White House press secretary Sarah Sanders issued a rare correction Tuesday night after falsely declaring that President Donald Trump has created three times as many jobs for African-American workers as former President Barack Obama did during his two terms in office.

“Correction from today’s briefing: Jobs numbers for Pres Trump and Pres Obama were correct, but the time frame for Pres Obama wasn’t. I’m sorry for the mistake, but no apologies for the 700,000 jobs for African Americans created under President Trump,” Sanders wrote in a tweet.

During the briefing, as she sought to defend the President’s record on race, Sanders said Trump has already tripled Obama’s record over eight years for creating jobs for black workers.

“This President since he took office, in the year and a half that he’s been here, has created 700,000 new jobs for African-Americans,” Sanders said from the White House podium. “That’s 700,000 African-Americans that are working now that weren’t working when this President took place. When President Obama left, after eight years in office, he had only created 195,000 jobs for African-Americans.”

But that’s not even close to true, according to Labor Department figures.

Hours after the briefing, after Bloomberg News pointed out the inaccuracy, the White House Council of Economic Advisers apologized for the figure. It posted a tweet citing a “miscommunication” to Sanders.

While it’s true that the US economy has added about 700,000 jobs held by African American workers since Trump took office, it added about 3 million black jobs while Obama was in office, according federal labor statistics.

When Obama took office in 2009, 15.5 million African Americans had jobs in an economy filleted by one of the country’s worst recessions. When he left office, the economy had 18.4 million black workers.

But even the correction from the Council of Economic Advisers, which is tasked with providing the President with objective economic analysis, used questionable accounting to bolster the claim that Trump has helped job growth among African-Americans more than his predecessor.

Rather than tallying job growth since Trump took office in January 2017, the advisory council posted figures that include the three months since Trump’s election while Obama was still president.

The time period attributes an additional 140,000 new jobs for African-Americans to Trump even though Obama was still in office. And it attributes 162,000 African-American jobs lost to Obama though it occurred during the economic recession when George W. Bush was still president.

While the CEA graphic correctly notes the figures stem from “20 months after a presidential election,” presenting the statistics that way magnifies the impression that Trump has helped create more jobs for African-Americans than Obama. The comparison also ignores the economic recession that Obama inherited from his predecessor.

Sanders made the claim as she was answering questions about whether she could guarantee Trump had never been recorded using the N-word while producing “The Apprentice.”

“I can’t guarantee anything, but I can tell you that the President addressed this question directly,” Sanders said. “I can tell you that I’ve never heard it.”

Then, Sanders went on to argue that Trump has created more jobs for black Americans than Obama did.

“This is a President who is fighting for all Americans, who is putting policies in place that help all Americans, particularly African Americans,” Sanders said. “Just look at the economy alone.”

This story has been updated.

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    (CNN) — Look out Donald Trump, while you’re not watching, China is quietly stealing a continent from you. And India may not be far behind.

Currently, the battle for supremacy on the African continent is being fought out between the leaders of Asia’s two superpowers — China and India — and, for the most part, the United States is nowhere to be seen.

Chinese President Xi Jinping and Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi all but tripped over each other last month crisscrossing the continent on personal goodwill visits.

Meanwhile, the President of the African Development Bank had to come hat in hand to Washington, where, a source with knowledge of the situation told me, all he got to see were some officials in the Treasury Department

President Trump has still not visited the continent and has not announced plans to do so.

Why should we care? China and India care deeply. After all, Africa is home to Nigeria — poised to become the world’s third most populous country and all the challenges that poses in terms of more jobs for an increasingly youthful population, not to mention food and infrastructure.

But it’s also where critical, strategically essential minerals including lanthanum, cerium and neodymium, essential for the electric cars of the future, are located.

And as Akinwumi Adesina, the President of the African Development Bank, told me this week, “there are 400 million hectares of arable land in the savannas of Africa” that will “determine the future of food in the world.”

Not surprisingly, Modi announced in an address to the Ugandan Parliament, the first by a serving Indian Prime Minister, that India would be opening 18 new embassies, “deepen[ing] our partnership and engagement across the vast expanse of Africa.”

Xi came with an even grander proposal — membership in China’s mega development project: the Belt and Road initiative, initially involving development of massive land and trading corridors across Eurasia and extending its scope even more broadly. Already, it has loaned some $94 billion to African governments and state-owned companies.

