President Barack Obama & First Lady Michelle Obama G20 London Visit Obama Meets The Queen

U.S. President Barack Obama and his family gave Queen Elizabeth II an iPod when they arrived Wednesday at London's Buckingham Palace.

The New York Times reported that a White House aide said the first family gave the queen an iPod loaded with video and photos of her 2007 trip to the United States, as well as Broadway show tunes.

The Obamas also gave the queen a rare songbook signed by Richard Rodgers, of Rodgers and Hammerstein, the newspaper reported.

In exchange, the queen gave the Obamas a silver-framed signed photograph, a gift she gives to all visiting dignitaries. [UPI]

Can you believe that Barack Obama can honestly say I gave the Queen a cool ipod and all I got was a picture? Dang O you got bamboozled! Barack Obama's ipod gift included 40 Broadway show tunes.

President Barack Obama kept trying to wrap it up, get out of there and get on with it all.

Raw Video: Obama's Meet With Queen

"All right?" he said conclusively after dealing with the same question about global markets for the umpteenth time. His impeccably frozen listening position had held out a good 45 minutes of the press conference with Gordon Brown, as had his eloquent gestures and language. But the world's most popular man was getting fidgety beneath this heavily gilded Foreign Office ceiling.

Prime minister Brown, though, was having none of it. "George?" he hailed another of "my friends in the British media". George asked whether President Obama had a message for the England football team before its World Cup qualifier against Ukraine.

Resigned to further delay, Obama replied: "I'm having enough trouble back home picking ... the college basketball. The last thing I'm going to do is wade into European football."

Obama's arrival in London was set against a double backdrop: of his global super-stardom, and of a sour taste left on the British diplomatic palate by Brown's visit to Washington when the honour of being the first European leader to be hosted by Obama was tempered by the relegation of the "special relationship" to "partnership".

This has not only to do with affection between Labour and George Bush. Anyone who has read his books knows that Obama does not feel benign towards the UK in the same way that Ronald Reagan or the Bushes did, for reasons of heritage in the US and in Kenya.

But yesterday Obama appeared eager to put any pique to rest. After standing as still as a statue throughout Brown's desperately effusive welcome, Obama highlighted "the special relationship", which relaxed into "the United States as a peer of these other guys" in the G20.

This was not to be mistaken, however for the much-trumpeted "end of American hegemony" on which foreign secretary David Miliband briefs, about which Obama was asked. America, he said, had a "system of values" to which the world would always look, and "cannot miss the opportunity to lead".

If Brown's delight at the visit was sad in its way, the public's was effervescent. Among the crowds greeting Obama with American flags were many black Britons, including Rose Ellis, a nurse who had taken the day off with her boyfriend, Lucas. "He's my favourite person in the world," said Rose. "He's exciting, he's a leader of all people of colour and, well, he's cool, I mean he's HOT!" Lucas, a little less enthusiastically, added: "Yeah, he is."[Guardian UK]

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