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The White House has acknowledged that as a student at Harvard Law School in the 1980s, the president briefly lived with his Kenyan-born uncle, after it first denied the two had ever met.

Earlier this week, Onyango Obama, 69, faced a deportation that resulted from a 2011 drunk-driving arrest. At the hearing, which he won, the judge asked about his family and Onyango replied that he had a nephew named Barack Obama, adding "He's the president of the United States."

According to The Boston Globe, Onyango also testified that while the future president was attending Harvard Law School, he briefly stayed with him.

On Thursday, White House spokesman Eric Schultz said in a statement that President Obama "did stay with him [Onyango] for a brief period of time until his apartment was ready."

"After that, they saw each other once every few months, but after law school they fell out of touch. The president has not seen him in 20 years, has not spoken with him in 10," Schultz said.

That statement contradicts a January 2012 article in the Globe about Onyango Obama, in which the White House is reported to have said the two never met.

The Associated Press writes:

"Onyango Obama, the half-brother of the president's late father, testified he has lived in the U.S. since 1963, when he entered on a student visa. He had a series of immigration hearings in the 1980s and was ordered to leave the country in 1992 but remained."

"His immigration status didn't become public until his 2011 drunken-driving arrest in Framingham, Mass. Police said after the arrest he told them, 'I think I will call the White House.'"

"In the president's memoir, Dreams from My Father, he writes about his 1988 trip to Kenya and refers to an Uncle Omar, who matches Onyango Obama's background and has the same date of birth."

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China has been building up its military strength for some time now, and pushing ever farther from its coastline and into international waters. The real concern now is for miscalculation — particularly with Japan — that ends up in gunfire.

Just six months ago, the Pentagon released its annual report on China's military. Its defense budget was growing. The country was building more stealthy aircraft and submarines. It even bought an aircraft carrier from the Ukraine.

Pentagon official David Helvey highlighted particular areas of concern.

"In recent years, China has begun to demonstrate a more routine and capable presence in both the South and East China seas, which has increased regional anxieties over China's intentions," he said in May.

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Vice President Joe Biden met with China's president in Beijing Wednesday, in a trip to Asia that has often touched on growing tensions over China's new air defense identification zone.

Biden's two-day visit to China was planned before the country's defense officials surprised neighboring Japan by declaring a defense zone in an area contested by the two countries. The topic of the air zone likely helped extend a closed-door session that had been scheduled for 45 minutes to its actual length of two hours.

"At the U.S. embassy here, Biden enthusiastically challenged Chinese visa applicants to think outside the box and challenge their own government. Chinese may find his remarks inflammatory," NPR's Anthony Kuhn reports from Beijing. "Hours later, though, Biden sounded hoarse as he spoke to President Xi Jinping about the need for trust between Beijing and Washington."

In public remarks in the Great Hall of the People that were separate from their closed meeting, Biden said, "As we've discussed in the past, this new model of major country cooperation ultimately has to be based on trust and a positive notion about the motive of one another."

After China's declared its control over the airspace, the U.S., Japan, and South Korea have said that they do not recognize the claim. Within days, several aircraft — including two U.S. bombers — defied China's requirement that all planes identify themselves.

As we reported yesterday, Biden said during a visit to Japan that the U.S. is "deeply concerned" about the air defense zone.