On the streets of Guangzhou and nearby Shenzhen, Mark Okoth Obama Ndesandjo is turning heads. Since holding a press conference for his semiautobiographical novel Nairobi to Shenzhen: A Novel of Love in the East on Nov. 4, Ndesandjo, the half brother of U.S. President Barack Obama, has appeared on television in Hong Kong, and his picture has been splashed on the front pages of the China Daily, the South China Morning Post and other regional newspapers.
Ndesandjo had shunned the limelight until now. He is one of two children born to Barack Obama Sr. and his third wife, an American teacher named Ruth Nidesand, whom Obama Sr. met while the two were students at Harvard. Tall and slim like the President, Ndesandjo had avoided any association with the Obama name. For most of his life, he used only his stepfather's Tanzanian surname Ndesandjo, but he's now added Okoth, a word from the language of his father's Kenyan tribe, the Luo, as well as his original surname, Obama. (See Barack Obama's family tree.)
His novel, written in diary form, is based on his own experiences growing up with an abusive, alcoholic father and moving to China where he fell in love with a Chinese woman and began working with orphans. President Obama's name is mentioned just once, when Ndesandjo thanks several people, including "Barack," in the foreword. With this book, Ndesandjo says he's stepping into the public eye in order to raise awareness of domestic violence, promote volunteerism and share his tale of starting a new life in a new land. "I am an Obama, and a large part of my life was a repudiation of that," Ndesandjo tells TIME. "To a certain extent, my brother ... opened my eyes to things that I had left behind for a long time." (Ndesandjo is still reticent about detailing his personal life beyond the fictionalized account, saying he may save that for a second book, a true autobiography.)
Ndesandjo's life was hardly ordinary even before the world discovered his connection to the President of the United States. Educated in international schools in Nairobi, Ndesandjo, an American citizen, moved to the U.S. after high school, where he earned physics degrees from Stanford and Brown as well as an executive M.B.A. from Emory University. Soon after 9/11, he was laid off from his marketing job at telecommunications-equipment maker Nortel Networks in Atlanta. He decided to reinvent himself by moving to China, a country he had visited with classmates while at Emory. Since 2002, he has taught English and worked as a business consultant in Shenzhen, a 14 million–strong metropolis in southern China, just across the border from Hong Kong. (See the story of Barack Obama's mother.)
His self-published book was released just days before his brother's visit to China. Ndesandjo says he plans to introduce his wife, a native of Henan province whom he married last year, to his brother before he leaves China on Wednesday. During the course of TIME's interview in Guangzhou, Ndesandjo, who speaks fluent Mandarin and practices Chinese calligraphy, was overwhelmingly positive about his life in China, the Chinese people and culture. "I'm so happy my brother is coming to China because I've experienced the warmth and the graciousness of the Chinese people," he says. "If we can continue seeing the mutual positive points in these two great cultures, I think it'll be good for the world in general."
The two brothers have met a handful of times in their lives, the last of which was during Obama's inauguration in Washington. In his 1995 memoir Dreams from My Father, Obama describes his first encounter with his brother, an ambitious student who had severed ties with his father's side of the family as well as his African roots. "I don't feel much of an attachment [to Kenya]. Just another poor African country," Ndesandjo says in Dreams. He goes on to say, "You think that somehow I'm cut off from my roots ... Well, you're right."
One of Obama Sr.'s eight children with four women, Ndesandjo was raised by both birth parents until their divorce in the early 1970s. He has refused to tell reporters his age, but he is likely to be in his early 40s. Ndesandjo says his father was brilliant, but that alcoholism drove him to beat his wife and children. "The relationship I had with my father was a difficult one," he says, fighting back tears. "I didn't have positive memories of my dad because of domestic violence."
Ndesandjo says his mother, who runs a kindergarten in Nairobi, inspired him to work with children. A trained pianist, he has given piano lessons to Chinese orphans and performed at an event in January that raised $37,000 to alleviate poverty in China. Harley Seyedin, president of the American Chamber of Commerce in South China, the organization that sponsored the charity event, has been a close friend of Ndesandjo's for the past six years, but only learned of his friend's relationship with the President last year when reading news reports. "He's a very private person and he wanted to continue to live his modest lifestyle," says Seyedin. "But his primary message is raising awareness of domestic violence and to get the message out, you have to go public." To underline this message, Ndesandjo has arranged for 15% of the proceeds from book sales to be used to help orphans in China.
As a Kenyan-American in China, Ndesandjo is part of a growing community of Africans migrating to cities like Guangzhou to do business. Ethnic strife in China has made headlines in recent months after 200 Han and Uighur Chinese were killed in July, in the worst ethnic violence in decades. That same month, a Nigerian man was critically injured trying to escape one of many visa checks in Guangzhou's sizeable African neighborhood. Also this year, a half–African American, half-Chinese contestant on a Chinese reality-TV show and a half–South African, half-Chinese athlete on China's national volleyball team became the subject of a flurry of racist comments in China's blogosphere. But Ndesandjo is optimistic about ethnic-minority life in China, saying, "If you make an attempt to understand where these attitudes come from, it can really help."
Read "The Five Faces of Barack Obama."
See behind-the-scenes pictures of Obama in Iraq.
View this article on Time.comRelated articles on Time.com:Obama in Asia: Five Things the U.S. and China Differ On Can Obama Get Around China's 'Great Firewall'? Hong Kong Dissidents Get Organized As 20th Tiananmen Anniversary Draws Near A New Book Reveals Why China Is Unhappy Five Things the U.S. Can Learn from China

