http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barack_Obama
Barack Hussein Obama II (
US 
i/ /,
UK / /; born August 4, 1961) is the
44th and
current President of the United States, and the
first African American to hold the office. Born in
Honolulu, Hawaii, Obama is a graduate of
Columbia University and
Harvard Law School, where he served as president of the
Harvard Law Review. He was a
community organizer in Chicago before earning his
law degree. He worked as a
civil rights attorney and taught
constitutional law at the
University of Chicago Law School from 1992 to 2004. He
served three terms representing the 13th District in the
Illinois Senate from 1997 to 2004,
running unsuccessfully for the
United States House of Representatives in 2000.
In 2004, Obama received national attention during his
campaign to represent Illinois in the
United States Senate with his victory in the March
Democratic Party primary, his
keynote address at the
Democratic National Convention in July, and his election to the Senate in November. He began his presidential campaign in 2007 and, after
a close primary campaign against
Hillary Rodham Clinton in 2008, he won sufficient delegates in the
Democratic Party primaries to receive the presidential nomination. He then defeated
Republican nominee
John McCain in the
general election, and was
inaugurated as president on January 20, 2009. Nine months after his election, Obama was named the
2009 Nobel Peace Prize laureate.
Obama was born on August 4, 1961,
[1] at Kapi
ʻolani Maternity & Gynecological Hospital (now
Kapiʻolani Medical Center for Women and Children) in
Honolulu,
Hawaii,
[2][3][4] and would become the first President to have been born in Hawaii.
[5] His mother,
Stanley Ann Dunham, was born in
Wichita,
Kansas, and was of mostly English ancestry.
[6] His father,
Barack Obama, Sr., was a
Luo from
Nyang’oma Kogelo, Kenya. Obama's parents met in 1960 in a Russian class at the
University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa, where his father was a foreign student on scholarship.
[7][8] The couple married in
Wailuku on
Maui on February 2, 1961,
[9][10] and separated when, in late August 1961, Obama's mother moved with their newborn son to attend the
University of Washington in Seattle for one year. In the meantime, Obama, Sr. completed his undergraduate economics degree in Hawaii in June 1962, then left to attend graduate school at
Harvard University on a scholarship. Obama's parents divorced in March 1964.
[11] Obama Sr. returned to Kenya in 1964 where he remarried; he visited Barack in Hawaii only once, in 1971.
[12] He died in an automobile accident in 1982 when his son was 21 years old.
[13]
In 1963, Dunham met
Lolo Soetoro, an Indonesian
East–West Center graduate student in geography at the University of Hawaii, and the couple were married on
Molokai on March 15, 1965.
[14] After two one-year extensions of his
J-1 visa, Lolo returned to
Indonesia in 1966, followed sixteen months later by his wife and stepson in 1967, with the family initially living in a Menteng Dalam neighborhood in the
Tebet subdistrict of south
Jakarta, then from 1970 in a wealthier neighborhood in the
Menteng subdistrict of central Jakarta.
[15] From ages six to ten, Obama attended local Indonesian-language schools: St. Francis of Assisi Catholic School for two years and
Besuki Public School for one and a half years, supplemented by English-language
Calvert School homeschooling by his mother.
[16]
Obama returned to Honolulu in 1971 to live with his maternal grandparents,
Madelyn and
Stanley Dunham, and with the aid of a scholarship attended
Punahou School, a private
college preparatory school, from fifth grade until his graduation from high school in 1979.
[17] Obama lived with his mother and sister in Hawaii for three years from 1972 to 1975 while his mother was a graduate student in
anthropology at the University of Hawaii.
[18] Obama chose to stay in Hawaii with his grandparents for high school at Punahou when his mother and sister returned to Indonesia in 1975 so his mother could begin anthropology field work.
[19] His mother spent most of the next two decades in Indonesia, divorcing Lolo in 1980 and earning a PhD in 1992, before dying in 1995 in Hawaii following treatment for
ovarian cancer and
uterine cancer.
[20]
The opportunity that Hawaii offered—to experience a variety of cultures in a climate of mutual respect—became an integral part of my world view, and a basis for the values that I hold most dear."
[22] Obama has also written and talked about using alcohol,
marijuana, and
cocaine during his teenage years to "push questions of who I was out of my mind".
[23] Obama was also a member of the "choom gang", a self-named group of friends that spent time together and occasionally smoked marijuana
Obama is a
Christian whose religious views developed in his adult life.
[360] He wrote in
The Audacity of Hope that he "was not raised in a religious household." He described his mother, raised by non-religious parents (whom Obama has specified elsewhere as "non-practicing
Methodists and
Baptists"), as being detached from religion, yet "in many ways the most spiritually awakened person that I have ever known." He described his father as a "confirmed
atheist" by the time his parents met, and his stepfather as "a man who saw religion as not particularly useful." Obama explained how, through working with
black churches as a
community organizer while in his twenties, he came to understand "the power of the African-American religious tradition to spur social change."
[361]
In an interview with the evangelical periodical
Christianity Today, Obama stated: "I am a Christian, and I am a devout Christian. I believe in the redemptive death and resurrection of
Jesus Christ. I believe that that faith gives me a path to be cleansed of sin and have eternal life."
[362] On September 27, 2010, Obama released a statement commenting on his religious views saying "I'm a Christian by choice. My family didn't—frankly, they weren't folks who went to church every week. And my mother was one of the most spiritual people I knew, but she didn't raise me in the church. So I came to my Christian faith later in life, and it was because the precepts of Jesus Christ spoke to me in terms of the kind of life that I would want to lead—being my brothers' and sisters' keeper, treating others as they would treat me."
[363][364]
Obama announced in June 2009 that his primary place of worship would be the Evergreen Chapel at
Camp David.
[367]
In April 2010, Obama announced a planned change in direction at
NASA, the U.S. space agency. He ended plans for a return of
human spaceflight to the
moon and development of the
Ares I rocket,
Ares V rocket and
Constellation program, in favor of funding Earth science projects, a new rocket type, and research and development for an eventual manned mission to
Mars, and ongoing missions to the
International Space Station.
[149
http://youtu.be/OFPwDe22CoY