But these Chinese-led initiatives and this push into Africa have only been accompanied by considerable peril and deep challenges to the United States and its interests there.

Public debt in sub-Saharan Africa has soared from 28.5% of gross domestic product in 2012 to 48% of GDP this year, according to the International Monetary Fund, meaning broad swaths of the continent must use large chunks of their output just to service their debt.

All too often, pledged against this debt are the natural resources ranging from oil in Nigeria and Angola to rare minerals in Congo and deeply important geo-strategic locations like Djibouti.

At the same time, two-way trade between the US and Africa has plummeted from roughly $142 million in 2008 to $55 million last year, largely because the US has become increasingly energy self-sufficient, removing the need for African crude oil.

Meanwhile, as China and the US are embarking on a virulent trans-Pacific trade war, China is embedding itself in country after country across Africa, often quite profitably, occasionally quite toxically.

Take Djibouti, the tiny nation barely the size of Vermont, which occupies a strategic corner of Africa overlooking the Gulf of Aden, through which some 12.5% to 20% of global trade passes annually.

The US maintains Camp Lemonnier with 4,000 personnel stationed in what the Navy describes as “the primary base of operations for US Africa Command in the Horn of Africa.”

As it happens, the base is located not far from a massive new billion dollar Doraleh Container Terminal complex that includes roads and a hotel, in addition to the port, all built by Dubai-based DP World, the mammoth owner and operator of ports and related facilities in more than 40 countries. Last year, China opened its first overseas military base right next door.

On February 22, armed Djibouti troops, without any warning, seized control of the DP World facility and claimed it for Djibouti’s government.

The London Court of International Arbitration ruled the seizure illegal.

“Before the Chinese arrived, we had no problems here,” Sultan Ahmed bin Sulayem, chief efecutive of DP World, told me in an interview. “But as soon as the Chinese moved in, of course, the Chinese basically loaned them more than what they needed—to the point there the government became helpless.”

China has failed to take any note of this, while the Djibouti government has said it was simply rewriting the terms of its contract with DP. The London Arbitration Court disagreed and termed it an outright seizure.

Sultan Sulayem paused and continued, “What is killing Africa is the infrastructure is collapsing and the only way to improve it is through public-private partnerships. And now, after Djibouti, who is going to invest?”

Djibouti is hardly the only African nation to be seduced by wbhat would appear to be easy Chinese money that will be difficult if not impossible to repay without selling its patrimony of raw materials at wholesale prices, thereby holding them hostage to or tying them ever closer to the Chinese sphere.

Nigeria agreed to a three-year $2.5 billion currency swap to boost its reserves with the understanding that the yuan would become a Nigerian reserve currency.

The African Development Bank, Adesina told me, has a number of programs designed to stem this drift away from western-style capitalism. But China’s commitments may be simply too large and too seductive.

The US has few such profound ties to Africa. Yet it has become quite clear since the late years of the Obama administration that Africa is where instability can quickly morph into direct attacks on American security. Al Qaeda and ISIS have discovered vast new reservoirs and support in terms of manpower, funding and easy plunder in several African nations.

American troops have begun dying in terrorist incidents, most recently in Niger, where four US soldiers died in an ambush by ISIS.

Yet American interests diverge quite dramatically from China’s in many corners of this complex continent. China has little interest in building strong, democratic institutions and states. Its goal is to create dependencies that will advance its own agenda of control and security. So, it is long past time for Trump to pay more than lip service to Africa’s needs and undertake a substantive visit to this region where he is losing a vast and potentially quite deadly war.

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    (CNN) — The funeral for Aretha Franklin will be held August 31 in Detroit, according to the singer’s publicist, Gwendolyn Quinn.

The service, for family and friends, will be held at 10 a.m. ET that day at Greater Grace Temple.

Public viewings will be held August 28 and 29 from 9 a.m. to 9 p.m. at the Charles H. Wright Museum of African American History in Detroit, Quinn said.

Franklin will be entombed at Woodlawn Cemetery in Detroit.

The legendary soul singer died Thursday from advanced pancreatic cancer. She was 76.

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    (CNN) — On August 31, 1955, the body of a black youth was found in the Tallahatchie River, near Money, Mississippi. He was naked except for the barbed wire wound around him, which was attached to a 75-pound fan meant to sink him down to the riverbed. One eye was gouged out and his skull badly fractured and with a bullet hole in it. He was, in fact, so badly beaten that his uncle was able to make a positive identification only because he recognized the youngster’s initialed ring.

