Today’s NYT cover story on Obama’s late mother, Stanley Ann Dunham Soetoro, contains one passage that gave me a sinking feeling:

    In Hawaii she married an African student at age 18. Then she married an Indonesian, moved to Jakarta, became an anthropologist, wrote an 800-page dissertation on peasant blacksmithing in Java, worked for the Ford Foundation, championed women’s work and helped bring microcredit to the poor.

Somewhere around the words “peasant blacksmithing,” I found myself thinking, “This man can never be president. His mother was just too cool.” American presidential mothers don’t drift bohemianly around the globe, marrying and divorcing foreigners, working for Third World development banks and discussing “esoteric Indonesian woodworking techniques” with their daughters. They are not named Stanley. They’re Barbaras and Dorothys; they wear pearls and host charity events. At the most, a presidential mother might, like Bill Clinton’s mother Virginia, be a working-class Southern widow abused by a rotten second husband. But that image still fit into a familiar American narrative of bootstrap pluck (and allowed Bill to keep telling that story about threatening his wife-beating stepfather with a golf club). Stanley Ann doesn’t sound like someone who needed that kind of help.  read more »

TOKYO (Reuters) - A 44-year-old mother of two has become Japan’s oldest professional boxer after passing the Japanese board’s license test.

Kazumi Izaki, who has daughters aged 21 and 14 and herself turns 45 next week, laced up her first pair of boxing gloves in 2001.

“She has passed,” the Japan Boxing Commission (JBC) told Reuters Friday.

“This is first time she has held a JBC license and she is now Japan’s oldest pro boxer.”

Under JBC rules, applicants for a license must be under 32 but Izaki was allowed permission to fight because she previously won a Japanese title, albeit one not recognized by the country’s governing body.

Hiroaki Yokota had held the distinction of being Japan’s oldest professional boxer but the 46-year-old declined to renew his license.

“I try not to think about my age,” the former aerobics instructor told reporters.

“I’m a mum but I’m going to give it everything I’ve got.

“I wanted to show my children that if you give up, then you’re washed up!”

(Reporting by Alastair Himmer; Editing by John O’Brien)