The Deepwater Horizon, a deepwater oil drilling rig operated by BP, exploded in the Gulf of Mexico on April 20, 2010. The explosion killed eleven workers and set off a massive offshore oil spill. Millions of barrels of crude oil rushed into the gulf for months until the leak was capped on July 15. Local fishing economies were devastated by the spill.
Barack Obama (1961– ) is the forty-fourth president of the United States. Before becoming the first African American elected to the nation’s highest office, Obama attended Columbia University and earned a law degree from Harvard. He also worked as a community organizer in Chicago for several years and in 1997 became a member of the Illinois senate. He was elected to the US Senate in 2004, and that same year his keynote address at the Democratic National Convention lifted Obama into the national spotlight. In 2007 he announced his candidacy...