(Reuters) - U.S. President Barack Obama, 48, won the 2009 Nobel Prize for Peace on Friday. Here are some facts about Obama. EARLY LIFE Barack Obama was born in August 1961 to a Kenyan father and a white American mother. His father, Barack Obama Sr., married his mother, Ann Dunham, while studying at the University of Hawaii. The couple separated two years after Obama was born. He was raised in Hawaii and Indonesia. After finishing college in 1983, Obama worked for a New York financial consultancy. He landed a job in Chicago in 1985 as an organizer for Developing Communities Project, a church-based group seeking to improve living conditions in poor neighborhoods. Three years later, Obama went to Harvard Law School, where he became the first black president of the law review. POLITICAL CAREER * Obama won a seat in the Illinois state Senate in 1996. During his time there he worked on welfare and ethics issues. * Obama won a heavily contested U.S. Senate seat in 2004, carrying 53 percent of the Democratic primary vote in an eight-candidate race. He easily won the general election as well. In the U.S. Senate he compiled a liberal voting record, but was one of the few Democrats to back a measure on class-action lawsuits. ROAD TO PRESIDENCY * Obama announced his presidential candidacy on Feb. 10, 2007. New York Sen. Hillary Clinton was initially seen as the front-runner for the Democratic nomination. * Obama won the first contest of the Democratic primary in Iowa in January 2008, but did not clinch the nomination until the last states had cast their ballots in June. * Obama won 53 percent of the popular vote on Nov. 4, beating Republican rival John McCain, and became the first black U.S. president A LONG YEAR * In April, Obama launched a plan to create a world free of nuclear weapons in a speech in the Czech capital Prague. He said the United States would reduce the role of nuclear weapons in its national security and urge others to follow. His plan envisaged maintainin...
(Reuters) - U.S. President Barack Obama, 48, won the 2009 Nobel Prize for Peace on Friday. Here are...
