




Biography: Barack Hussein Obama was born Aug. 4, 1961, in Honolulu, Hawaii. His father, Barack Obama, Sr., was born of Luo ethnicity in Nyanza Province, Kenya. He grew up herding goats with his own father, who was a domestic servant to the British. Although reared among Muslims, Obama, Sr., became an atheist at some point. Obama’s mother, Ann Dunham, grew up in Wichita, Kansas. Her father worked on oil rigs during the Depression. After the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, he signed up for service in World War II and marched across Europe in Patton’s army. Dunham’s mother went to work on a bomber assembly line. After the war, they studied on the G. I. Bill, bought a house through the Federal Housing Program, and moved to Hawaii. Meantime, Barack’s father had won a scholarship that allowed him to leave Kenya pursue his dreams in Hawaii. At the time of his birth, Obama’s parents were students at the East–West Center of the University of Hawaii at Manoa. Obama’s parents separated when he was two years old and later divorced. Obama’s father went to Harvard to pursue Ph. D. studies and then returned to Kenya. His mother married Lolo Soetoro, another East–West Center student from Indonesia. In 1967, the family moved to Jakarta, where Obama’s half-sister Maya Soetoro–Ng was born. Obama attended schools in Jakarta, where classes were taught in the Indonesian language. Four years later when Barack (commonly known throughout his early years as "Barry") was ten, he returned to Hawaii to live with his maternal grandparents, Madelyn and Stanley Dunham, and later his mother (who died of ovarian cancer in 1995). He was enrolled in the fifth grade at the esteemed Punahou Academy, graduating with honors in 1979. He was only one of three black students at the school. This is where Obama first became conscious of racism and what it meant to be an African–American. In his memoir, Obama described how he struggled to reconcile social perceptions of his multiracial heritage. He saw his biological father (who died in a 1982 car accident) only once (in 1971) after his parents divorced. And he admitted using alcohol, marijuana and cocaine during his teenage years. After high school, Obama studied at Occidental College in Los Angeles for two years. He then transferred to Columbia University in New York, graduating in 1983 with a degree in political science. After working at Business International Corporation (a company that provided international business information to corporate clients) and NYPIRG, Obama moved to Chicago in 1985. There, he worked as a community organizer with low-income residents in Chicago’s Roseland community and the Altgeld Gardens public housing development on the city’s South Side.




Marilyn Manson, whose real name is Brian Hugh Warner, was born on January 5, 1969 in Canton, Ohio to the parents of Hugh and Barb Warner. During his childhood, one of his neighbors molested him several times until the young Brian broke down one day and told his mother what happened. As an only child, he would often get into mischievous activities such as adventure through his grandfather Jack Warner's sex toys, shoot his BB gun with his cousin Chad, and create sex magazines to sell to his classmates. His parents raised him as an Episcopalian, and he attended the religious private Heritage Christian School. It was there that he became fueled with hate towards Christanity. During his tenth grade year, he convinced his parents to let him attend a public school.After he graduated from high school, he and his parents moved to Fort Lauderdale, Florida because his father got a better job there. He studied journalism and theater at the local community college called Broward, and being some place new and feeling lonely, he wrote poems and short stories. After being fired from his last job at a record store, he became entertainment journalist for a local magazine. He interviewed several famous musicians including Trent Reznor from the band "Nine Inch Nails". Along with his job and writing, he would also frequently go to rock clubs. He soon decided to create his own band. With musical influences from Ozzy Osbourne and KISS, he recruited other musicians with the same interests and started the band called "Marilyn Manson and the Spooky Kids". He got the name Marilyn Manson as a combination from the names of the movie star Marilyn Monroe and the psycho killer Charles Manson. The band's name would later officially change to just Mariyn Manson, and most of the original band members would leave and be replaced, too. Manson reunited with Trent Reznor and had his band tour with "Nine Inch Nails". Reznor would also produce Marilyn Manson's first three albums (Portriat of an American Family, AntiChrist Superstar, and Mechanical Animals) and an E.P. (Smells like Children). "Mechanical Animals" is Marilyn Manson's most successful album to date.With the success, Manson became a controversial celebrity, because the anti-Christian message in his songs, and Satanist 'Anton Szandor LaVey' deemed Manson a Reverend for the Church of Satan. Also with fame, Manson started to mingle with other celebrities, and began a romantic relationship with the actress Rose McGowan. They became engaged, but broke off the relationship in 2001. He then fell in love with the burlesque dancer Dita Von Teese, and soon became engaged. They had a fairytale, non-denominational wedding in a castle in Ireland. Meanwhile, Manson came out with two more albums (Holy Wood, and the Golden Age of Grotesque), and a best of album (Lest We Forget: The Best Of...). He also dabbled into acting by being in such movies as Jawbreaker (1999), Party Monster (1998) and The Heart Is Deceitful Above All Things (2004). He continues to make music and act in movies.







For his pioneering work in manned flight Alberto Santos-Dumont is officially called the "Father of Aviation" in his native country of Brazil. Santos-Dumont left Brazil when he was eighteen and moved to Paris, France, where he applied his mechanical skills and considerable inheritance to building and flying aircraft. He first worked on balloons in the late 1890s, then turned his attention to "heavier-than-air" machines. In 1906 Santos-Dumont flew 715 feet and became internationally famous as the first man to fly an airplane -- a claim that was later denied him when it turned out that The Wright Brothers had flown their own plane secretly in 1903. Unlike the Wright Brothers, Santos-Dumont was a flamboyant socialite who loved the limelight -- he used to fly around Paris in his powered balloons, hobnobbing with the rich and famous. In 1909 he built the "Demoiselle," a lightweight monoplane that captured the public's attention and became a popular seller in England and France. In 1910 he retired due to illness (now described as multiple sclerosis), and in 1928 he returned to Brazil, where he was greeted as a national hero. Apparently despondent over the militarization of airships, he committed suicide in 1932.