By wearing a tightly-laced corset for extended periods, known as tightlacing, men and women can learn to tolerate extreme waist constriction and eventually reduce their natural waist size. Tightlacers dream of 40 to 43 centimeters (16 to 17 inches) waists, but most are satisfied with anything under 50 centimeters (20 inches). Until 1998, the Guinness Book of World Records listed Ethel Granger as having the smallest waist on record at 32.5 centimeters (13 inches). After 1998, the category changed to "smallest waist on a living person" and Cathie Jung took the title with a 37.5 centimeters (15 inches) waist. Other women, such as Polaire, also have achieved such reductions (14 inches in her case).

However, these are extreme cases. Corsets were and are still usually designed for support, with freedom of body movement an important consideration in their design. Present day corset-wearers usually tighten the corset just enough to reduce their waists by 5 to 10 centimeters (2 to 4 inches); it is very difficult for a slender woman to achieve as much as 15 centimeters (6 inches), although larger women can do so more easily.

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A 35-mile rift in the desert of Ethiopia will likely become a new ocean eventually, researchers now confirm.

The crack, 20 feet wide in spots, opened in 2005 and some geologists
believed then that it would spawn a new ocean. But that view was
controversial, and the rift had not been well studied.

A new study involving an international team of scientists and
reported in the journal Geophysical Research Letters finds the
processes creating the rift are nearly identical to what goes on at the
bottom of oceans, further indication a sea is in the region's future.

The same rift activity is slowly parting the Red Sea, too.

Using newly gathered seismic data from 2005, researchers
reconstructed the event to show the rift tore open along its entire
35-mile length in just days. Dabbahu, a volcano at the northern end of
the rift, erupted first, then magma pushed up through the middle of the
rift area and began "unzipping" the rift in both directions, the
researchers explained in a statement today.

"We know that seafloor ridges are created by a similar intrusion of
magma into a rift, but we never knew that a huge length of the ridge
could break open at once like this," said Cindy Ebinger, professor of
earth and environmental sciences at the University of Rochester and
co-author of the study.

The result shows that highly active volcanic boundaries along the
edges of tectonic ocean plates may suddenly break apart in large
sections, instead of in bits, as the leading theory held. And such
sudden large-scale events on land pose a much more serious hazard to
populations living near the rift than would several smaller events,
Ebinger said.

"The whole point of this study is to learn whether what is happening
in Ethiopia is like what is happening at the bottom of the ocean where
it's almost impossible for us to go," says Ebinger. "We knew that if we
could establish that, then Ethiopia would essentially be a unique and
superb ocean-ridge laboratory for us. Because of the unprecedented
cross-border collaboration behind this research, we now know that the
answer is yes, it is analogous."

The African and Arabian plates meet in the remote Afar desert of Northern Ethiopia
and have been spreading apart in a rifting process - at a speed of less than 1
inch per year - for the past 30 million years. This rifting formed the
186-mile Afar depression and the Red Sea. The thinking is that the Red Sea will eventually pour into the new sea in a million years or so. The new ocean would connect to the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden, an arm of the Arabian Sea between Yemen on the
Arabian Peninsula and Somalia in eastern Africa.

Atalay Ayele, professor at the Addis Ababa University in Ethiopia,
led the investigation, gathering seismic data with help from neighboring Eritrea and Ghebrebrhan Ogubazghi, professor at the Eritrea Institute of
Technology, and from Yemen with the help of Jamal Sholan of the
National Yemen Seismological Observatory Center.

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Original Story: Giant Crack in Africa Will Create a New OceanLiveScience.com chronicles the daily advances and innovations made in science and technology. We take on the misconceptions that often pop up around scientific discoveries and deliver short, provocative explanations with a certain wit and style. Check out our science videos, Trivia & Quizzes and Top 10s. Join our community to debate hot-button issues like stem cells, climate change and evolution. You can also sign up for free newsletters, register for RSS feeds and get cool gadgets at the LiveScience Store.

