JENS SCHLUETER/AFP/Getty Images

While soon-to-be former Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe is struggling with his health following his resignation announcement, there are some people in Japan that have been injected with fresh lease on life: those in the manga industry.

Following the news of Abe's resignation Wednesday, shares in manga retailers jumped dramatically on speculation that Taro Aso, an avid manga fan, will soon replace Abe as Japan's PM. For instance, Broccoli, a retail chain selling games and comics, saw its share price leap 71 percent, and second-hand bookstore Mandarake closed 13 percent higher. Meanwhile, Japan's main share index fell half a percent.

But why has the manga market reacted so enthusiastically? Simply knowing that Abe's likely successor is a manga fan hardly explains the dramatic market movement.

Maybe investors sense that there may be more tangible benefits in the near future. While serving as Japan's foreign minster earlier this year, Aso was instrumental in creating the "Nobel prize" for foreign manga artists. He's keen on promoting manga overseas, arguing that the comics are a critical vehicle for enhancing Japanese diplomacy, with "warm feelings" for Japanese manga and anime translating into warm feelings for Japanese foreign policy, especially in the Asian region, where manga is already popular. Perhaps the investors responsible for the jump hope that Aso's manga diplomacy will prompt international markets to go crazy for the Japanese comics. Perhaps they even hope that Aso may provide more than just publicity. Whatever happens with the industry, one thing's for sure if Aso take the reins: Prince Pickles will be sticking around.

White House photo

Oops, Bush did it again. After telling Australia's deputy prime minister that "We're kicking ass" in Iraq, U.S. President George W. Bush made two more of his characteristic verbal blunders at the APEC summit in Sydney.

In a speech this morning, Bush welcomed business leaders to the OPEC meeting, not the APEC meeting. Apparently, he got his PECs confused, referring to the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries instead of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation forum. He made a quick save, though, by smiling and saying that he planned to attend an OPEC meeting next year. (The meetings section of OPEC's Web site, however, doesn't yet have anything listed for 2008.)

As he continued his speech, Bush recalled how Australian Prime Minister John Howard had gone to Iraq last year to visit "Austrian troops." Actually, there are no Austrian troops in Iraq, but there are 1,500 Australian military personnel in and around Mesopotamia.

You gotta give the prez credit for adding some comic relief to what might otherwise be a no-nonsense meeting of government officials and business leaders.

iStockphoto.com

Earlier this week, Passport brought you the inaugural flight of the Vatican's new airline, which will ferry eager Catholics to holy sites across Europe.

But so far, it hasn't been all smooth sailing for the heavenly voyagers. Pilgrims returning home from the shrine at Lourdes in the south of France were told by airport security officials that they couldn't take more than 100 ml of holy water on board with them.

Sorry folks, even the big guy upstairs can't get you out of anti-terror security regulations. You'll have to take off your shoes just like the rest of us.

Surely this qualifies as animal abuse:

Models shows off dogs in designer outfits during the 2007 Pet Fashion Week NY dog runway fashion show, August 19, 2007. Pet Fashion Week was launched a year ago for buyers and sellers of pet lifestyle items from all over the world to exhibit new ideas and innovation in the pet industry. (Photos: TIMOTHY A. CLARY/AFP/Getty Images)

DIMITAR DILKOFF/AFP/Getty Images

Zitiste may be a long way from South Philly, but this beleaguered Serbian village is hoping for a morale boost from the Italian Stallion himself. City officials unveiled a three-meter bronze statue of Rocky Balboa by sculptor Bojan Marceta over the weekend in the town square. Thirty-five miles north of Belgrade, Zitiste has fallen victim to flooding and landslides in recent years, gaining a reputation for misfortune and catastrophe. Officials hope that Rocky's underdog story will help the town's image:

For years, only negative reports on farm disease, monstrous murders, floods and landslides have been coming from our village," said Mayor Zoran Babic.

"This is the chance to give a better, more positive image to Zitiste."

