Obama Statue Removed From Jakarta Park

A statue depicting Barack Obama as a child was recently removed from a park in Jakarta, Indonesia, where the president lived briefly in his youth. Since it was first erected last December, critics have targeted the bronze figure, inspired by photograph of a 10-year-old Obama wearing shorts and holding a butterfly. Some argue that an Indonesian icon should have been honored in the park instead, but most Indonesians feel no malice toward the president, who went to school in Jakarta from 1967 to 1971. The nearly four-foot statue was instead moved to an affluent government school the young Obama attended, which is where it will stand when the president visits the Indonesian capital on March 20. “Everyone at the school welcomes it,” one teacher said of the statue, which was funded privately by the Jakarta-based nonprofit group Friends of Obama Foundation.