It is risky business to view today's key "off-year" contests -- in Virginia, New Jersey and New York -- as bellwethers for next year's much fuller slate of elections. Or, at least that's what history suggests.

Sometimes, these odd-year elections can look oddly predictive, as in 2003, when Republican pickups for governor in Mississippi and Kentucky preceded the re-election of Republican George W. Bush as president in 2004, and in 2005, when the Democratic candidates scored hard-won holds for governor in New Jersey and Virginia on the eve of their party's takeover of Congress in the 2006 elections.

But the big off-year races in 2007 ended up a wash, with a Republican takeover for governor of Louisiana, a Democratic take-back in Kentucky and a GOP hold in Mississippi. And the next year, the Democrats nonetheless celebrated Barack Obama's victory for president and big seat gains in Congress, governors' offices and state legislative races.

That said, it will come as no surprise tonight when both parties deploy their best spin, making their arguments that the most-watched races -- the contests for governor in Virginia and New Jersey, and the raucous House special election in upstate New York's 23rd Congressional District -- are harbingers of things to come next year when there are 37 Senate seats (including January's special election in Massachusetts), 38 gubernatorial seats and 435 House seats up for election.

After the huge setbacks their party endured in the 2006 and 2008 elections, Republican strategists welcome any sign that the tides are turning back in their favor. So a sweep of today's three big races, or winning at least two out of three, is important for a party looking for bragging rights.

But this year's big contests seem a bit too idiosyncratic to provide a single takeaway message.

If polls are correct, the clearest Republican victory is likely to come in Virginia, where a strong Democratic trend over the course of the decade appears to be on the verge of at least temporary interruption. GOP nominee Bob McDonnell, a former state attorney general, has busted out to a big lead in what earlier was seen as a tossup race with Democrat Creigh Deeds, a state senator.

But McDonnell, who established his political career as a socially conservative state legislator, has played down that aspect of his persona as he has campaigned for votes in the recently Democratic-leaning Northern Virginia suburbs of Washington, D.C., instead emphasizing and lucidly explaining his positions on the state's economy, taxes, transportation funding and other kitchen-table issues for most Virginia voters. He has run a much better campaign than Deeds, who comes from a lightly populated area in the western part of the state and has had trouble countering McDonnell's ties to Northern Virginia, where he grew up, and the populous Hampton Roads area to the southeast, where he lives and has his political base.

The New Jersey governor's race is much more a referendum on incumbent Jon Corzine -- who has never been overwhelmingly popular and has suffered of late from terrible job approval ratings -- than on Obama, who carried the state by 15 points in last year's presidential race and whose continued popularity in the state is Corzine's biggest hope for survival. Republicans initially touted former U.S. Attorney Chris Christie as a great recruit, but his own campaign stumbles and the lavishly self-financed campaign run by former Wall Street CEO Corzine have turned the race into a tossup. The outcome is likely to be determined by how much of the vote strays to independent candidate Chris Daggett, a former state and federal environmental policy official, and which of the major-party contenders he hurts more.

And these two statewide races have, in the campaign's final weeks, been unexpectedly overshadowed by the New York's House special election, which has drawn unusually attention as it emerged as a major skirmish in the "battle for the soul" of the Republican Party -- between centrists and other party pragmatists who believe the Republicans must recruit more moderate candidates to win in strongly Democratic-trending areas such as the Northeast, and conservatives who say the GOP needs to field candidates who will stick to the national party's right-ward platform and fight to persuade voters that is the right direction for the nation.

Through most of the campaign, the national Republican organization played the pragmatic role, backing state Assemblywoman Dede Scozzafava, a moderate, in her bid for the seat vacated by nine-term Republican John M. McHugh to become secretary of the Army. But conservative activists rebelled, citing Scozzafava's support for abortion rights and same-sex marriage and her ties to labor unions, and aligned with accountant Doug Hoffman, the nominee of New York's Conservative Party. Hoffman then drew the support of some big-name national conservative figures, including 2008 Republican vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin.

The schism became big national news this weekend when Scozzafava, her poll numbers plummeting, dropped out of the race -- and urged her backers to vote for Democratic nominee Bill Owens, a lawyer. But the Republican National Committee and its campaign arm, the National Republican Congressional Committee, which had invested hundreds of thousands of dollars in local advertising supporting Scozzafava's campaign, turned on a dime and switched its endorsement to Hoffman.

Strategy, Risk and End Games

But even if the GOP gets the better of these 2009 races, any claims of major momentum heading into 2010 would require a rebuttal of a wide range of national opinion polls, the results of which suggest that the Republican Party has a long way to go in order to regain the public standing it lost during Bush's tumultuous second term.

This summer, the GOP faithful had reason to hope that the November elections would send a clear message that the public had already lost faith in President Obama and the hefty Democratic majorities in both chambers of Congress. After entering office in January with soaring approval ratings, Obama saw his popularity decline as his campaign promise of "Change" met the gritty realities of the policy-making process and the nearly unanimous opposition of a determined Republican congressional minority.