No word yet on whether Vladimir Putin's government—always a factor in Serbian politics—will insist on equal representation for Ivan Drago.

Remember our blog post about those 1,500 prisoners in the Philippines who were jamming out to Michael Jackson's "Thriller"? Well, ABC News went behind the scenes and visited the Cebu province prison to find out how it all got made.

They talk to warden Byron Garcia, who conceived of the routines for prison yard exercise and YouTube fame (and whose sister happens to be the local governor). Are the prisoners actually enjoying themselves? According to a journalist interviewed by ABC who has visited the prison, the enforced dancing may actually be a violation of their human rights. He says:

I think Byron sees his prisoners as his dancing monkeys.

Garcia, however, thinks everything is copacetic:

We have a good relationship. Whatever I tell them to do, they do.

Check out the ABC News video here:

Not only do rubber duckies make bath time lots of fun, they tell us a lot about the environment, too.

Fifteen years ago, 29,000 bathtub toys—ducks, frogs, turtles, and beavers made of plastic, actually—fell off a container ship in the central Pacific Ocean.

Oceanographer Curtis Ebbesmeyer has been tracking the toys' movement around the world and has found that about a hundred of them drifted on oceanic currents to Alaska, north to the Bering Sea, across the North Pole, alongside Greenland, and into the North Atlantic. As recently as 2003, one of the ducks washed up on the shore in Maine and one of the frogs landed in Scotland. The container of toys aren't the only ocean flotsam that Ebbesmeyer has tracked. He's also tracked 80,000 Nike shoes that were also lost in the Pacific, 34,000 hockey gloves, five million Legos lost off the coast of England, and survey stakes that have drifted in the ocean from Japan. As Ebbesmeyer writes in today's Wall Street Journal, there is way too much junk, especially plastic junk, in the world's seas:

Most of it does not biodegrade. It just breaks down into ever smaller pieces, to the size of confetti and, finally, dust. Fish, birds and other marine animals eat this pseudo-planton and pass it up the food chain. Our world-wide litter is poisoning the seas, the creatures within them, and ultimately, ourselves."

If you spot one of the ducks on your shore, now bleached to white and imprinted with the words "The First Years," submit a photo and note to Ebbesmeyer's Web site, www.beachcombersalert.org. 

Question: How do you discipline bad cops who litter, arrive late, park where they aren't supposed to, and commit other misdemeanors?

Answer: Make them wear Hello Kitty armbands as punishment.

In Thailand, police officers who behave badly will now have to wear a hot pink armband—picturing Hello Kitty sitting on two hearts—as a mark of shame. A police official explained the rationale by saying: "[Hello] Kitty is a cute icon for young girls. It's not something macho police officers want covering their biceps."

The only concession is that officers receiving the armband punishment will have to stay in the division office all day. They won't have to wear Hello Kitty in public.

STR/AFP

Associated Press reporter Tim Sullivan recently took a trip to a region in northeastern India that boasts the world's hottest chili pepper, according to the folks at Guinness World Records.

Known as the bhut jolokia, the pepper registers at over 1,000,000 "Scoville units," the industry-standard measurement that was invented by pharmacist Wilbur L. Scoville in 1912. Scoville relied on his tongue, but today a machine known as a High Pressure Liquid Chromatograph handles this hot job. For reference, a garden-variety bell pepper is a zero, while a typical Mexican habanero rings in at about 350,000 Scoville units. Tobasco sauce can be up to 5,000 units.

So 1,000,000 is pretty damned spicy, as Sullivan discovered when—on the stellar advice of his editor—he ate an entire bhut jolokia:

It was awful. My eyes watered uncontrollably and my nose ran. I felt like I was gargling with acid. My hands quivered. As the minutes passed, the pain grew worse.

I shoveled in yogurt: No relief. I chewed bread: Nothing. My head felt like it was expanding. My ears felt as if hot liquid was draining from them. Picture one of those old Tom and Jerry cartoons, with steam blasting from Tom's ears as a train whistle blows. That was me.

