7 Osama bin Laden 7

the Afghanistan-Pakistan border. Bin Laden emerged in a

videotaped message in October 2004, less than a week

before that year’s U.S. presidential election, in which he

claimed responsibility for the September 11 attacks.

Barack Obama

(b. Aug. 4, 1961, Honolulu, Hawaii, U.S.)

B

arack Hussein Obama, II, 44th president of the

United States (2009 – ), became the first African

American to hold the country’s highest office.

Obama’s father, Barack Obama, Sr., was a teenage

goatherd in rural Kenya. He won a scholarship to study in

the United States and eventually became a senior econo-

mist in the Kenyan government. Obama’s mother, S. Ann

Dunham, grew up in Kansas, Texas, and Washington State

before her family settled in Honolulu. In 1961 she and

Barack Sr. met and married less than a year later.

When Obama was age two, Barack Sr. left to study at

Harvard University. Shortly thereafter, in 1964, Ann and

Barack Sr. divorced. Later Ann married Lolo Soetoro from

Indonesia, with whom she had a second child, Maya.

Obama lived for several years in Jakarta with his half sister,

mother, and stepfather. While there, Obama attended

both a government-run school where he received some

instruction in Islam and a Catholic private school where

he took part in Christian schooling. He returned to Hawaii

in 1971, and in 1979 graduated from Punahou School, an

elite college preparatory academy in Honolulu.

Obama attended Occidental College in suburban Los

Angeles for two years and then transferred to Columbia

University in New York City, where in 1983 he received

a bachelor’s degree in political science. In 1985 he took a

position as a community organizer on Chicago’s largely

impoverished Far South Side. He returned to school three