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Nevertheless, there is one thing that I don’t quite understand. On the Certification of Live Birth (COLB), now widely available on the internet, Obama’s father’s race is listed as “African”. (snip) For the sake of argument, let’s say that the terminology is peculiar to Hawaii and Obama filed a Late Certificate of Birth or perhaps his documents were updated in recent years. In that case, the publicly available COLB must reflect what is written on the source birth documents, even updated ones. In Appendix B “Hawaii Model – Standard for Clustering Race/Ethnicity Categories” contained in an article published in 2003...

In a radio interview on Monday, potential 2012 presidential candidate Mike Huckabee repeatedly claims that President Obama grew up in Kenya. A spokesman for Huckabee later told CBS News that the former Arkansas governor misspoke. In an interview on WOR's "The Steve Malzberg Show," Huckabee made reference to Mr. Obama's "having grown up in Kenya" and spoke of him growing up "with a Kenyan father and grandfather" - despite the fact that Mr. Obama grew up largely in Hawaii and barely knew his father at all. In responding to Malzberg's question about whether "we deserve to know more about this...

Following my article last week on whether Barack Obama deserved to get the Nobel Peace Prize, my inbox was inundated with emails from American readers seeking to know whether I have proof that Obama was really born in Kenya. If he was born in Kenya, they theorise, he is therefore not entitled to claim American citizenship and the presidency of the United States. I could not help laughing at those emails, most displaying a naivete' and lack of understanding of this sentence from last week’s article: "It seems Barack Hussein Obama, President of the United States of America (via a...

If we Kenyans were granted one wish for 2008, we would request the right to vote for Democratic Senator Barack Obama in the U.S. presidential elections. There would be no more questions about whether he is "black enough." Kenyans believe in Barack Obama so much that I'm willing to bet that if he were to run against our President Mwai Kibaki and opposition leader Raila Odinga -- the two men at the center of Kenya's disputed December 27 election that has led to widespread tribal violence -- he would win in a landslide. The absolute support that Kenyans offer Obama...

A barefoot old woman in a ripped dress is sitting on a log in front of her tin-roof bungalow in this remote village in western Kenya, jovially greeting visitors. Mama Sarah, as she is known around here, lives without electricity or running water. She is illiterate and doesn’t know when she was born. Yet she may have a seat of honor at the next presidential inauguration in Washington — depending on what happens to her stepgrandson, Barack Obama. Mama Sarah cannot communicate with Mr. Obama, who calls her his grandmother, because she speaks only her Luo tribal language and a...

NAIROBI, Kenya - During a visit to his father's homeland, Sen. Barack Obama electrified the thousands of Kenyans who thronged every stop of his tour. Some hoped for promises of largesse, others to bask in the glory of a successful African-American politician, but all wanted to see the man they consider a local kid made good. "Simply by coming here, he was making a very important statement. He was telling all Kenyans, and especially our youth, that the sky is really the limit," columnist Dominic Odipo wrote in Kenya's oldest newspaper, The Standard. This despite the fact that Obama never...

In 1989, Zedueh Doerue, a proud and traditional-minded father of eight, smuggled his family out of civil-war ravaged Liberia into Guinea, a more stable West African nation to the south. Zedueh Doerue: "I don't understand it." Before long, Guinea, a former French colony, began to slide into political unrest as well, and Mr. Doerue was jailed and harassed as an insurgent because he spoke English. Four years ago, a Catholic refugee resettlement program brought him to Pittsburgh, where two of his children were born. Now, working as a nursing assistant and living in a two-story Bon Air home, Mr. Doerue...

1 hour, 49 minutes ago DES MOINES, Iowa - A man who immigrated from Kenya to the United States found prosperity beyond his expectations on the day he became a U.S. citizen. Shortly after Moses Bittok, of West Des Moines, took the oath of citizenship on Friday, he discovered he had a $1.89 million winning ticket from the Iowa Lottery's Hot Lotto game. "It's almost like you adopted a country and then they netted you $1.8 million," Bittok said Monday as he cashed in his ticket. "It doesn't happen anywhere — I guess only in America." Bittok said he took...

