Barack Obama

Obama was born in Honolulu, Hawaii to Barack Obama, Sr. (born in Nyanza Province, Kenya) and Ann Dunham (born in Wichita, Kansas). Barack Hussein Obama (born August 4, 1961) is the junior United States Senator from Illinois and a member of the Democratic Party.

Obama grew up in culturally diverse surroundings. He spent most of his childhood in the majority-minority U.S. state of Hawaii and lived for four years in Indonesia. Obama delivered the keynote address at the 2004 Democratic National Convention while still an Illinois state legislator. Since announcing his candidacy in February 2007, Obama has emphasized ending the Iraq War and implementing universal health care as campaign themes.

As a member of the Democratic minority in the 109th Congress, Obama co-sponsored the enactment of conventional weapons control and transparency legislation, and made official trips to Eastern Europe, the Middle East, and Africa. Obama's parents separated when he was two years old and later divorced. His father went to Harvard University to pursue Ph.D. studies, then returned to Kenya, where he died in an auto accident when the younger Obama was twenty-one years old.

MD Bridge Closing for Rehab

Another one of the region's bridges is scheduled to undergo a rehabilitation project this summer. The Maryland State Highway Administration plans to shut down the Central Avenue bridge over the Patuxent River on Monday for a $3 million project scheduled to last until late fall. The 72-year-old, two-lane steel truss bridge on the Prince George's-Anne Arundel line carries nearly 11,000 vehicles daily. Though it lacks the scale of the Douglass and Legion bridges, the rehab project caused some of the same concerns among the commuters who use it on their way toward Washington and now will have to use detours. Some in the Davidsonville area would have prefered that the state find a way to work only at night or keep the bridge partly open to traffic during rush periods. But the state figured it was best to get in, get it done and get out of a project that

washingtonpost.com Fri, 03 Aug 2007 05:41:02 EDT

Source: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/blog/2007/08/03/BL2007080300388.html?nav=rss_opinion/columns
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President Bush signs the "Coburn-Obama" Federal Funding Accountability and Transparency Act of 2006. The family moved to Jakarta in 1967, where Obama attended local schools from ages 6 to 10.

In September 2006, he was the featured speaker at Iowa Senator Tom Harkin's annual steak fry, an event traditionally attended by presidential hopefuls in the lead-up to the Iowa caucus. Obama was born in Honolulu, Hawaii to Barack Obama, Sr. (born in Nyanza Province, Kenya) and Ann Dunham (born in Wichita, Kansas). Speaking to an elderly Jewish audience during his 2004 campaign for U.S. Senate, Obama linked the linguistic roots of his East African first name Barack to the Hebrew word baruch, meaning "blessed. In early May 2007, the U.S. Secret Service announced that Obama had been placed under their protection. Together with Warren and Brownback, Obama took an HIV test, as he had done in Kenya less than four months earlier. Obama encouraged "others in public life to do the same" to show "there is no shame in going for an HIV test. His parents met while both were attending the University of Hawaii at Manoa, where his father was enrolled as a foreign student. "I've never been a heavy smoker," Obama told the Chicago Tribune. The New York Times described Obama as "the prize catch of the midterm campaign" because of his campaigning for fellow Democratic Party members running for election in the 2006 midterm elections.