95 Facts About US President Barack Obama

1. US President Barack Obama continued drone strikes against Islamist militants begun by the previous administration.

2. US President Barack Obama went on an international trip from November 28 to December 2, 2017, and visited China, India and France.

3. US President Barack Obama gained 10 spots from the same survey in 2015 from the Brookings Institution that ranked Obama the 18th-greatest American President.

4. US President Barack Obama accepted this award in Oslo, Norway on December 10, 2009, with "deep gratitude and great humility.

5. US President Barack Obama gave a speech encouraging the world to increase economic ties via investments and trade with the continent, and lauded the progresses made in education, infrastructure, and economy.

6. US President Barack Obama spoke in front of the African Union in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, on July 29, 2015, the first sitting US president to do so.

7. US President Barack Obama visited Havana, Cuba for two days in March 2016, becoming the first sitting US President to arrive since Calvin Coolidge in 1928.

8. US President Barack Obama was living in seclusion in a large compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan, a suburban area 35 miles from Islamabad.

9. In 2014, US President Barack Obama authorized an air campaign aimed primarily at ISIL, but repeatedly promised that the US would not deploy ground troops in Syria.

10. In 2012, US President Barack Obama authorized multiple programs run by the CIA and the Pentagon to train anti-Assad rebels.

11. The next day, on US President Barack Obama's orders, the US military took part in air strikes to destroy the Libyan government's air defense capabilities to protect civilians and enforce a no-fly-zone, including the use of Tomahawk missiles, B-2 Spirits, and fighter jets.

12. In 2015, US President Barack Obama was harshly criticized by Israel for advocating and signing the Iran Nuclear Deal; Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who had advocated the US congress to oppose it, said the deal was "dangerous" and "bad".

13. US President Barack Obama said that both movements seek to bring justice and equal rights to historically persecuted peoples.

14. In June 2011, US President Barack Obama said that the bond between the United States and Israel is "unbreakable".

15. US President Barack Obama supports the two-state solution to the Arab–Israeli conflict based on the 1967 borders with land swaps.

16. In February 2013, US President Barack Obama said the US military would reduce the troop level in Afghanistan from 68,000 to 34,000 US troops by February 2014.

17. US President Barack Obama announced an increase in US troop levels to 17,000 military personnel in February 2009 to "stabilize a deteriorating situation in Afghanistan", an area he said had not received the "strategic attention, direction and resources it urgently requires".

18. US President Barack Obama said, "Let me say this as plainly as I can: by August 31, 2010, our combat mission in Iraq will end.

19. On February 27, 2009, US President Barack Obama announced that combat operations in Iraq would end within 18 months.

20. In December 2014, US President Barack Obama announced that he intended to normalize relationships between Cuba and the United States.

21. In December 2011, US President Barack Obama instructed agencies to consider LGBT rights when issuing financial aid to foreign countries.

22. In March 2010, US President Barack Obama took a public stance against plans by the government of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to continue building Jewish housing projects in predominantly Arab neighborhoods of East Jerusalem.

23. On June 4, 2009, US President Barack Obama delivered a speech at Cairo University in Egypt calling for "A New Beginning" in relations between the Islamic world and the United States and promoting Middle East peace.

24. US President Barack Obama attempted to reach out to Arab leaders by granting his first interview to an Arab satellite TV network, Al Arabiya.

25. US President Barack Obama said that the results came because not enough Americans had felt the effects of the economic recovery.

26. US President Barack Obama called the November 2, 2010 election, where the Democratic Party lost 63 seats in, and control of, the House of Representatives, "humbling" and a "shellacking".

27. On January 5, 2016, US President Barack Obama announced new executive actions extending background check requirements to more gun sellers.

28. In June 2014, US President Barack Obama made indications that his administration would consider a shift towards an energy policy more closely tuned to the manufacturing industry and its impact on the domestic economy.

29. In March 2009, US President Barack Obama lifted a ban on using federal funds for stem cell research.

30. US President Barack Obama proposed an expansion of health insurance coverage to cover the uninsured, to cap premium increases, and to allow people to retain their coverage when they leave or change jobs.

31. US President Barack Obama called for Congress to pass legislation reforming health care in the United States, a key campaign promise and a top legislative goal.

32. US President Barack Obama used his power under the Antiquities Act to create 25 new national monuments during his presidency and expand four others, protecting a total of 553,000,000 acres of federal lands and waters, more than any other US president.

