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Barack and Michelle Obama return to White House for portrait unveiling

More than five years after Barack and Michelle Obama left the White House, the couple returned for the unveiling of their official portraits.

Ariana Triggs, USA TODAY

An April 12 Facebook post (direct link, archive link) shows a screenshot of a tweet and several photos of a passport belonging to a man named Barack Obama.

"Many of us already knew and have been saying that hes an ILLEGITIMATE president…. Well heres his brother dropping some Proofs!" the post reads.

The post was shared 20 times in six days. A similar claim was made in an April 12 Instagram post that was liked more than 1,000 times in three days before being taken down after the social media user was contacted by USA TODAY.

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The passport shown in this post belongs to Barack Obama Sr., the former presidents father. President Obama was born in Hawaii.

The photos in the social media post originated inApril 11 and April 12 tweets by Malik Obama, the half-brother of Barack Obama.

But he never claimed the photos showed the passport of the former president.His posts indicated he wanted the former president to keep the passport in his presidential library.

Malik Obama did not respond to requests for comment from USA TODAY, but he told Reuters the passport belonged to their father.

Its my fathers passport, Malik Obama told Reuters via email.

The photos in Malik Obamas tweets include several pieces of identifying information that show the passport belonged toBarack Obama Sr. Among the clearest indicators is that the man pictured in the April 12 tweet appears to be the elder Obama, pictured on the cover of a biography,and not the 44th president.

The passport also shows it was issued in 1959 in Kenya, which was a British colony at the time, and lists June 18, 1934, as the birthday of its bearer. President Obama was born Aug. 4, 1961.

Fact check: Claim Obama is moving to Kenya started as April Fools' Day joke

The passports bearer was born in Alego, Nyanza Province, of Kenya.

USA TODAY has previously debunked the claimthat Obama was born in Kenya, noting that the White House released both a standard birth certificate and the long-form version of the document that demonstrated he was born in Hawaii.

When the younger Obama became the first sitting American president to visit Kenya in 2015, he commented on the importance of visiting and appreciating his familys history.

I traveled to Alego, the village where my family was from, he said. I saw the graves of my father and my grandfather. And I learned things about their lives that I could have never learned through books.

USA TODAY reached out to the Instagram and Facebook users who shared the claim for comment.

The Associated Press and Lead Stories also debunked the claim.

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Our fact-check work is supported in part by a grant from Facebook.

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Fact check: Photos show passport belonging to President Obama's father - USA TODAY

In November 2018, when then-president Donald Trump challenged a federal judges impartiality by calling him an Obama judge, Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts was indignant. He insisted, We do not have Obama judges or Trump judges, Bush judges or Clinton judges. What we have is an extraordinary group of dedicated judges doing their level best to do equal right to those appearing before them.

I wanted to believe him. It was right to criticize the actual rulings of Trump-appointed judges, just as you might do so with a judge appointed by any other president, but it was wrong to label them Trump judges, as if the appointing president defined their judicial philosophy. True, prior to the Trump presidency, political scientists tried to match the ideology of judges with that of the appointing president, with varying success; at best, research showed that most judges ranged from the moderate right to the moderate left. The Senate confirmation process with some exceptions selected judges in proportion to their not taking extreme positions earlier in their judicial careers.

Take Ruth Bader Ginsburg. As a District of Columbia Appeals Court judge, she wrote narrow decisions, hewing closely to precedent. Jill Lepore (writing in The New Yorker) described Ginsburgs circuit court years as something like a decontamination chamber, in which Ginsburg was rinsed and scrubbed of the hazard of thirteen years as an advocate for womens rights. By 1993 she was sufficiently depolarized to be appointed to the Supreme Court. And the depolarization was not a ruse. She was the same on the Supreme Court, while the press labeled her a liberal.

District court judges were even more constrained, no matter who had appointed them. In the 1990s, the predominant approach was managerial judging, a phrase coined by Yale Law Professor Judith Resnik. Lower court judges were supposed to focus on being efficient, encouraging settlements, alternative dispute resolution, not writing opinions unless absolutely necessary, and only then on narrow grounds. (I described it as the pressure to duck, avoid, and evade.)

Recent events have proven Roberts (and me) wrong. There are no Obama, Bush, or Clinton judges, (or Reagan and Carter) but there are Trump-era judges. Not all of Trumps appointees fit the pattern, nor do they behave as Trump appointees in every case, but there are clear patterns.

Trump judges were appointed at a time of dramatic change at the Supreme Court; doctrinal flux was the euphemism that Judge Stuart Kyle Duncan labeled it in the talk he intended to make at Stanford Law School (the one interrupted by student protests). What is doctrinal flux? Its a fancy way of saying that to this conservative Supreme Court, all precedents are up for grabs. It is not just well-known constitutional precedents. This court has changed settled procedures (like accepting direct appeals from the district court to the Supreme Court during the Trump administration) and softened the rules on standing (which require parties to have a direct interest in the case outcome). As Slates Dahlia Lithwick and Mark Joseph Stern said: One case after another blew up decades of existing precedent and tests and doctrine and replaced them with Rorschach exams that transformed contemporary Republican policies into constitutional law.

