The half-brother of US President Barack Obama has been made an “image ambassador” for southern China’s booming city of Shenzhen, state press reported yesterday.
Mark Obama Ndesandjo was named image ambassador on Friday by the Shenzhen Youth League for his volunteer work teaching piano to orphans in the city, the Beijing News reported.
Since moving to Shenzhen in 2002, Ndesandjo has given lessons once a week to orphans at the Shenzhen Social Welfare Center, the paper said.
The son of President Obama’s late father and his third wife Ruth Nidesand, Ndesandjo reportedly runs a business consultancy in China.
During Obama’s visit to China last month, the two had a brief, but emotional reunion in Beijing.
“We had a big hug. And my wife and he had a big, big hug. He was very powerful, very intense, because he’s my big brother,” Ndesandjo said in an interview at the time with CNN.
The two half-brothers did not know each other growing up, but have met from time to time as adults, and always manage to re-forge their bond, Ndesandjo said.
Ndesandjo revealed in a semi-autobiographical book that he was often physically abused by his father, Barack Obama Sr — a revelation President Obama said was not entirely surprising.
“I haven’t read the book. But it’s no secret that my father was a troubled person,” Obama told CNN.
POLITICAL PRISONERS VS DEPORTEES: Venezuela’s prosecutor’s office slammed the call by El Salvador’s leader, accusing him of crimes against humanity Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele on Sunday proposed carrying out a prisoner swap with Venezuela, suggesting he would exchange Venezuelan deportees from the US his government has kept imprisoned for what he called “political prisoners” in Venezuela. In a post on X, directed at Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro, Bukele listed off a number of family members of high-level opposition figures in Venezuela, journalists and activists detained during the South American government’s electoral crackdown last year. “The only reason they are imprisoned is for having opposed you and your electoral fraud,” he wrote to Maduro. “However, I want to propose a humanitarian agreement that
ECONOMIC WORRIES: The ruling PAP faces voters amid concerns that the city-state faces the possibility of a recession and job losses amid Washington’s tariffs Singapore yesterday finalized contestants for its general election on Saturday next week, with the ruling People’s Action Party (PAP) fielding 32 new candidates in the biggest refresh of the party that has ruled the city-state since independence in 1965. The move follows a pledge by Singaporean Prime Minister Lawrence Wong (黃循財), who took office last year and assumed the PAP leadership, to “bring in new blood, new ideas and new energy” to steer the country of 6 million people. His latest shake-up beats that of predecessors Lee Hsien Loong (李顯龍) and Goh Chok Tong (吳作棟), who replaced 24 and 11 politicians respectively
Young women standing idly around a park in Tokyo’s west suggest that a giant statue of Godzilla is not the only attraction for a record number of foreign tourists. Their faces lit by the cold glow of their phones, the women lining Okubo Park are evidence that sex tourism has developed as a dark flipside to the bustling Kabukicho nightlife district. Increasing numbers of foreign men are flocking to the area after seeing videos on social media. One of the women said that the area near Kabukicho, where Godzilla rumbles and belches smoke atop a cinema, has become a “real
Archeologists in Peru on Thursday said they found the 5,000-year-old remains of a noblewoman at the sacred city of Caral, revealing the important role played by women in the oldest center of civilization in the Americas. “What has been discovered corresponds to a woman who apparently had elevated status, an elite woman,” archeologist David Palomino said. The mummy was found in Aspero, a sacred site within the city of Caral that was a garbage dump for more than 30 years until becoming an archeological site in the 1990s. Palomino said the carefully preserved remains, dating to 3,000BC, contained skin, part of the
RSS