government, among other factors?

Small things sometimes point to bigger things.

Financial markets might eventually be revitalized but is change coming to the White House?

I left all the fun in Chicago and returned back to work - for less than 24 hours, admittedly, and not back to Lithuania but to Washington. But I did what I usually do: covered Lithuanian foreign policy.

It was not the first time Lithuanian President Valdas Adamkus met US President George Bush at the White House, and it was not the first time for me to cover the meeting in the Oval Office (well, second...) but it was by far the most important when it came to results. In addition to the now-usual discussion on what to do with Russia, President Bush announced that he "hoped" that from mid-October Lithuanians would be included in a program that allows foreigners to travel to the US for tourism and business without visas. This is what Lithuanian - and EU - diplomacy strived to achieve for many years.

I interviewed President Adamkus after the meeting at the White House lawn for the flagship news at Lithuanian Television (starts at 01:00) - and did that jerky camerawork in the Oval Office.

Barely had we left the White House, it was all back to politics as usual there - Congress throwing out the financial bailout plan, Dow Jones plummeting like never before and a lame-duck president being shunned by his own party...

Last week we attended the United Nations General Assembly in New York. The Argentinian delegation was there too. The schedule of the president Cristina Fernández de Kirchner in the Big Apple was full of meetings and events.

During our week in Los Angeles we visited the Seismological Laboratory. We talked about how they are trying to get ready for a big earthquake in Southern California, among other topics.

Perfil newspaper - 28th September

Leobardo Estrada is an expert on ethnic and racial demographic trends. Currently he is a member of Barack Obama´s transition team. In this article professor Estrada analyzes the importance of the Latino population in the elections.

I saw her at a function at the United Nations five years ago.

From that moment, the UN to me became a place where you took it for granted to see the world-famous figures filing past.

This year, my collection started with Sergey Lavrov, the outspoken Russian foreign minister, rushing up the 46th street. He spent more than twenty years at the Soviet, then Russian mission at the UN and must know New York so well that the current permanent representative, Vitaly Churkin, could barely keep up behind him (no wonder he was eventually not chosen to replace Lavrov last year).

A moment later, a Norwegian TV reporter was bringing her country's prime minister Jens Stoltenberg, to a live interview at the press island on the First Avenue. He had to squeeze through between the two sections of the police fence but did not seem to mind.

Once he finished and left, a bigger group of people breezed through the concrete barricades. Kevin Rudd, the relatively new prime minister of Australia, almost touched me as I was fiddling with my notebook atop the concrete block.

Then there was Miguel Angel Moratinos, the Spanish foreign minister, and Lamberto Dini, a veteran Italian politician.

And I could have been forgiven had I not noticed Bill Gates, the founder of Microsoft. Only people turning their heads alerted me towards this understated billionaire philantropist.

Others could probably be forgiven if they were thinking nothing about a lone man standing patiently outside the main entrance while a lone journalist was anxiously trying to revive the microphones on his video camera that for the first - and last - time stopped working, precisely at the worst possible moment. The man was Valdas Adamkus, the Lithuanian president, and the unfortunate journalist was me.

The next day, the first was Lech Kaczynski, the Polish president, materializing almost out of nowhere in from of me as I was entering the building through the media entrance. Largely pushed to the sidelines even in his domain of the foreign policy by an assertive prime minister, he was rushing to the riverside spot where Polish journalists had already set up their cameras.

A day later, it was Boris Tadic, the president of Serbia, who I nearly bumped into on that same 46th street. He had been announcing the UN debate on the independence of Kosovo to the Serbian television journalists just moments earlier.

Then Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero, the Spanish prime minister, suddenly appeared from the UN cafeteria. Do the world leaders also find that the food there is rather good and inexpensive?

Stories like this are plentiful from anyone who finds oneself in the crowd of thousands of people converging on this yearly talking shop.

An Asian minister falling asleep in an important meeting, a South American president pointedly ignoring journalists' questions, someone nearly stumbling over a president from the Middle East who would soon show thumbs-down to the US president's speech, someone else missing that shot of herself with a prime minister from a European power rushing past.

Too many leaders are gathered in one place for everyone of them to stay in the same cocoon of exclusiveness that surrounds them back home.

Except, maybe, for some African dictators who enjoyed the largest security detail, plushest hotels, noisiest motorcades and teams of yes-men, and seemed never to land from their high orbits onto the soil of ever-rushing, cosmopolitan and ignorant New York.

It has allegedly ended in certain parts of the Western world, but not in others.

It still accounts for some of the deepest cleavages among nations and peoples -- democratic nations, that is, which are said to have never been at war with each other.

The Holocaust Memorial Museum is situated close to the historical monuments that are always full of people in the capital of the nation that constantly refers itself back to its history -- however short and shallow it might seem from across the ocean.

People do cry in those dark and menacing halls.

