World

The new Tokyo Skytree is the biggest attraction in Japan — or at least the tallest.
The Tokyo Skytree, twice as tall as the Eiffel Tower, and its surrounding retail and office complex opened on Tuesday to an estimated 200,000 visitors. (Haruyoshi Yamaguchi - Bloomberg)

The observation decks of the tallest tower in the world opened to the public on Tuesday. Here are six important facts and figures to know about Skytree, pulled from the Associated Press.

* Skytree is the tallest tower in the world. It is 2,080 feet tall (634 meters), just edging out the Canton Tower in China (1,969.5 feet, or 600 meters).

* Skytree is not the tallest structure in the world. That would be Dubai’s 2,717-foot Burj Khalifa. What’s the difference? The Burj Khalifa is a skyscraper, which is a different category of building.

* How tall is 2,080 feet? Twice the height of the Eiffel Tower. How’s that for perspective?

* Pairing form with function, Skytree will serve as a TV and radio broadcast tower. It replaces the old Tokyo Tower, which stood just half its height at 1,092.5 feet.

* Nearly 8,000 people were expected at the opening, Some of these visitors waited more than a week for the chance. They were disappointed with fog obstructing the views from above.

* Skytree is painted its own color: “Skytree White.” The design is based on “aijiro,” a traditional Japanese light blue that helps the tower join its surroundings.

Visitors to the tallest tower in the world will surely want something to remember the trip. Luckily (naturally?) Skytree has endless amounts of gift shop swag. Below are photos we collected of the best souvenirs and ephemera available to the public.

NEW DELHI — For cricket-crazy Indians, the Indian Premier League (IPL) transformed the old, colonial-era gentleman’s game into 21st-century, swashbuckling entertainment — replete with bling, Bollywood, billionaires, pom-pom waving cheerleaders and scandalous after-parties.

Shah Rukh Khan, a Bollywood actor and co-owner of the Kolkata Knight Riders team, gestures toward a security guard at Wankhede Stadium in Mumbai. Khan is to be banned for life from entering the Wankhede Stadium following an altercation he had with security gurads and officials of the Mumbai Cricket Association. (Indranil Mukherjee - AFP/Getty Images)

The league squeezed the long, slow game to a relatively scant three hours, packed it with American-style energy and thumping music, and even brought in the Washington Redskins cheerleaders for a cameo appearance in 2008.

NEW DELHI — On a dusty lane too narrow for a car to fit through, the Delhi Girls’ Home sits shrouded by the minarets and residential houses that litter Delhi’s outer suburb of Burari. It’s a cavernous three-story building, housing 15 young Indian girls.

At the end of poorly lighted hallways, the girls’ rooms are packed with metal bunk beds; the walls are covered with Winnie the Pooh, Cinderella and Christian messages.

Ishant, 2, peers through a gate at the PALNA adoption center in New Delhi. The center is a part of the Delhi Council for Child Welfare, a nongovernmental organization established in 1952 to care for children displaced during the riots that followed the partition of India. (Benjamin Gottlieb for The Washington Post)

The girls living at the Delhi Girls’ Home represent the complicated relationship Indians have with adoption. Their families, who are from a mix of Christian, Hindu and Sikh backgrounds, were unable to care for them and sent their girls to the Christian faith-based home for a chance at a better life.

BEIJING -- The call came in at 3:19 p.m., from a cell phone in Beijing.

“This is Gary, Gary Locke,” the ambassador said.

I wasn’t expecting the call, and I fumbled around to see if I had a notebook and pen anywhere near at hand. 

For days, reporters trying to get any information out of the U.S. Embassy on the status of dissident Chen Guangcheng had been met only with a wall of silence. Maybe, I thought, the Chinese-born U.S. ambassador was finally willing to share some tidbits on the whereabouts of the man who was currently China’s most famous activist, the blind lawyer jailed and then confined to his house for years because of his outspoken advocacy on behalf of women forced to have abortions in support of China’s one-child policies.

What I was not prepared for was when Locke said, “I’m here with Chen Guangcheng.  Do you speak Chinese?  Hold on.” 

And then passed the phone over.

NEW DELHI — For hundreds of millions of cricket-crazy Indians, 39-year-old Sachin Tendulkar is a god. And on Thursday, this god was nominated as a member of parliament.

“God Has a New House”, declared India’s leading daily, The Times of India on Friday about the entry of the reigning superstar of world cricket into the Rajya Sabha, or the House of Elders, one of two Houses in the Indian parliament.

As fans celebrated the elevation of the soft spoken, curly haired “master blaster”, TV shows, twitterati and analysts asked one sobering question: Will this god clean up India’s politics? Or will the corrupt cesspool of Indian politics muddy the unblemished hero?