How does this affect the district court? While district court judges dont have the authority to reconsider precedent, some Trump judges didnt get the memo. The constitutional ceiling that constrained all judges has been weakened, if not shattered.

Judge Aileen Cannon tried to stop an ongoing criminal investigation of Trump for which she had no constitutional authority. A Trump appointee in Arkansas ruled in February that the Voting Rights Act cant be enforced by private individuals or groups, despite more than five decades of such litigation. In May, another Trump appointee in Florida canceled scheduled arguments in a challenge to the federal mandate for mask use in transportation, then rushed out a decision striking down the requirement days before it was to expire.

Now comes Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk. He ruled that mifepristone, one of the two drugs used in medical abortions, is unsafe, although it has been used for more than two decades. He granted standing to an organization formed a month before in Amarillo, Texas, where Kacsmaryk is the only federal judge. He tapped into the skepticism of some Supreme Court justices about administrative delegation, even with an agency long recognized for its expertise. And he indulged in old tropes about womens psychological reactions to abortion because some justices parroted them in an earlier case.

With the weakening of that constitutional ceiling, nothing stops conservative litigants from making totally unprecedented arguments and finding a Trump judge who is happy to indulge them. Kacsmaryk obliged.

Nancy Gertner is a retired federal judge in Boston and a law professor at Harvard Law School.

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There arent Obama judges or Bush judges, but there are Trump-era judges - The Boston Globe

Barack Obama clinched the presidency in 2008 and knocked down the racial barrier to the nations highest office vowing to unite Red and Blue America and enact once-in-a-generation policy shifts: universal health care, closing the military detention camp at Guantnamo Bay, creating a path to citizenship for immigrants living illegally in the United States.

Yes, we can, Obama promised.

It didnt all go as planned.

A conference that began Wednesday and continues Thursday and Fridayat Hofstra University examines the Obama presidency what went right, what went wrong and the44th chief executiveslegacy.

Obamas road to the White House was unexpected. His victory marked a historic moment in American politics the election of the nations first African American president," said Meena Bose, Hofstras executive dean for public policy and public service programs,who'shead of the conference."Obama was elected on a platform of moving beyond traditional political debates and differences to build unity to move past red and blue divisions. But putting that into practice proved to be much more difficult than anticipated."

Bose, also a Hofstra political-science professor,added: And so I think that the Obama presidency really illustrates the promise of hope for change in America, as well as the difficulty of achieving that change.

Among those speaking at the conference The Barack Obama Presidency: Hope and Change are administration alumni, academics and journalists: former senior adviser Valerie Jarrett; former White House chief of staff and U.S. treasury secretary Jacob Lew; formerWhite House director of legislative affairs Philip Schiliro;presidential historian Douglas Brinkley;former U.S. Rep. Steve Israel;former Obama adviser Ben Rhodes; and Tina Tchen, Michelle Obama's chief of staff from 2011 to 2017.

The conference is Hofstras 13th on presidents.Previous such conferences have covered every chief executive sinceFranklin D. Roosevelt.

Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter, George H.W. Bush and Bill Clintoncame to the conferences about themselves, Bose said; Obama isnt expected to.

The Obama conference was supposed to be in 2021, but the coronavirus pandemic forced a postponement.

Obamas campaign promises yielded mixed results:He kept a promise to order thekilling of Osama bin Laden, the mastermind behind the 9/11 terrorist attacks. But Obamadidn't keep hispromiseto bring U.S. troops home from two major wars, Afghanistan and Iraq, leaving office with U.S. forces still involved those conflicts. He promised single-payer health care but signed Obamacare, the nation's biggest expansion of health insurance since Medicaid and Medicare in 1965. Guantnamo Bay remains open. And no path to citizenship was created; he didenact, by executive action, a contested program to legalize the immigration status of foreign-born immigrants who were brought here illegally as children.

Among the Hofstra faculty scheduled to present is Alan J. Singer, an education professor, historian and former high school social science teacher.

Singer will be speaking about Obamas education policy, as carried out largely by his secretary of education, Arne Duncan.

In many ways, the Obama-Duncan educational record was a continuation of initiatives that began during the Bush presidency the Common Core testing, the focus on data to evaluate teachers and schools and districts, Singer said.

Nevertheless, Singer said, Obamas policy modified expectations set out during the Bush years, and provided grants to districts as a carrot to get them to adopt the testing policies, said Singer,a critic of the Obama administrations focus on testing.

Matthew Chayes, a Newsday reporter since 2007, covers New York City.