But the powerful exhibition also refers to another part of the Western civilization where history has not ended.

Central Europe, though now part of the common values-based communities such as the European Union and NATO, is the place where historical wounds have not healed yet, and scores with the past have not yet been settled.

This is what sets it apart from the rest of Europe.

Central European leaders still bring up historical injustices as arguments in international negotiations (a taboo for Western European counterparts). Candidates win elections using what observers say are Luftwaffe eagle-like logos and Nazi torch-like lit rallies. The appeasement by most of the Western Europe when a major power invades its neighbor seems all too familiar here to not bring back memories of the haunted past.

The tragedy of the Holocaust also seems much more fresh here rather than in the Western Europe which is in the process of relegating it to the realm of painful history and moving on to the "ever closer union".

This is partly because the Central European countries are constantly criticized for failing to account to their past, and partly because Holocaust was only one of the great calamities that befell this part of Europe. Guilt felt elsewhere in Europe is often overshadowed here by the victimization of the past.

In a sense, while Western Europe moves to the post-modernism of the twenty-first century, not only America still professes the realpolitik of the centuries past, but also the Central Europe is not ready -- justifiably or not -- to move to the end of history.

The fact that the latter two now have to confront another power that seems stuck in the nineteenth century will probably make ties even stronger -- however much the goal of bringing Central Europe to the fold of post-modern politics of the Western Europe and building Europe "whole, free and at peace" seems desirable.

The alliance between the two therefore is probably much more than a political calculation of the day, and this is why, to the annoyance of the Western European leaders, countries from the US-described "new Europe" intentionally waste opportunities "to keep their mouth shut" about their ties to America.

The "new Europe" is, in fact, old, as is America. The "old Europe" is new.

And he won the elections.

Oh, and he is a Muslim.

Keith Ellison talks confidently and enthusiastically about policy proposals during his first term in Congress ("I feel like I've been effective"), his opposition to the war in Iraq and foreign trips he was invited to by the administration - not least because he is the first Muslim in the US House of Representatives.

But the talk constantly drifts to the subject of who he is, rather than what he does.

"It took me a month to understand what's the big deal" about being Muslim, he says about his primary campaign that eventually resulted in a victory in a district where Muslims make up only three per cent of the voters. The race energized thousands of new voters and Jewish organizations endorsed him rather than a Jewish competitor.

Ellison, who converted to Islam when he was 18, claims that voters are more interested in policy proposals of the candidates rather than their religion.

But the legislator who took the oath on a Koran skirts the issue of whether a Muslim can be elected president in the foreseeable future, and is vague about what advice he could offer Barack Obama to dispel the internet claims he is a Muslim. He also admits fears among conservatives that he opened Congress doors to more Muslims.

Religion still seems to be an elephant in the room.

But in the small office of Ellison, it is easy to spot a bigger elephant.

While there are few visible sign of his religion, numerous pictures of Martin Luther King and Rosa Parks tell you what might be really important. "America got race wrong from the very beginning," says Ellison.

The first African-American member of Congress from Minnesota claims he does not dream of homogeneity, and implies that it is neither possible nor desirable: "We don't seek to create a color-blind society".

This is a brave admission that the real tolerance - of the kind where people no longer notice race (or religion for that matter) rather than claim that they tolerate 'the others' - is a long way off.

It is also a brave admission from someone who was elected in an overwhelmingly white district, likes to talk about policies instead of his exclusiveness, but still decorates his office with the civil rights iconography, that race is a political issue.

Thus, in the end, Keith Ellison might have some advice to Barack Obama.

But the crisis of journalism in US threatens to seriously hurt not only newspapers but all the media, including the new ones. There are two major symptoms of this crisis experts say.

First is the decrease of depth in reporting stories and covering events. Choosing the subject of interest to the media has become influenced much more by pure economical criteria (in order to bring fast profits to the new corporate owners of media) than by the public interest. This results with more and more media in US becoming the yellow- tabloid like.  

The second symptom is political polarization of the media. Some of the experts say that it was always possible to see the color of the political party through the reports of American media. But the majority agree that it is becoming more and more obvious which media are left and which are right oriented.

Pulitzer awarded journalist and former WPI executive director John Ullmann reminded WPI fellows of the very essence of being a journalist. "It is not the editor, it is not the publisher- IT IS THE PEOPLE WE ARE WRITTING FOR!!!" hollered Ullmann while lecturing about the ethics of journalism in his distinguished and engaging style.  

Just like the newspapers- quality, in-depth and objective journalism will not die despite the hard times as long as there is one reporter who doesn't forget who he/she is really writing for.

WHO DO YOU WRITE FOR?!!!- Ullmann- or some others like him- will keep asking the students and young journalists. FOR THE PEOPLE!!!! They will howl back in the Marine Corps style.

AND YOU SHOULD NEVER FORGET IT!!!