WORD?
‘Obama shares ancestral ties with 7 ex-US presidents, including George Bush’
– Courtesy of TimesofIndia.Indiatimes.com –
New York: After finding that seven previous US Presidents, including George W. Bush and Bill Clinton are his distant kin, President Barack Obama has now discovered that the nations newest senator Scott Brown is also his distant cousin.
The New England Historical Geological Society (NEHGS), which has since 1845 traced the ancestry of Americans of English descent, says Obama is a long-lost cousin of Scott Brown.
A Republican, Brown created ripples in US politics Jan 19 by winning the Massachusetts senate seat long held by the late Edward Kennedy of the Democratic Party. His win has upset the President’s health reform agenda as Obama’s Democratic Party has lost the 60-mark filibuster majority in the 100-member Senate.
In a statement, the Boston-based New England Historic Genealogical Society says it has “uncovered family lines that link President BarackObama with Scott Brown, the newly elected Republican senator from Massachusetts.”
The society says Obama’s mother, Stanley Ann Dunham, and Brown’s mother, Judith Ann Rugg, both are descendants of Richard Singletary of Haverhill, Massachusetts, who died in 1687 at the age of 102.
” President Obama descends from Richard’s eldest son, Jonathan Singletary, who later changed his surname to Dunham. Scott Brown descends from Jonathan’s brother, Nathaniel Singletary. This kinship makes Obama and Brown 10th cousins,” the society statement says.
Like his illustrious descendants (Obama and Brown), Singletary too held public office during his time, serving as town selectman in both Salisbury and Haverhill, Massachusetts, in the 1650s, the statement says.
In 2008, the society made the startling discovery that Obama is related to seven former presidents, including George H. W. Bush, George W. Bush, Jimmy Carter, Gerald Ford, Lyndon Johnson, Harry S. Truman, and James Madison, as well as actor Brad Pitt.
Reacting to his family links to Obama, Brown has been quoted in the media as saying that he is happy about his family ties “such distinguished company.”
The society has also discovered that Brown too is related to six other presidents, including George H. W. Bush, George W. Bush, Richard Nixon, Calvin Coolidge, Herbert Hoover, and Rutherford Hayes.
With their common ancestry, will Brown make common cause with cousin Obama on health reforms? Unlikely, say political experts.
– Courtesy of Nationalblackagendaonline.com –
– Photography by Bruno Schlumberger, The Ottawa Citizen –
Courtesy of Ottawa Citizen
OTTAWA — A 42-year-old Ottawa woman returned home from her grandmother’s funeral to be handcuffed, strip-searched and accused of drug-smuggling by Canadian customs agents at the Ottawa airport Tuesday night.
Charmaine Archer, a nurse’s assistant at a long-term care facility was on a flight from Philadelphia, the last leg of her trip home from Jamaica. She and her four-year-old son were pulled aside for inspection by border services agents at the airport as they left the plane around 11 p.m.
“I noticed I was the only one in that area,” she said.
Agents told Archer, who is a Canadian citizen, she was flagged because she paid for part of her ticket with a credit card, because she booked last minute and because she only stayed for four days.
Agents took what she described as gauze swabs and ran them over her wallet, the lining of her suitcase and even her toothbrush. This took over an hour, Archer said.
Her toothbrush, agents said, tested positive for heroin and THC, the active ingredient in marijuana.
“I said, ‘You’re a liar.’ I don’t do drugs, I don’t know anybody that does drugs, and I wasn’t around drugs when I was in Jamaica … I come from an upstanding family and nobody touched that toothbrush but me.”
Agents told her she would have to submit to a strip search.
“I said to her, ‘No way that’s going to happen! My husband don’t know what’s inside my rectum and neither will you.”
She was threatened with arrest and told her child would be sent to Children’s Aid, Archer said. The boy was eventually allowed to join his father, who was waiting to pick him and Archer up in the airport.
Archer was handcuffed and she eventually agreed to be searched.
“I got undressed. There were three women in the room — quite humiliating, quite degrading. I’m a big person, very conscious of my body … you can imagine how I felt.
“They made me stand up and hold my arm up and they made me lift up my breast. Then she told me to turn around and bend all the way over with my feet wide apart. And then she told me to use my hand and open my rectum.
“They told me to put one foot forward then squat and cough … they told me to lift up my belly and they told me open my feet apart and to pry my legs apart and they looked underneath my crotch.”
When it was over, “they asked if I wanted to take a minute to sit down,” since she was shaking and crying. They offered to help repack her bag and two male officers put her bags on a trolley to bring them down to her waiting husband. It was 2 a.m., and they had found no drugs.
“They never apologized, never said anything,” she said. “They thought they had a big fish.”
“This is by no means isolated,” said Ewart Walters, editor of the Spectrum, a monthly newspaper aimed at Ottawa’s black community. “There have been enough incidents over the years of people being picked on.”
He pointed to Leon Stewart, who was held for three hours at the airport in March, 2000. Like Archer, he was strip searched, only Stewart was asked to produce a bowel movement to satisfy customs agents he wasn’t concealing drugs.
“There is an overwhelming number of black people coming from Jamaica who get stopped and asked questions.” Walters said.
Kerwin Dougan, Archer’s travel agent with Voyages G Travel in Gatineau, agreed the destination may play a role in determining which people are detained for searches, including Jamaica in a list of countries he says has a reputation for drugs.
Many of his clients and friends have come through the Ottawa airport “not happy about how they’ve been treated,” he said.
Before returning to Canada Dougan suggests wiping out suitcase linings, thoroughly washing hands and clothing, and being aware of who’s around you in the airport.
Even fame is no antidote. In 2001 R&B singer Wilson Pickett was strip-searched upon his arrival in Ottawa. Archer has retained legal counsel.
“I want to know what my rights were.” she said. “I hope no one will ever have to feel the form of degradation that I felt. And that lack of power.”
Nobody at the Canadian Border Services Agency could be reached for comment.
tbspears@thecitizen.canwest.com
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