Barack Hussein Obama II (born August 4, 1961) is the President-elect of the United States and the junior United States Senator from Illinois.Obama is the first African American to be elected President of the United States. On February 10, 2007 he announced his candidacy for President of the United States and on June 3, 2008 he was named the presumptive nominee of the Democratic party after a 17 month long primary campaign. He became the President-elect after defeating John McCain on November 4, 2008 and will be sworn in as the 44th President of the United States on January 20, 2009. He is the first new president to be elected in the 21st century. [Wikipedia]
Barack Obama was born at the Kapi'olani Medical Center for Women & Children in Honolulu, Hawaii,to Barack Hussein Obama, Sr., a Luo from Nyang’oma Kogelo, Nyanza Province, Kenya, and Ann Dunham, a white American from Wichita, Kansas of mainly English, Irish and smaller amounts of German descent.His parents met in 1960 while attending the University of Hawaii at Manoa, where his father was a foreign student.The couple married February 2, 1961; they separated when Obama was two years old and subsequently divorced in 1964. Obama's father returned to Kenya and saw his son only once more before dying in an automobile accident in 1982.
After her divorce, Dunham married Lolo Soetoro, and the family moved to Soetoro's home country of Indonesia in 1967, where Obama attended local schools, such as Asisi, in Jakarta until he was ten years old. It was during this time that he learned about equality and unity and became involved in Scouting. He then returned to Honolulu to live with his maternal grandparents, Madelyn and Stanley Dunham, while attending Punahou School from the fifth grade in 1971 until his graduation from high school in 1979. Obama's mother returned to Hawaii in 1972 for several years, and then in 1977 went back to Indonesia, where she worked as an anthropological field worker. She stayed there most of the rest of her life, returning to Hawaii in 1994. She died of ovarian cancer in 1995. [More at Wikipedia]