WYOMING [(MI)]-- He lost his parents at age 4 to his homeland's brutal civil war. He survived a 600-mile march to neighboring Ethiopia. Then, this "Lost Boy" of Sudan languished in a Kenyan refugee camp for nine years before coming to West Michigan as a refugee in 2000. Now, Simon Majak figures it's time that he gives back -- by putting on the uniform of the U.S. Marine Corps. "This is my new country," said Majak, 22, who expects to ship out Saturday for boot camp in California. "Joining the Marines is my way of saying thank you."

A recent article in the New York Times newspaper noted that there are currently more Africans who have arrived in the United States voluntarily than the total of those who were brought in as captives during the slave trade. Since the end of World War II, there has been a steady stream of immigrants to the United States from Africa. But in the 1990's their numbers dramatically increased. Now, the presence of these relatively-recent African immigrants is unmistakably visible in some American communities. When Barack Obama, a little-known state legislator from Illinois, was elected to the U.S. Senate last November,...

More Africans Enter U.S. Than in Days of Slavery For the first time, more blacks are coming to the United States from Africa than during the slave trade. Since 1990, according to immigration figures, more have arrived voluntarily than the total who disembarked in chains before the United States outlawed international slave trafficking in 1807. More have been coming here annually - about 50,000 legal immigrants - than in any of the peak years of the middle passage across the Atlantic, and more have migrated here from Africa since 1990 than in nearly the entire preceding two centuries. New York...

Has any of you given any thought to this fact? Teresa Heinz Kerry is the wife of Senator John Kerry of Massachusetts and the former wife of the late Senator John Heinz of Pennsylvania. Heinz Kerry was born in Mozambique, the daughter of a Portuguese medical doctor. She earned a bachelor's degree from the University of the Witwatersrand in South Africa, Mozambique Location : South-eastern Africa, bordering the Mozambique Channel, between South Africa and Tanzania So if John Kerry is elected , Teresa Heinz Kerry could rightfully claim to be the first "AFRICAN AMERICAN FIRST LADY OF THE UNITED STATES...

SILVER SPRING, Md., Aug. 27 - For a moment, the Ethiopian-born activist seemed to melt into the crowd, blending into the sea of black professors, health experts and community leaders considering how to educate blacks about the dangers of prostate cancer. But when he piped up to suggest focusing some attention on African immigrants, the dividing lines were promptly and pointedly drawn. The focus of the campaign, the activist, Abdulaziz Kamus, was told, would be strictly on African-Americans."I said, 'But I am African and I am an American citizen; am I not African-American?' " said Mr. Kamus, who is an...

On "The Big Story" with John Gibson, just now, Jesse Jackson was being interviewed by John. When asked his opinion of Heinz-Kerry, he said that she is a "free spirit". She was born in Mozambique, he observed, and is now an American citizen. Jesse Jackson then opined that this makes Teresa an African American. I s'pose now anything considered an "attack" on Teresa will now be labeled racist.

African Americans have a mixed reaction to Teresa Heinz Kerry's claim that she's African American herself, at least according to an informal survey conducted this week by WMCA-NY radio host Kevin McCullough. On Tuesday McCullough posed the question to his African American listeners, asking if it was appropriate for the Mozambican-born first lady-wannabe to describe herself using the term, which is universally interpreted in the U.S. to mean black. Caller Elgin from the Bronx said Heinz Kerry's claim didn't particularly bother him, but noted, "She's one of the whitest women imaginable. It's kind of reminiscent of Sammy Davis junior considering...

Student Caught In Racial Controversy Flyers Promote White Student For African-American Award POSTED: 6:39 AM CST January 22, 2004 UPDATED: 11:59 AM CST January 22, 2004 OMAHA, Neb. -- Four Westside High School students are suspended for promoting a white student for an African-American award. More than 150 flyers (pictured, below right) were distributed throughout the school Monday. They featured junior Trevor Richards (pictured, left), A South African native who moved to the United States in 1997. Westside officials say the flyers were were quickly removed because they were inappropriate and insensitive to black students. Trevor said he is...

Flyers Promote White Student For African-American Award POSTED: 6:39 AM CST January 22, 2004 UPDATED: 7:52 AM CST January 22, 2004 OMAHA, Neb. -- Four Westside High School students are suspended for promoting a white student for an African-American award. More than 150 flyers were distributed throughout the school Monday. They featured junior Trevor Richards, A South African native who moved to the United States in 1997. Westside officials say the flyers were were quickly removed because they were inappropriate and insensitive to black students. Trevor said he is as African as anyone else. "I had no intent of hurting...