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Obama presidency the focus of Hofstra University conference - Newsday

Elon Musk thinks the world is woefully unprepared for the impact of artificial intelligence. On Sunday, he agreed that the technology will hit people like an asteroid, and he revealed that he used his only one-on-one meeting with then President Barack Obama to push for A.I. regulation.

The Twitter and Tesla CEO made the comments in response to a tweet from A.I. software developer Mckay Wrigley, who wrote on Saturday: It blows my mind that people cant apply exponential growth to the capabilities of AI. You wouldve been called a *lunatic* a year ago if you said wed have GPT-4 level AI right now. Now think another year. 5yrs? 10yrs? Its going to hit them like an asteroid.

Musk responded: I saw it happening from well before GPT-1, which is why I tried to warn the public for years. The only one on one meeting I ever had with Obama as President I used not to promote Tesla or SpaceX, but to encourage AI regulation. Obama had dinner with Musk in February 2015 in San Francisco.

This week, Musk responded to news about Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer laying the groundwork for Congress to regulate artificial intelligence.

Good news! AI regulation will be far more important than it may seem today, Musk tweeted.

According to the Financial Times, Musk is developing plans to launch an A.I. startup, dubbed X.AI, to compete against Microsoft-backed OpenAI, which makes generative A.I. tools, including the A.I. chatbots ChatGPT and GPT-4 and the image generator DALL-E 2.

Musk is also reportedly working on an A.I. project at Twitter.

A few weeks ago, Musk called for a six-month pause on developing A.I. tools more advanced than GPT-4, the successor to ChatGPT. He was joined in signing an open letter by hundreds of technology experts, among them Apple cofounder Steve Wozniak. The letter warned of mass-scale misinformation and the mass automation of jobs.

The power of A.I. systems to automate some white-collar jobs is in little doubt. A Wharton professor recently ran an experiment to see what A.I. tools could accomplish on a business project in 30 minutes and called the results superhuman. Meanwhile some remote workers are apparently taking advantage of productivity-enhancing A.I. tools to hold multiple full-time jobs, with their employers none the wiser. But fears that in the long run A.I. will replace many jobs are mounting.

Musk cofounded OpenAI in 2015 as a nonprofit, but he parted ways with it after a power struggle with CEO Sam Altman over its control and direction, according to the Wall Street Journal.

He tweeted on Feb. 17 that OpenAI was created as an open-source nonprofit to serve as a counterweight to Google, but now it has become a closed source, maximum-profit company effectively controlled by Microsoft. Not what I intended at all.

Altman himself has warned frequently about the dangers of artificial intelligence. Last month in an ABC interview, he said that other A.I. developers working on ChatGPT-like tools wont apply the kind of safety limits his firm hasand the clock is ticking.

Musk has long believed that oversight for artificial intelligence is necessary, having described the technology as potentially more dangerous than nukes.

We need some kind of, like, regulatory authority or something overseeing A.I. development, he told Tesla investors last month. Make sure its operating in the public interest.

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Elon Musk agrees A.I. will hit people like an asteroid, says he used Obama meeting to urge regulation - Fortune

Elon Muskrecalls his only one-on-one meeting with former U.S. PresidentBarack Obama, during which he didnt talk aboutTesla Inc.TSLA orSpaceXbut something else.

What Happened:Responding to aTwitteruser who said people dont seem to apply exponential growth to the capabilities of AI, Musk said, I saw it happening from well before GPT-1, which is why I tried to warn the public for years.

He also recalled the time when he met Obama and didnt promote Tesla or SpaceX but encouraged AI regulation.

See Also:Elon Musk Reveals 3 Key Behaviors To Help You Stand Out From The Rest Of The Herd

Musk is among the 1000+ signatories, includingApple Inc.AAPL co-founderSteve Wozniakwho signed an open lettercalling for a pause on training systemsexceedingOpenAIs GPT-4.

He previously insultedMicrosoft CorporationMSFT co-founderBill Gatessaying he had alimited understanding of AI, which still persists.

Why Its Important:While Musk is vocally asking to slow down AI development and introduce appropriate regulations, he is reportedly embarking on amission to launch an OpenAI rival.

On Friday, it was reported that the Tesla CEO had assembled a team of AI researchers and engineers and secured thousands of high-powered GPU processors fromNvidia Corp.NVDA.

Last month, it was reported that Musk wanted to run OpenAI the company he co-founded in 2015 by himself,but his proposal was turned downby fellow co-founderSam Altmanand others.

Check out more of Benzingas Consumer Tech coverage byfollowing this link.

Read Next:Elon Musk Now The Most Followed Person On Twitter: Too Late To Say Sorry, Thanks Obama!

Photoby Steve Jurvetson Flickr

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Elon Musk Reveals What He Talked In Only Meeting With Obama - Microsoft (NASDAQ:MSFT), NVIDIA (NASDAQ ... - Benzinga