33. US President Barack Obama has emphasized the conservation of federal lands during his term in office.

34. On February 24, 2015, US President Barack Obama vetoed a bill that would authorize the pipeline.

35. In July 2013, US President Barack Obama expressed reservations and stated he "would reject the Keystone XL pipeline if it increased carbon pollution" or "greenhouse emissions".

36. US President Barack Obama urged Congress to ratify a 12-nation free trade pact called the Trans-Pacific Partnership.

37. In December 2013, US President Barack Obama declared that growing income inequality is a "defining challenge of our time" and called on Congress to bolster the safety net and raise wages.

38. US President Barack Obama signed into law the Car Allowance Rebate System, known colloquially as "Cash for Clunkers", that temporarily boosted the economy.

39. US President Barack Obama intervened in the troubled automotive industry in March 2009, renewing loans for General Motors and Chrysler to continue operations while reorganizing.

40. On March 11, 2009, US President Barack Obama created the White House Council on Women and Girls, which formed part of the Office of Intergovernmental Affairs, having been established by Executive Order 13506 with a broad mandate to advise him on issues relating to the welfare of American women and girls.

41. On December 22, 2010, US President Barack Obama signed the Don't Ask, Don't Tell Repeal Act of 2010, which fulfilled a key promise made in the 2008 presidential campaign to end the Don't ask, don't tell policy of 1993 that had prevented gay and lesbian people from serving openly in the United States Armed Forces.

42. On October 30, 2009, US President Barack Obama lifted the ban on travel to the United States by those infected with HIV, which was celebrated by Immigration Equality.

43. US President Barack Obama spoke of a five-year freeze in domestic spending, eliminating tax breaks for oil companies and reversing tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans, banning congressional earmarks, and reducing healthcare costs.

44. US President Barack Obama 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.

45. On March 30, 2010, US President Barack Obama signed the Health Care and Education Reconciliation Act, a reconciliation bill that ended the process of the federal government giving subsidies to private banks to give out federally insured loans, increased the Pell Grant scholarship award, and made changes to the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act.

46. US President Barack Obama's was confirmed on August 5, 2010, bringing the number of women sitting simultaneously on the Court to three justices for the first time in American history.

47. US President Barack Obama nominated Sonia Sotomayor on May 26, 2009 to replace retiring Associate Justice David Souter; she was confirmed on August 6, 2009, becoming the first Supreme Court Justice of Hispanic descent.

48. US President Barack Obama appointed two women to serve on the Supreme Court in the first two years of his Presidency.

49. In March 2009, US President Barack Obama reversed a Bush-era policy that had limited funding of embryonic stem cell research and pledged to develop "strict guidelines" on the research.

50. US President Barack Obama ordered the closing of the Guantanamo Bay detention camp, but Congress prevented the closure by refusing to appropriate the required funds and preventing moving any Guantanamo detainee into the US or to other countries.

51. On November 6, 2012, US President Barack Obama won 332 electoral votes, exceeding the 270 required for him to be reelected as president.

52. US President Barack Obama delivered his victory speech before hundreds of thousands of supporters in Chicago's Grant Park.

53. US President Barack Obama became the first African American to be elected president.

54. On June 19, 2008, US President Barack Obama became the first major-party presidential candidate to turn down public financing in the general election since the system was created in 1976.

55. US President Barack Obama emphasized issues of rapidly ending the Iraq War, increasing energy independence, and reforming the health care system, in a campaign that projected themes of hope and change.

56. On February 10, 2007, US President Barack Obama announced his candidacy for President of the United States in front of the Old State Capitol building in Springfield, Illinois.

57. US President Barack Obama sponsored a Senate amendment to the State Children's Health Insurance Program, providing one year of job protection for family members caring for soldiers with combat-related injuries.

58. US President Barack Obama sponsored legislation that would have required nuclear plant owners to notify state and local authorities of radioactive leaks, but the bill failed to pass in the full Senate after being heavily modified in committee.

59. US President Barack Obama introduced two initiatives that bore his name: Lugar–Obama, which expanded the Nunn–Lugar Cooperative Threat Reduction concept to conventional weapons; and the Federal Funding Accountability and Transparency Act of 2006, which authorized the establishment of USAspending.

60. US President Barack Obama announced on November 13, 2008, that he would resign his Senate seat on November 16, 2008, before the start of the lame-duck session, to focus on his transition period for the presidency.

61. US President Barack Obama was sworn in as a senator on January 3, 2005, becoming the only Senate member of the Congressional Black Caucus.

62. US President Barack Obama's expected opponent in the general election, Republican primary winner Jack Ryan, withdrew from the race in June 2004.

