Hawaiian Governor Neil Abercrombie wants to find a way to release more information about US President Barack Obama’s Hawaii birth and dispel conspiracy theories that he was born elsewhere.
Abercrombie was a friend of Obama’s parents and knew him as a child, and is deeply troubled by the effort to cast doubt on the president’s citizenship.
The newly elected governor will ask the state attorney general’s office about what can be done to put an end to questions about Obama’s birth documentation from Aug. 4, 1961, spokeswoman Donalyn Dela Cruz said on Tuesday.
“He had a friendship with Mr Obama’s parents, and so there is a personal issue at hand,” Dela Cruz said. “Is it going to be done immediately? No, the first thing on our list is the economy.”
It’s unclear what Abercrombie could do, because Hawaii’s privacy laws have long barred the release of a certified birth certificate to anyone who doesn’t have a tangible interest.
Hawaii’s health director said last year and in 2008 that she had seen and verified Obama’s original vital records, and birth notices in two Honolulu newspapers were published within days of Obama’s birth at Kapiolani Maternity and Gynecological Hospital in Honolulu.
So-called “birthers” claim Obama is ineligible to be president because they say there’s no proof he was born in the US, with many of the skeptics questioning whether he was actually born in Kenya, his father’s home country.
“What bothers me is that some people who should know better are trying to use this for political reasons,” Abercrombie told the Los Angeles Times last week. “Maybe I’m the only one in the country that could look you right in the eye right now and tell you, ‘I was here when that baby was born.’”
Abercrombie was unavailable for additional comment on Tuesday because he was vacationing on Maui, Dela Cruz said.
The Obama campaign issued a certificate of live birth in 2008, an official document from the state showing the president’s birth date, city and name, along with his parents’ names and races. The certificate doesn’t list the name of the hospital where he was born or the physician who delivered him, information collected by the state as part of its vital records.
Abercrombie, originally from New York, befriended Obama’s parents at the University of Hawaii after he moved here in 1959, the same year the islands became a state.
Abercrombie, 72, has said he remembers seeing Obama as a child with his parents at social events, although he acknowledged that he didn’t see his parents with their newborn son at the hospital.
The number of requests for Obama’s birth information increased this month as the Obama family prepared to vacation in Hawaii.
The Hawaiian Department of Health had received 27 requests for the president’s birth information this month as of last Thursday, up from 16 last month, said spokeswoman Janice Okubo.
Information requests rose despite a new state law allowing officials to ignore persistent and repetitive inquiries, a law that has been used about six times by the department, Okubo said.
“It’s just a few people, and some of their requests are the same,” she said. “The requests fluctuate from month to month.”
Nearly all birth certificate information seekers are from the mainland US, with requests rarely coming from Hawaii residents, said Cathy Takase, acting director for the Hawaiian Office of Information Practices.
Takase usually responds to appeals for Obama’s birth records by telling requesters that the information they’re seeking is contained in records protected by statute.
James Watson — the Nobel laureate co-credited with the pivotal discovery of DNA’s double-helix structure, but whose career was later tainted by his repeated racist remarks — has died, his former lab said on Friday. He was 97. The eminent biologist died on Thursday in hospice care on Long Island in New York, announced the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, where he was based for much of his career. Watson became among the 20th century’s most storied scientists for his 1953 breakthrough discovery of the double helix with researcher partner Francis Crick. Along with Crick and Maurice Wilkins, he shared the
OUTRAGE: The former strongman was accused of corruption and responsibility for the killings of hundreds of thousands of political opponents during his time in office Indonesia yesterday awarded the title of national hero to late president Suharto, provoking outrage from rights groups who said the move was an attempt to whitewash decades of human rights abuses and corruption that took place during his 32 years in power. Suharto was a US ally during the Cold War who presided over decades of authoritarian rule, during which up to 1 million political opponents were killed, until he was toppled by protests in 1998. He was one of 10 people recognized by Indonesian President Prabowo Subianto in a televised ceremony held at the presidential palace in Jakarta to mark National
LANDMARK: After first meeting Trump in Riyadh in May, al-Sharaa’s visit to the White House today would be the first by a Syrian leader since the country’s independence Syrian President Ahmed al-Sharaa arrived in the US on Saturday for a landmark official visit, his country’s state news agency SANA reported, a day after Washington removed him from a terrorism blacklist. Sharaa, whose rebel forces ousted long-time former Syrian president Bashar al-Assad late last year, is due to meet US President Donald Trump at the White House today. It is the first such visit by a Syrian president since the country’s independence in 1946, according to analysts. The interim leader met Trump for the first time in Riyadh during the US president’s regional tour in May. US envoy to Syria Tom Barrack earlier
US President Donald Trump handed Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban a one-year exemption from sanctions for buying Russian oil and gas after the close right-wing allies held a chummy White House meeting on Friday. Trump slapped sanctions on Moscow’s two largest oil companies last month after losing patience with Russian President Vladimir Putin over his refusal to end the nearly four-year-old invasion of Ukraine. However, while Trump has pushed other European countries to stop buying oil that he says funds Moscow’s war machine, Orban used his first trip to the White House since Trump’s return to power to push for
RSS