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President Obama returned to Washington on Tuesday after a weeklong visit to Asia.

The four-nation tour was designed to showcase U.S. involvement in the region, but it produced only modest diplomatic developments. And toward the end of the trip, the president offered a modest assessment of his overall foreign policy.

The Asia trip didn't produce a blockbuster trade deal, or bring an end to North Korea's nuclear threat. The U.S. won a smaller-scale agreement to station military forces in the Philippines. And it polished its newfound ties with Malaysia. This is the kind of workaday diplomacy that President Obama says is not sexy but pays off in the long run.

"That may not always attract a lot of attention, and it doesn't make for good argument on Sunday morning shows. But it avoids errors. You hit singles; you hit doubles. Every once in a while we may be able to hit a home run. But we steadily advance the interests of the American people and our partnership with folks around the world."

The ongoing crisis in Ukraine cast a shadow over the trip. Having watched Russia annex Crimea with only limited challenge from the West, Asian allies wanted reassurance the U.S. will support them against any aggressive moves by China. Congressional Republicans, like Tennessee Sen. Bob Corker, have criticized what they say is the administration's tepid response to Russia's moves in Ukraine.

"I'm very concerned that as we've seen from this administration on so many tough issues, their policies are always late — after, after the point in time when we could have made a difference in the outcome," Corker said on CBS.

Obama suggests his critics are really calling for a stronger military response, and argues they haven't learned the lessons of the Iraq War:

"Frankly, most of the foreign-policy commentators that have questioned our policies would go headlong into a bunch of military adventures that the American people have no interest in participating in and would not advance our core security interests."

David Rothkopf, the editor of Foreign Policy magazine, concedes some of the president's critics are trigger-happy. But he also says Obama is too quick to suggest that sending in the troops is the only possible alternative.

"There is something between the catastrophe of the Iraq War and total impotence that is an option for U.S. foreign policy," he says.

Rothkopf would have liked to see the U.S. act more decisively in Syria and Egypt, and on global issues such as climate change. While the president's modest talk of hitting singles partly reflects the experience of five-plus years in office, Rothkopf says there's a danger of setting the bar too low.

"He's being realistic, but I think he's also rationalizing where we've ended up in a way that is a little self-serving and not sufficiently demanding of himself or performance from his team."

Obama insists the U.S. will continue to make a difference around the world, using all the tools available to it. But the president was frank this week in citing the limits of U.S. power.

"There are going to be times where there are disasters and difficulties and challenges all around the world. And not all of those are going to be immediately solvable by us."

Obama takes seriously the idea that he was elected to end wars, not start new ones. But in his drive to avoid making errors, Rothkopf says, the president also runs the risk of playing it too safe.

"I think he's moved into a kind of a mode where he will consider his presidency and its foreign policy to be successful if we don't screw up in a big way like we did during the first term of the Bush administration. And, you know, that's fair. We don't want to go back there. But it may leave some problems on the field for the next president."

This president still has 2 1/2 years, though, in which to refine the Obama Doctrine.

Some countries in Syria's neighborhood are feeling inundated with refugees, and countries like Greece are making it harder for them to enter the country. Now Bulgaria has followed suit, with growing reports of Syrian refugees facing violent beatings, according to a new report by Human Rights Watch.

Among the poorest European states, Bulgaria was ill-prepared for the spike in refugees who came across its border last fall. The government quickly beefed up border patrols as part of a "pushback" policy designed to keep the refugees in Turkey. It's a policy that refugees and rights advocates say the border police are executing with a vengeance.

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Youth is a time of idealism and energy except, perhaps, when it comes to voting in the mid-term elections.

A new Harvard Institute of Politics poll found that interest in voting in the November 2014 elections among 18-to-29-year-old voters is lower now than just several months ago — and even lower than it was at a similar point in 2010.

Only 24 percent of those polled said they would definitely be voting, according to the survey. That was a drop of 10 percentage points since last November and a seven point drop from four years ago.

These are the kind of polling results guaranteed to raise Republican hopes and give Democrats sleepless nights. Younger voters tend to vote Democratic. If they are significantly less inclined to vote this year than they were in 2010 — when Democrats lost the House — Election Day 2014 could be very gloomy indeed for Democrats.

The other piece of bad news for the president's party in the Harvard poll was something we've seen elsewhere — there's more intensity among Republican voters than Democrats.

The poll found 44 percent of the 18-to-29 year olds who voted for Mitt Romney in 2012 say they definitely plan to vote this fall. That compared with 35 percent of President Obama voters who said they planned to vote in November 2014.

While these numbers are obviously bad for Democrats, they're not necessarily determinative, as least not according to Sasha Issenberg, author of "The Victory Lab," which explains techniques campaigns use to motivate their voters to go to the polls.

In a recent New Republic piece, Issenberg, a fellow at UCLA's Luskin School of Public Affairs, writes that Democrats may be able to drive up turnout numbers if they use proven methods that motivate a portion of "unreliable" voters — like young people — to go to the polls.

The challenge is those methods, like sending canvassers out to targeted voters or dropping direct mail in the right mailboxes can be costly. It requires donors and activists to stay engaged which is easier said than done, Issenberg says.

There was a time in Eastern Europe when the landscape was dotted with wooden synagogues, some dating back to the 1600s. Inside, the walls and ceilings were covered with intricate painted designs. Almost all of these structures were destroyed during the Holocaust, and with them a folk art. But in Burlington, Vt., a synagogue mural has been uncovered where it lay hidden for a quarter century.

Aaron Goldberg grew up in a section of Burlington known as Little Jerusalem. His family was among the Jewish immigrants who settled there in the late 1800s, mostly from Lithuania. Goldberg first saw the mural in the 1970s when he was in middle school and accompanied his mother to a carpet store.

"I have a distinct memory of going up to the second floor to look at the carpet rolls and the remnants with my mother and seeing a painting on the back wall," he says. "It was surreal."

The store, it turned out, had once been a synagogue. Shoppers could see rays of sunlight, a crown hovering above a tablet with the Ten Commandments and a throne supported by two lions of Judah — all part of a mural stretching 10 feet high and 18 feet wide. It had been painted in 1910 by an immigrant artist named Ben Zion Black.

Years later, Goldberg and another member of his synagogue learned that the carpet store had been sold and the new owner was going to convert the building into apartments.

"She allowed us about a month to see if we could figure out a plan to get the mural out," he says. "So we called museums, hospitals, colleges, commercial warehouse storage spaces all over the East Coast and we could not locate a space. So we asked her if she would consider walling up the mural."

The owner agreed and for 25 years tenants lived in an apartment not knowing what was behind the walls.

An Exuberant Work Of Art

Two years ago, the Ohavi Zedek Synagogue, where Goldberg serves as archivist, started renting the apartment. It tore down the wall that had been erected to protect the mural and hired art conservator Connie Silver to help restore it.

"This is a really exuberant work of art," she says.

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