That quote comes from Sullivan's personal dispatch, but his main story on the hopes of the impoverished bhut jolokia growers is also worth reading. From the sound of it, the AP ought to have given him hazard pay.

It's easy to see globalization at work in the Philippines, as long as you just add a couple decades and throw in 1,000 orange jumpsuits. Nearly 24 years after the premier of Michael Jackson's "Thriller" video, prisoners in the central Philippine province of Cebu groove out during their morning exercises by re-enacting the zombie dance moves that became so famous on MTV.

The jailbirds also perform to Queen's "Radio Ga Ga" and don nuns' habits when dancing to "Hail Holy Queen" from the 1992 Whoopi Goldberg movie "Sister Act." Warden Byron Garcia introduced the choreography to the prisoners last year, but only uploaded the videos recently. They've been tearing up cyberspace ever since.

I want the prison system to learn from this," Garcia told Reuters. "The inmates are after all human beings and the inmates after all, once inside, know that they have committed mistakes, let them enjoy their stay."

News that President George W. Bush will briefly cede the powers of his office to Vice President Dick Cheney this weekend prompts a Passport Friday Afternoon Pop Quiz:

Which is a more painful procedure for George W. Bush to undergo?

A. Handing over the Oval Office to Dick Cheney.

B. Having a colonoscopy.

E-mail us with your opinion, and we'll post any particularly clever responses we get on Monday.

Editor's note: Christine chimes in to ask, "Hasn't Bush already handed over presidential powers to Cheney?"

Apparently, being Colin Powell just isn't what it used to be. Time was, the former secretary of state and chairman of the joint chiefs commanded audiences with the world's most powerful statesmen. Presidents and politicians sought his counsel. Now, he's being sold like a free toaster.

I woke up this morning to find Powell in an advertisement in the Washington Post, offered up as an also-ran at the Get Motivated seminar that rolls into town in September. "SAVE! SAVE! SAVE!" the ad declares. See Powell for "ALMOST FREE!"

(Click here to see a larger image)

How much is "almost free," you might ask? Forty-nine bucks. "Not $49 per person," explains the ad, "but per office! So, if you have 10 people from your office attend, the investment is only $4.90 each! That is almost free!"

Indeed it is. It's about the same price as a pack of smokes. Not a bad deal, considering the guy won a war.

Passport noted this week that the booming Chinese city of Chongqing is getting mighty creative with its public bathrooms. But the folks in Chongqing have nothing on the Japanese, who are so flush with cash that they're lining toilet stalls with yen.

(Hat tip: FP's Jeffrey Marn) 

MICHEL GANGNE/AFP

Nicolas Sarkozy, perhaps the most pro-American president in French history, has been stirring up a furor in the French and British media this summer with his most right-wing activity of all: jogging. And to add insult to injury, he often runs in his favorite NYPD T-shirt.

Sarkozy seems to be confirming a French belief that jogging is an activity for self-absorbed individualists such as Americans, the Times of London reports. The editor of V02, a sports magazine, told the left-wing French newspaper Libération, "Jogging is of course about performance and individualism, values that are traditionally ascribed to the right." The Times writes that sports sociologist Patrick Mignon thinks that "French intellectuals have always held sports in contempt, while totalitarian regimes cultivated physical fitness." Meanwhile, Boris Johnson, a member of British Parliament who jogs, says:

Of course [jogging] is right-wing. … The very act of forcing yourself to go for a run, every morning, is a highly conservative business. There is the mental effort needed to overcome your laziness.

A leading French philosopher, Alain Finkielkraut, says Sarkozy should stop his un-French and "undignified" athletic activity, which involves the indecency of exposing one's knees. Finkielkraut thinks strolling is more cerebral and says, "Western civilization, in its best sense, was born with the promenade."

(Well, if sports are indeed right-wing, their health benefits certainly aren't showing up in the most conservative areas of the United States.)