Northwest Arkansas Democrat-Gazette
Names and faces
■ Former first lady
Michelle Obama writes that she felt alone after a miscarriage 20 years ago, and she and Barack Obama underwent fertility treatments to conceive their two daughters, according to her coming memoir. In some of her most extensive public comments on her White House years, the former first lady also lets her fury fly over President Donald Trump’s “bigotry and xenophobia” — dangerous, deliberate rhetoric, she wrote, that risked her family’s safety. “For this,” she writes, “I’d never forgive him.” In a deeply personal account of her marriage to the future president, Obama sheds light on the Ivy League-educated couple’s early struggle with issues of family, ambition and public life. “We were trying to get pregnant, and it wasn’t going well,” Mrs. Obama, 54, writes in Becoming, set for release Tuesday. “We had one pregnancy test come back positive, which caused us both to forget every worry and swoon with joy, but a couple of weeks later I had a miscarriage, which left me physically uncomfortable and cratered any optimism we felt.” In an interview broadcast Friday on ABC’s Good Morning America, Mrs. Obama said they went through fertility treatments to conceive daughters Sasha and Malia, now 17 and 20.
■ A Philippine court found former first lady Imelda Marcos guilty of graft and ordered her arrest Friday in a rare conviction among many corruption cases that she plans to appeal to avoid jail and losing her seat in Congress. The special anti-graft Sandiganbayan court sentenced Marcos, 89, to serve 6 to 11 years in prison for each of the seven counts of violating an anti-corruption law when she illegally funneled about $200 million to Swiss foundations in the 1970s as metropolitan Manila’s governor. Marcos intends to appeal the decision. Anti-Marcos activists and human rights victims welcomed the conviction as long overdue. The court disqualified Marcos from holding public office, but she can remain a member of the country’s House of Representatives while appealing the decision. President Ferdinand Marcos, Imelda Marcos’ husband, declared martial law in the Philippines in 1972. He was ousted by an army-backed “people power” revolt in 1986 and died in self-exile in Hawaii in 1989.