III. State whether the following statements are true or false. Correct the false
ones:
1. Two of those planes were crashed into the World Trade Center complex in Washing.
2. A third plane was crashed into the Pentagon.
3. The fourth plane targeted at the United States Capitol in Washington, D.C., but crashed into a field near Shanks Ville, Pennsylvania.
4. Almost 300 people died in the attack, including all 227 civilians and 14 hijackers aboard the four planes.
5. The Federal Aviation Administration closed American airspace to all international flights, causing about five hundred flights to be turned back or redirected to other countries.
6. The temporary World Trade Center PATH station opened in late 2003 and construction of the new 7 World Trade Center was completed in 2006.
7. The most widespread among alternative 9/11 conspiracy theories were: the falsification of the results of investigations, the hiding of participation of Obama’s cabinet, and the conspiracy of American and Afghanistan governments.
8. The destruction of the Twin Towers and other properties caused serious damage to the economy of the USA and had a significant effect on global markets.
9. As a result of the attacks, many governments across the world passed legislation to combat terrorism.
10. The Amendment to the USA Constitution gave the federal government greater powers, including the authority to detain foreign terror suspects for a week without charge, to monitor telephone communications, e-mail, and Internet use by terror suspects, and to prosecute suspected terrorists without time restrictions.
IV. Choose the correct answer:
1. The most terrible tragedy in modern American history was…
A. September 11 attacks;
B. The Cold War;
C. The 1st World War.
2. Four passenger jets hijacked by Al-Qaeda terrorists were crashed into…
A. New York, Tennessee, Manhattan
B. New York, Washington, Pennsylvania
C. World Trade Center, Pentagon, Pennsylvania
3. Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) officials were notified Flight 11 had been hijacked at…
A. 8:53
B. 7:40
C. 8:32
4. Hundreds of thousands of tons of toxic debris containing more than 2,500 contaminants, including known carcinogens, were spread across…
A. Lower Manhattan
B. Upper Manhattan
C. 5th Avenue
Vice President Dick Cheney issued orders to shoot down any commercial aircraft that could be positively identified as being hijacked at ...
A. 10:00
B. 9:30
C. 10:20
6. When and against whom did Osama bin Laden declare a holy war?
A. Russia, 1996
B. Japanese, 1995
C. USA, 1998
7. A bin Laden video was released …
A. November 13, 2009
B. December 27, 2001
C. September 30, 2009
8. On October 7, 2001 United States began the war against…
A. Afghanistan
B. Iraq
C. Britain
9. The plan for striking Iraq was accepted …
A. in 20 March 2003
B. in 13 April, 2004
C. in 20 March, 2005
10. Bin Laden was located and killed by…
A. Iraq forces, in May 2011
B. U.S. forces in June, 2010
C. U.S. forces in May, 2011
11. Numerous incidents of harassment and hate crimes against Muslims and South Asians were reported after…
A. the 9/11 attacks
B. the death of bin Laden
C. the war with Afghanistan
12. When was the rebuilding of new World Trade Center completed?
A. In 2008
B. In 2010
C. In 2006
13. The Pentagon Memorial was completed and opened to the public…
A. on the seventh anniversary of the attacks in 2008
B. on the seventh anniversary of the attacks in 2010
C. on the seventh anniversary of the attacks in 2011
14. Which government, as a result of the attacks, passed legislation to combat terrorism?
A. the USA Patriot Act
B. the Department of Homeland Security
C. the Federal Aviation Administration
V. Try to prove that terrorism is one of the main problems in the modern world.
Seminar N 5
Barack Obama
The USA today
Barack Obama
|
| 44th President of the United States |
Barack Hussein Obama II is the 44th and current President of the United States. He is the first African American to hold the office. Born in Honolulu, Hawaii, Obama is a graduate of Columbia University and Harvard Law School, where he was president of the Harvard Law Review.
