Barack Obama, President | featured news

A Washington state man was arrested by federal agents on Tuesday after making threats against President Barack Obama in emails sent to the FBI, authorities said.

It was once President Barack Obama's "war of necessity." Now, it's America's forgotten war. The Afghan conflict generates barely a whisper on the U.S. presidential campaign trail. It's not a hot topic at the office water cooler or in the halls of Congress - even though more than 80,000 American troops are still fighting here and dying at a rate of one a day.

Obama said the successful landing of Curiosity -- "the most sophisticated roving laboratory ever to land on another planet" -- is "an unprecedented feat of technology that will stand as a point of national pride far into the future." "It proves that even the longest of odds are no match for our unique blend of ingenuity and determination," Obama said.

President Barack Obama celebrated his 51st birthday Saturday with a round of golf and plans for a quiet weekend at Camp David, taking a break from campaigning three months before Election Day. Obama played golf with a group of friends and aides at Andrews Air Force Base before heading to the presidential getaway in Maryland's Catoctin Mountains.

Ancestry.com has determined that President Obama is the 11th great-grandson of John Punch, the first documented slave in American history. The nation's first African-American president may be descended from America's first documented slave.

Ask Americans how race relations have changed under their first black president and they are ready with answers. Ashley Ray, a white woman, hears more people debating racial issues. "I know a lot of people who really thought we were OK as a nation, a culture, and now they understand that we're not," she says.

President Barack Obama on Wednesday ordered a series of modest steps aimed at helping small businesses, his latest election-year effort to counter Republican attacks on his economic record and show voters he is trying to tackle high unemployment.

Lost in the chatter about whether President Obama will win a second term in November is an even bigger — and perhaps even more important — question: Is it possible for a president — any president — to succeed in the modern world of politics?

IN HIS BRAND-NEW biography “Barack Obama: The Story,” The Post’s David Maraniss deftly hops along the personal islands of the president’s formative years, from his days with laid-back Hawaiian classmates to his long insular hours in New York, and his soul-searching from Occidental to Illinois, and his looking backward to Kenya and Kansas. It is a sweeping multigenerational journey.

Poland's President Bronislaw Komorowski welcomed a letter from Barack Obama on Friday in which the U.S. leader expressed regret for upsetting Poles earlier this week by referring to a "Polish death camp".