Hugo Chavez Frias was born in Sabaneta, Barinas State on July 28th, 1954. He has a mulatto background which gives him a common link to the 67% majority of Venezuelans. After he finished high school, he would have to travel to Caracas to continue his education. Chavez attended Venezuela’s Military Academy, where he graduated with a degree in Military Sciences and Arts on July 5, 1975. Having both parents as teachers its easy to see why he is an intellectual person, and why they weren't wealthy. Apparently his family also sold bananas and sowed corn for income. Chavez’ love for baseball is also easy to see. When he was a kid he played baseball like all children in Venezuela, and apparently he was a good pitcher. It was the desire to become a major league pitcher that initially led him into the military. After gaining his degree and his hopes of being a major leaguer gone, he continued on with his military career. During that time, he had various assignments, an armored unit, anti-guerilla duty along the Colombian border, and then as a military ethics instructor. Soon after that he began sowing the seeds for a coup in 1992.
Francisco Alves Mendes Filho, Chico Mendes, had just turned 44 years old on December 15, 1988, one week before being murdered. Born in the Brazilian state of Acre, in the “seringal” (rubber tapper settlement) called Porto Rico in Xapuri city, he started working as a rubber tapper when still a child, following his father’s steps. His life as a union leader began with the foundation of the Rural Workers Union of Brasiléia, in 1975, when he was chosen to be the general secretary. In 1976, he was actively engaged in the rubber tappers’ fight against deforestation through a strategy of resistance called the "empate". He also organized several actions to defend the people’s right to land ownership. In 1977, he helped found the Rural Workers Union of Xapuri, and was elected City councilman for the political party MDB (Brazilian Democratic Movement). During this same year, Chico Mendes suffered the first death threats from the local ranchers, at the same time that he began to face several problems within his own political party, the MDB, which was not supportive of his struggles. In 1979, Chico Mendes transformed the City Council into a great forum of debates between union, popular and religious leaders, being for that accused of subversion and submitted to hard interrogations. In December of the same year, Chico was tortured in secret. Having no support, he was not able to denounce the fact. With the appearance of the Workers Party, Chico became one of its founders and leaders in Acre, participating in local assemblies together with Lula. Still in 1980, Chico Mendes was framed within the National Security Law, at the request of the local ranchers who attempted to involve him in the revenge murder, promoted instead by forty landowners, of a rancher believed to be involved in Wilson Pinheiro’s murder, the Brasiléia Workers Union’s president. In the following year, Chico Mendes became the Xapuri Workers Union president, and kept that position until the time of his death. In this same year, Chico was accused of inciting landowners to violence. Being tried by the Military Court of Manaus, he managed to avoid his preventive detention. In the November 1982 elections, Chico Mendes ran for the seat of state congressman of the Workers Party, the PT, loosing the election. Two years later he was tried again, being acquitted by lack of evidence. In October 1985, he lead the 1st Rubber Tappers National Meeting, when the Rubber Tappers National Council (CNS) was created, becoming its main point of reference. From then on, the rubber tappers struggle, under Chico Mendes's leadership, gained national and international exposure, strengthened by the proposal of the "Forest People Alliance”. This proposal aimed to unite the common interests of the indigenous communities and the rubber tappers in preserving the amazon forest as well as the creation of the extractive reserves in order to protect the indigenous areas and the forest, and ensure, at the same time, the rubber tappers’ agrarian reform. During the 2nd Rubber Tappers National Meeting, scheduled on March 1989, Chico should assume the CNS presidency. In 1987, United Nations members met Chico Mendes in Xapuri, where they witnessed the extent of forest devastation and the expulsion of rubber tappers caused by projects financed by international investments. Two months later, Chico Mendes was bringing these accusations to the North American Senate and to one of the financing banks meeting, the BID (Bank of Interamerican Development). After thirty days, the financing to the devastative projects were suspended and Chico was accused by local ranchers and politicians of hindering the " progress " of the State of Acre. Months later, Chico Mendes began to receive several national and international awards and acknowledgments, such as the Global 500 prize by the UN, for being one of the persons that most stood out on that year in defense of the ecology. During the year of 1988, Chico Mendes, who was being increasingly threatened and attacked by organized groups stemming from the recently established UDR (Rural “Democratic” Union) in Acre, expanded his struggle through several areas of Brazil, by participating in seminars, lectures and congresses, where he could denounce the predatory actions against the forest and the ranchers’ acts of violence against the Xapuri workers. On the other hand, Chico was responsible for the accomplishment of a great dream: the implementation of the first extractive reserve in the State of Acre, in addition to the expropriation of rancher Darli Alves da Silva from the Seringal Cachoeira, in Xapuri. From then on, the death threats became very serious, as Chico himself denounced several times. He made it very clear to the police department and government officials that his life was in danger and that he needed protection, to the point of giving out the names of his probable murderers. During the 3rd National Congress of CUT, Chico Mendes once more denounced this situation, along with several other rural workers from different parts of the country. The situation was the same everywhere; criminal violence was being perpetrated by the UDR from north to south of Brazil. In this same Congress, Chico Mendes defended the thesis presented by the Xapuri Union, "In Defense of the Forest People", unanimously approved by the approximate 6 thousand delegates present. At the end of the Congress, he was elected substitute of the CUT national direction. On December 22, 1988, Chico Mendes was murdered at his home’s door. Chico was married with lIzamar Mendes and left two children, Sandino, 2 years old, and Elenira, 4.