Obama was born on August 4, 1961, at Kapi’olani Maternity & Gynecological Hospital (now Kapi’olani Medical Center for Women and Children) in Honolulu, Hawaii, and is the first President to have been born in Hawaii. His mother, Stanley Ann Dunham, was born in Wichita, Kansas, and was of mostly English ancestry. She died in 1995 in Hawaii following treatment for ovarian cancer and uterine cancer. His father, Barack Obama, Sr., was from Kenya. He died in an automobile accident in 1982.
In 1971, Obama returned to Honolulu to live with his maternal grandparents, Madelyn and Stanley Dunham, and with the aid of a scholarship attended Punahou School, a private college preparatory school, from fifth grade until his graduation from high school in 1979.
Following high school, Obama moved to Los Angeles in 1979 to attend Occidental College. In February 1981, he made his first public speech, calling for Occidental to divest from South Africa in response to its policy of apartheid.
Two years after graduating, Obama was hired in Chicago as director of the Developing Communities Project (DCP), a church-based community organization originally comprising eight Catholic parishes in Roseland, West Pullman, and Riverdale on Chicago's South Side. Obama also worked as a consultant and instructor for the Gamaliel Foundation, a community organizing institute. In late 1988, Obama entered Harvard Law School. After graduating with a J.D. magna cum laude from Harvard in 1991, he returned to Chicago. Obama's election as the first black president of the Harvard Law Review gained national media attention and led to a publishing contract and advance for a book about race relations, which evolved into a personal memoir. The manuscript was published in mid-1995 as Dreams from My Father.
Obama was elected to the Illinois Senate in 1996, succeeding State Senator Alice Palmer as Senator from Illinois's 13th District. Once elected, Obama gained bipartisan support for legislation that reformed ethics and health care laws. He sponsored a law that increased tax credits for low-income workers, negotiated welfare reform, and promoted increased subsidies for childcare. In 2001, as co-chairman of the bipartisan Joint Committee on Administrative Rules, Obama supported Republican Governor Ryan's payday loan regulations and predatory mortgage lending regulations aimed at averting home foreclosures.
Obama was reelected to the Illinois Senate in 1998, defeating Republican Yesse Yehudah in the general election, and was reelected again in 2002. In 2000, he lost a Democratic primary race for Illinois's 1st congressional district in the United States House of Representatives to four-term incumbent Bobby Rush by a margin of two to one. In January 2003, Obama became chairman of the Illinois Senate's Health and Human Services Committee when Democrats, after a decade in the minority, regained a majority. During his 2004 general election campaign for U.S. Senate, police representatives credited Obama for his active engagement with police organizations in enacting death penalty reforms. Obama resigned from the Illinois Senate in November 2004 following his election to the U.S. Senate.
Obama was an early opponent of the George W. Bush administration's 2003 invasion of Iraq. On October 2, 2002, the day President Bush and Congress agreed on the joint resolution authorizing the Iraq War, Obama addressed the first high-profile Chicago anti-Iraq War rally, and spoke out against the war. He addressed another anti-war rally in March 2003 and told the crowd that "it's not too late" to stop the war.
In January 2007, Obama and Senator Feingold introduced a corporate jet provision to the Honest Leadership and Open Government Act, which was signed into law in September 2007. Obama also introduced Deceptive Practices and Voter Intimidation Prevention Act, a bill to criminalize deceptive practices in federal elections, and the Iraq War De-Escalation Act of 2007, neither of which was signed into law. Obama also 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.
In the March 2004 primary election, Obama won in an unexpected landslide, which overnight made him a rising star within the national Democratic Party. Obama's expected opponent in the general election, Republican primary winner Jack Ryan, withdrew from the race in June 2004. In the November 2004 general election, Obama won with 70 percent of the vote.