His name was Emmett Till. The 14-year-old Chicagoan had been sent to spend the summer with his uncle in Mississippi, where he was lynched for reputedly flirting with or whistling at a white woman (Carolyn Bryant Donham, who, in a book published in 2017, recanted her original account of this event).

When Till’s mother, Mamie Elizabeth Till-Mobley, was told how her only child had been murdered, she demanded that his body be returned to Chicago. Seeing the disfigured remains at the train station, she collapsed — but then she called Ebony and Jet magazines, telling them that she wanted the whole world to see what she saw. At the funeral home, a mortician offered to “touch up” Till’s body. The mother said no and instructed that the casket be left open.

“I think everybody needed to know what had happened to Emmett Till,” she said.

Like Mamie Elizabeth Till-Mobley 63 years ago, Lucy McBath and Lezley McSpadden want to leave the casket open.

The day after Thanksgiving 2012, Lucia “Lucy” McBath answered the phone. It was the father of Jordan Davis, her 17-year-old son. He told her that Jordan had been shot and killed at a Jacksonville, Florida, gas station by a white man who, as it turned out, complained that Davis and his friends had been playing music too loudly in their car.

Lucy McBath grieved. She also quit her job as a Delta flight attendant to become a full-time gun control activist. Then, on July 24, 2018, she won the Democratic nomination in Georgia’s 6th Congressional District. The month before, she told Elle magazine that she had been “afraid” to run for office. “I kept saying, I don’t know how to be a politician. … I’ve never done that before.” But after she won the primary, she tweeted, “… I intend to show the good people of #GA06 what a tough, determined mother can do.”

On August 9, 2014, Michael Brown, an 18-year-old African American resident of Ferguson, Missouri, just north of St. Louis, was walking with a friend down the center of Canfield Drive. Ferguson police officer Darren Wilson believed that Brown matched the description, fresh off his radio, of a shoplifting suspect. At one minute after noon, he drove up on the two young men. Two minutes later, an altercation ensued, the pair fled, and Wilson gave chase on foot. The official report by the district attorney and the medical examiner indicates that Brown had turned and was approaching Wilson when the officer fired repeatedly, hitting Brown, who was unarmed, six times.

On August 10, 2018, Michael Brown’s mother, Lezley McSpadden, stood “near the spot where her son was gunned down” and announced she was running for the Ferguson city council.

“Almost four years ago to this day,” she said in a news conference, “I ran down this very street, and my son was covered in a sheet. It broke me, you know. It brought me down to my knees and made me feel crippled, as if I could do nothing else anymore. I learned to walk again, and this is one of my first steps.” She pledged that, if elected, she would focus on community policing, economic equality, and access to health care for all of Ferguson’s young children. She also promised to work on rebuilding the relationship between the police and the residents of Ferguson, two-thirds of whom are black.

Lucy McBath and Lezley McSpadden want the world to see and to never forget what happened to their sons. They do this, in part, for personal healing. But as Ben Crump, the civil rights attorney who represented the Brown family, told me in a phone conversation on August 15, their “running will help heal their communities.”

I believe it will help to heal the entire nation. These grieving mothers have declared that they, who have every reason to give up on America, are doing no such thing. On the contrary, thrust onto the public stage by deep personal loss, they have decided to become instrumental in changing politics. Win or lose, their very candidacy will elevate consciousness and be a conduit to restorative justice.

But I do want them to win.

I want them to win because, with every reason to despair, they have instead chosen to engage, to rebuild police-neighborhood relations, race relations, and the basic fabric of our communities and our country. These women, who know the terrible cost of a breakdown in these three social domains, now possess a powerful motive to drive change.

And make no mistake, in recent years — in recent months, weeks, and days — police-neighborhood relations, race relations, and community solidarity have all been under assault, and they have all deteriorated. Political leadership at the very top has been not merely indifferent and incompetent, but has actively encouraged dissension among us, as if creating national division were its goal.

So, we need these women, and we need other men and women like them. We need Americans who choose not to cling to some 1955 mythology of bygone American “greatness” but who want American greatness right now and for the future — a future in which the likes of Emmett Till, Jordan Davis, and Michael Brown need not fear to make their way in America.

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