WASHINGTON, USA - The rival presidential campaigns of Hillary Rodham Clinton and Barack Obama traded accusations of nasty politics Wednesday over Hollywood donor David Geffen, who once backed Bill Clinton but now supports his wife’s top rival.
The Clinton campaign demanded that Obama denounce comments made by the DreamWorks movie studio founder, who told New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd in Wednesday’s editions that while “everybody in politics lies,” the former president and his wife “do it with such ease, it’s troubling.”
The Clinton camp also called on Obama to give back Geffen’s $2,300 contribution.
Campaigning in Iowa, Obama refused. “It’s not clear to me why I’d be apologizing for someone else’s remark,” the Illinois senator said.
For her part, New York Senator. Clinton sidestepped questions, leaving the issue to her aides to discuss. “I’m just going to stay focused on my campaign and I’m going to run a positive campaign about the issues that affect the people in our country,” she told The Associated Press in an interview in Nevada. She was participating a candidate forum in Carson City.
The Clinton team seemed eager to continue the attack. With Obama in Iowa, aides arranged for former Iowa attorney general Bonnie Campbell to criticize him in a conference call with reporters.
In the newspaper interview, Geffen also said Bill Clinton is “a reckless guy” and he does not think Hillary Clinton can bring the country together during a time of war, no matter how smart or ambitious she is.
Obama spokesman Robert Gibbs added another criticism of Clinton. “It is also ironic that Senator Clinton lavished praise on Monday and is fully willing to accept today the support of South Carolina state Sen. Robert Ford, who said if Barack Obama were to win the nomination, he would drag down the rest of the Democratic Party because ‘he’s black,’” Gibbs’ statement said.
Ford later apologized. The Clinton campaign said it disagreed with Ford, but the senator has embraced his support. Another Democratic presidential candidate, New Mexico Government. Bill Richardson, said at the candidate forum that Obama should denounce Geffen’s comments. “We Democrats should all sign a pledge that we all be positive,” Richardson said. •

GAZA CITY, Gaza Strip - The birth of quintuplets brought chaos to a blue-painted maternity ward in a Gaza City hospital Wednesday, with flustered doctors trying to keep order among a crush of photographers and a slightly bewildered father. Layla Abu Nofal, 25, delivered the five healthy babies — four boys and a girl — by Caesarean section in the Shifa Hospital.
“The fifth was a surprise,” said her husband, Mohammed. He said his wife took hormone treatments to get pregnant but that they had expected only four babies.
The Gaza Strip has one of the world’s highest birth rates. Two years ago, another woman had sextuplets in Shifa Hospital.
Still, the quintuplets created a frenzy at the maternity ward, where the babies lay side by side with midwives peering over them. Bemused nurses and doctors tried to keep order among TV cameramen, photographers and a Palestine TV correspondent with a microphone.
The couple already have a 5-year-old girl and a 6-year-old boy. “Everybody in the family picked a name” for the babies, Mohammed Abu Nofal said, but he only remembered them with some prodding from his mother-in-law: Mohammed, Ahmed, Hussam, Abdul Rahman, and Iman.
Abu Nofal, a 28-year-old policeman who earns $470 a month, said he wasn’t sure how they would afford to raise their seven children, alongside 11 members of his extended family.
“I don’t think we’ve got enough money for diapers and baby milk to be honest with you,” he said. •