Individual and organized critics held highly publicized anti-tax "tea party" rallies and besieged lawmakers' town hall meetings to lambaste the $787 billion legislation (PL 111-5) that Obama pushed through Congress in February in the name of stimulating the recession-plagued economy; the federal government's intervention in the teetering financial and auto industries; the Democrats' sweeping proposals to overhaul the nation's health care system; and an energy bill pushed by Democrats, aimed at limiting climate change, that includes a "cap and trade" program for industrial emissions that most Republicans protest as potentially crippling to the U.S. economy.

With loud voices accusing Obama of putting the United States on a path toward socialism, the president's approval ratings dropped. Until, that is they stopped falling. And where the parties stand on Election Day 2009, in the big-picture numbers, looks rather amazingly similar to where they were on Election Day 2008.

By the end of the summer, Obama's approval ratings hit a plateau, with percentages in the low to mid 50s. That puts the president's support base just about where it was in November 2008, when he won the presidency by 53 percent to 46 percent over Republican John McCain, an Arizona senator.

Of the October surveys co-sponsored by the major television networks' news divisions, an ABC News-Washington Post poll conducted Oct. 15-18 showed 57 percent of respondents approved and 40 percent disapproved of Obama's performance in office (exactly the same number as in the organization's Aug. 13-17 poll). A CBS News poll taken Oct. 5-8 showed approval exceeding disapproval by 56 percent to 34 percent (the same positive and 1 point lower negative compared to an Aug. 27-31 survey).

An NBC News-Wall Street Journal poll taken Oct. 22-25 was less generous, putting the numbers at 51 percent approval and 42 percent disapproval. But that 9-point margin is the same as in the same polling unit's Aug. 15-17 numbers.

That is not to say that many voters don't have issues with Obama on policy issues. That Oct. 22-25 NBC News-Wall Street Journal poll found 47 percent approved and 46 percent disapproved of Obama's handling of the economy. On the hot-button issue of health care, 43 percent approved and 48 percent disapproved. He did better, but not spectacular, on his handling of foreign policy, with 51 percent approving and 39 percent disapproving.

And there was a potentially worrisome number in aggregate polling done so far this year by Gallup which showed the number of self-described conservatives at 40 percent of respondents, up from 37 percent in 2008, to 36 percent who described themselves as moderate and 20 percent who called themselves liberal.

But the Republicans' potential for growth in the 2010 elections may be held back by the fact that their party's "brand," which incurred major damage from the Bush years, is still held in very low regard by most voters.

The NBC News-Wall Street Journal pollsters asked respondents' feelings about the Republican Party. Just 25 percent gave a positive response (and just 6 percent were very positive) while 46 percent were negative and 27 percent were neutral. The positive number was actually down from 32 percent in a poll taken Oct. 17-20, 2008, with about two weeks left in that year's presidential and congressional campaigns.

The Democrats' October 2009 numbers -- 42 percent positive, 36 percent negative and 20 percent neutral -- don't exactly rock the house, but they remain considerably better than the Republicans'.

A similar question asked by CNN/Opinion Research in an Oct. 16-18 poll found 36 percent had a favorable opinion of the Republican Party to 54 percent unfavorable. The Democrats' numbers were 53 percent favorable to 41 percent unfavorable.

These polling numbers, taken collectively, suggest that both parties are engaged in high-risk political strategies as they move beyond Election Day 2009 and into the bigger arena of 2010. Obama has taken on a full plate of the nation's most contentious issues during his first year in office, greatly expanded federal spending (and debt) to address the recession and seeking major changes in the nation's energy and environmental policies, all while dealing with the nation's stressful military engagements in Iraq and Afghanistan that he inherited from predecessor. So if most voters see him as falling short when the 2010 elections roll around, his Democratic Party could suffer a serious reversal.

But the Republicans are taking a big gamble, too, in taking a confrontational approach in trying to block or slow virtually every element of the president's domestic agenda. If the economy reaches a recovery phase by the fall of 2010, and especially if there is evidence of jobs growth, Democrats will freely remind voters that Republicans were quick to condemn Obama's stimulus plan as an expensive failure -- and their efforts to label the GOP as the "Party of No" will gain credence among many voters.

And while Republican leaders are fond of telling Democrats that they now own all the big issues and that they need to get over blaming Bush, it would take a horrendous political collapse by Obama to make that anything but wishful thinking. Democrats for 40 years were able to make political hay out of the name of Republican Herbert Hoover, who was president when the Great Depression hit. And there are still some Republicans who are fond of reminding voters of the unpopular presidency of Democrat Jimmy Carter, nearly 30 years after he lost his 1980 bid for re-election.