White House Already Well Wired, Bush Staffers Say

Is the White House in the technological dark ages? Hardly, say the people who just left it.
Former Bush administration staffers disputed the tone of a Washington Post story published Thursday that described a tech-savvy Obama team moving into a building equipped with creaky computers, out-of-date software, no e-mail service and dead phone lines.
Rather, the former staffers said, the White House has everything a modern corporate office would — Windows XP, BlackBerrys, Outlook e-mail, plenty of laptops and lots of flatscreen monitors and TVs.
"It's a shame if they're having problems moving in," said Theresa Payton, White House chief information officer from 2006 until this past November. "We began to prepare for the transition well ahead of the election cycle. Our aim was to leave it in better shape than we found it."
David Almacy, who ran the whitehouse.gov Web site and was the administration's Internet and e-communications director from 2005 to 2007, blames simple logistics and red tape for the Obama team's problems.
"Bureaucracy is nonpartisan," he said. "Moving 3,000 people out and 3,000 people in is a Herculean task."

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Japan, U.S. work on Aso-Obama talks

TOKYO, Jan. 21 (UPI) -- Japanese goverenment officials are working with U.S. counterparts to schedule talks between Prime Minister Taro Aso and President Barack Obama, officials said.

Coordinators in Tokyo said they hoped they could schedule a face-to-face meeting between the two leaders in the United States by the end of March before a financial summit in London April 2, the Yomiuri Shimbun newspaper reported Wednesday.

The talks were expected to focus on economic issues, as well as reaffirming Japan-U.S. alliances regarding climate change, terrorism and North Korea-related issues, such as its denuclearization plan and the abduction of Japanese nationals, the newspaper said.