63. US President Barack Obama addressed another anti-war rally in March 2003 and told the crowd that "it's not too late" to stop the war.

64. US President Barack Obama created a campaign committee, began raising funds, and lined up political media consultant David Axelrod by August 2002.

65. In May 2002, US President Barack Obama commissioned a poll to assess his prospects in a 2004 US Senate race.

66. In January 2003, US President Barack Obama became chairman of the Illinois Senate's Health and Human Services Committee when Democrats, after a decade in the minority, regained a majority.

67. US President Barack Obama was reelected to the Illinois Senate in 1998, defeating Republican Yesse Yehudah in the general election, and was re-elected again in 2002.

68. US President Barack Obama sponsored a law that increased tax credits for low-income workers, negotiated welfare reform, and promoted increased subsidies for childcare.

69. US President Barack Obama served on the board of directors of the Chicago Annenberg Challenge from 1995 to 2002, as founding president and chairman of the board of directors from 1995 to 1999.

70. In 1991, US President Barack Obama accepted a two-year position as Visiting Law and Government Fellow at the University of Chicago Law School to work on his first book.

71. US President Barack Obama was selected as an editor of the Harvard Law Review at the end of his first year, president of the journal in his second year, and research assistant to the constitutional scholar Laurence Tribe while at Harvard for two years.

72. US President Barack Obama worked as a consultant and instructor for the Gamaliel Foundation, a community organizing institute.

73. US President Barack Obama helped set up a job training program, a college preparatory tutoring program, and a tenants' rights organization in Altgeld Gardens.

74. US President Barack Obama worked there as a community organizer from June 1985 to May 1988.

75. US President Barack Obama described his mother, raised by non-religious parents, as being detached from religion, yet "in many ways the most spiritually awakened person that I have ever known.

76. US President Barack Obama wrote in The Audacity of Hope that he "was not raised in a religious household".

77. On his 55th birthday, August 4, 2016, US President Barack Obama penned an essay in Glamour, in which he described how his daughters and the presidency have made him a feminist.

78. In June 1989, US President Barack Obama met Michelle Robinson when he was employed as a summer associate at the Chicago law firm of Sidley Austin.

79. US President Barack Obama proposed to her twice, but both Jager and her parents turned him down.

80. US President Barack Obama lived with anthropologist Sheila Miyoshi Jager while he was a community organizer in Chicago in the 1980s.

81. US President Barack Obama plays basketball, a sport he participated in as a member of his high school's varsity team, and he is left-handed.

82. US President Barack Obama is a supporter of the Chicago White Sox, and he threw out the first pitch at the 2005 ALCS when he was still a senator.

83. US President Barack Obama has roots in Ireland; he met with his Irish cousins in Moneygall in May 2011.

84. US President Barack Obama graduated with a BA degree in 1983 and worked for about a year at the Business International Corporation, where he was a financial researcher and writer, then as a project coordinator for the New York Public Interest Research Group on the City College of New York campus for three months in 1985.

85. In February 1981, US President Barack Obama made his first public speech, calling for Occidental to participate in the disinvestment from South Africa in response to that nation's policy of apartheid.

86. US President Barack Obama lived with his mother and half-sister, Maya Soetoro, in Hawaii for three years from 1972 to 1975 while his mother was a graduate student in anthropology at the University of Hawaii.

87. US President Barack Obama attended Punahou School—a private college preparatory school—with the aid of a scholarship from fifth grade until he graduated from high school in 1979.

88. Recalling his early childhood, US President Barack Obama said, "That my father looked nothing like the people around me—that he was black as pitch, my mother white as milk—barely registered in my mind.

89. US President Barack Obama's parents met in 1960 in a Russian language class at the University of Hawaii at Manoa, where his father was a foreign student on a scholarship.

90. US President Barack Obama was born to a white mother and a black father.

91. US President Barack Obama is the only president who was born in Hawaii and the only president who was born outside of the contiguous 48 states.

92. US President Barack Obama advocated for gun control in response to the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting, indicating support for a ban on assault weapons, and issued wide-ranging executive actions concerning climate change and immigration.

93. US President Barack Obama received national attention in 2004 with his March primary win, his well-received July Democratic National Convention keynote address, and his landslide November election to the Senate.

94. US President Barack Obama represented the 13th district for three terms in the Illinois Senate from 1997 to 2004, when he ran for the US Senate.

95. US President Barack Obama was born in 1961 in Honolulu, Hawaii, two years after the territory was admitted to the Union as the 50th state.