He began his presidential campaign in 2007, and in 2008, after a close primary campaign against Hillary Rodham Clinton, he won sufficient delegates in the Democratic party primaries to receive the presidential nomination. He then defeated Republican nominee John McCain in the general election, and was inaugurated as president on January 20, 2009. Nine months later, Obama was named the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize laureate.
In foreign policy, Obama ended U.S. military involvement in the Iraq War, increased troop levels in Afghanistan, signed the New START arms control treaty with Russia, ordered U.S. military involvement in Libya, and ordered the military operation that resulted in the death of Osama bin Laden.
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. Regarding tort reform, Obama voted for the Class Action Fairness Act of 2005 and the FISA Amendments Act of 2008.
Obama called for Congress to pass legislation reforming health care in the United States, a key campaign promise and a top legislative goal. He 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. His proposal was to spend $900 billion over 10 years and include a government insurance plan.
On April 4, 2011, Obama announced his re-election campaign for 2012. At the Democratic National Convention in Charlotte, North Carolina, former President Bill Clinton formally nominated Obama and Joe Biden as the Democratic Party candidates for president and vice president in the general election, in which their main opponents were Republicans Mitt Romney, the former governor of Massachusetts, and Representative Paul Ryan of Wisconsin. President Obama's 2011 State of the Union Address focused on themes of education and innovation, stressing the importance of innovation economics to make the United States more competitive globally.
On May 9, 2012, shortly after the official launch of his campaign for re-election as president, Obama said his views had evolved, and he publicly affirmed his personal support for the legalization of same-sex marriage, becoming the first sitting U.S. president to do so.
Obama cosponsored the Secure America and Orderly Immigration Act. He 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.
On November 6, 2012, Obama won 332 electoral votes, exceeding the 270 required for him to be re-elected as president. With 51% of the popular vote, Obama became the first Democratic president since Franklin D. Roosevelt to twice win the majority of the popular vote.
On January 16, 2013, one month after the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting, President Obama signed 23 executive orders and outlined a series of sweeping proposals regarding gun control. He urged Congress to reintroduce an expired ban on "military-style" assault weapons, especially unlicensed dealers who buy arms for criminals and approving the appointment of the head of the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives for the first time since 2006.
In June 1989, Obama met Michelle Robinson when he was employed as a summer associate at the Chicago law firm of Sidley Austin. They began dating later that summer, became engaged in 1991, and were married on October 3, 1992. The couple's first daughter, Malia Ann, was born on July 4, 1998, followed by a second daughter, Natasha ("Sasha"), on June 10, 2001. The Obama daughters attended the private University of Chicago Laboratory Schools. When they moved to Washington, D.C., in January 2009, the girls started at the private Sidwell Friends School. The Obamas have a Portuguese Water Dog named Bo, a gift from Senator Ted Kennedy.
Obama tried to quit smoking several times, sometimes using nicotine replacement therapy, and, in early 2010, Michelle Obama said that he had successfully quit smoking.
Obama is a Christian whose religious views developed in his adult life. He wrote in The Audacity of Hope that he "was not raised in a religious household". He described his mother, raised by non-religious parents. He described his father as a "confirmed atheist" by the time his parents met, and his stepfather as "a man who saw religion as not particularly useful."
I Answer the questions:
1) When and where was Obama born?
2) What happened to Obama’s parents?
3) Who where Obama’s maternal grandparents?
4) What school did Obama enter in late 1988?
5) Whom did Obama succeed when he was elected to the Illinois Senate in 1996?
6) What did Obama sponsor?
7) What did Obama and Senator Feingold do in January 2007?
8) When did Obama win the unexpected landslide?
9) What happened in 2007-08?
10) When was Obama inaugurated as president?
11) What did he publicly affirm and do as the fist U.S. president?
12) How many electoral votes did Obama win on November 6, 2012?
13) What did Obama do on January 16, 2013 one month after the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting?
14) What did he urge Congress to reintroduce?
15) When did Obama meet his wife?
16) Does Obama have any children?
17) What religious did his family have?