PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA

Barack H. Obama is the 44th President of the United States.

His story is the American story — values from the heartland, a middle-class upbringing in a strong family, hard work and education as the means of getting ahead, and the conviction that a life so blessed should be lived in service to others.

With a father from Kenya and a mother from Kansas, President Obama was born in Hawaii on August 4, 1961. He was raised with help from his grandfather, who served in Patton's army, and his grandmother, who worked her way up from the secretarial pool to middle management at a bank.

After working his way through college with the help of scholarships and student loans, President Obama moved to Chicago, where he worked with a group of churches to help rebuild communities devastated by the closure of local steel plants.

He went on to attend law school, where he became the first African—American president of the Harvard Law Review. Upon graduation, he returned to Chicago to help lead a voter registration drive, teach constitutional law at the University of Chicago, and remain active in his community.

President Obama's years of public service are based around his unwavering belief in the ability to unite people around a politics of purpose. In the Illinois State Senate, he passed the first major ethics reform in 25 years, cut taxes for working families, and expanded health care for children and their parents. As a United States Senator, he reached across the aisle to pass groundbreaking lobbying reform, lock up the world's most dangerous weapons, and bring transparency to government by putting federal spending online.

He was elected the 44th President of the United States on November 4, 2008, and sworn in on January 20, 2009. He and his wife, Michelle, are the proud parents of two daughters, Malia, 10, and Sasha, 7.

PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA

Barack H. Obama is the 44th President of the United States.

His story is the American story — values from the heartland, a middle-class upbringing in a strong family, hard work and education as the means of getting ahead, and the conviction that a life so blessed should be lived in service to others.

With a father from Kenya and a mother from Kansas, President Obama was born in Hawaii on August 4, 1961. He was raised with help from his grandfather, who served in Patton's army, and his grandmother, who worked her way up from the secretarial pool to middle management at a bank.

After working his way through college with the help of scholarships and student loans, President Obama moved to Chicago, where he worked with a group of churches to help rebuild communities devastated by the closure of local steel plants.

He went on to attend law school, where he became the first African—American president of the Harvard Law Review. Upon graduation, he returned to Chicago to help lead a voter registration drive, teach constitutional law at the University of Chicago, and remain active in his community.

President Obama's years of public service are based around his unwavering belief in the ability to unite people around a politics of purpose. In the Illinois State Senate, he passed the first major ethics reform in 25 years, cut taxes for working families, and expanded health care for children and their parents. As a United States Senator, he reached across the aisle to pass groundbreaking lobbying reform, lock up the world's most dangerous weapons, and bring transparency to government by putting federal spending online.

He was elected the 44th President of the United States on November 4, 2008, and sworn in on January 20, 2009. He and his wife, Michelle, are the proud parents of two daughters, Malia, 10, and Sasha, 7.

Brain scans unravel hypnotist’s hand trick

Hypnosis can paralyze a limb by interfering with a region of the brain

How can a hypnotist paralyze your hand just with words? By making a part of your brain butt in on the process that normally makes your hand move, a study says.

So the brain region that's ready to move your hand ignores its usual inputs and listens to this interloper, which says, "Don't even bother," the research concluded.

It's "a kind of reconnection between different brain regions," said Yann Cojan, a researcher at the University of Geneva in Switzerland.

He's an author of the study in Thursday's issue of the journal Neuron. It used brain scans to show what happened when 12 volunteers tried to move a hand that had been paralyzed by hypnosis.

Results showed the right motor cortex prepared itself as usual to tell the left hand to move. But the cortex appeared to be ignoring the parts of the brain it normally communicates with in controlling movement. Instead, it acted more in sync than usual with a different brain region called the precuneus. That was a surprise, Cojan said.

The precuneus is involved in mental imagery and memory about oneself. Cojan suggests it was brimming with the metaphors the participants had heard from the hypnotist: Your hand is very heavy, it is stuck on the table, etc. So, he said, it might have been telling the motor cortex, "Oh, but your hand is too heavy, you can't move your hand."

Messages blocked
It's as if the motor cortex "is connected to the idea that it cannot move (the hand) and so ... it doesn't send the message to move," Cojan said.

For the research, 12 participants had their brains scanned while doing a task that required them to push a button with one hand or the other. For some sessions, they were hypnotized and told their left hands were paralyzed. For other sessions, their mental status was normal. For comparison, six other participants simply pretended their left hands were paralyzed.

Dr. Richard Frackowiak, a brain expert at the University of Lausanne in Switzerland who didn't participate in the study, called the new work a "very valuable addition" to research into hypnotic paralysis.

Amir Raz, who studies hypnosis and the brain at McGill University in Montreal, said he found the work interesting. But he wondered if the results might partially reflect general effects of being under hypnosis, rather than the paralysis suggestion itself.

Chinese make largest overseas acquisition ever

Sinopec to buy Canadian oil explorer Addax Petroleum for $7.2 billion

TORONTO - China's Sinopec will acquire oil explorer Addax Petroleum for $7.2 billion, flexing some of the country's economic clout in what would be the largest overseas takeover ever by a Chinese company.

Sinopec, a refiner, would gain access to substantial reserves in West Africa and the Middle East if the deal is approved.

Four years ago, China National Offshore Oil Company Ltd. withdrew an $18.5 billion bid for the Unocal Oil Company because of a tremendous backlash in Washington.

Geneva-based Addax, which previously said it was considering a sale, said Wednesday its board unanimously backed the deal, which still must be approved by regulators. The company is listed on exchanges in London and Toronto.

Addax said it produced 134.7 million barrels a day of crude oil in the first quarter of this year.

Beijing is pushing to lock up precious commodities as its economy grows.

Beijing-based Sinopec, which is formally known as China Petroleum & Chemical Corp., is China's biggest refiner by capacity.

If the company can add exploration and production capacity, it would help cushion against spikes in global crude oil prices. The company has posted billions in losses in recent years due to caps on domestic fuel prices.

"There's no secret that China has made a policy that it wants its firms to go forth and secure the natural resources that China believes it needs for its development," said Brad Setser, a fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations.

Chinese companies are becoming more competitive on a global scale, but they can't compete with majors such as Exxon Mobil Corp. and Royal Dutch Shell.

So the companies are going into places that oil majors are less likely to go, said Erica Downs, Chinese Energy Fellow at Brookings Institution Washington.

That includes places like Sudan, where China is a top trading partner.

"Good reserves in stable places have been locked up by the big multinationals," said Nick Lardy, an expert on China's economy at the Peterson Institute, a Washington think tank. "If you're a new player and you have a substantial appetite for access to oil on some long-term basis, then you are more or less forced to go into high risk places where the majors are not willing to tread."

Sinopec, a wholly owned subsidiary of China Petrochemical Corp., will pay $46.17 per share.

The offer is a 47 percent premium to closing market price for Addax on June 5, the day prior to it's public announcement of sales talks.

"We are pleased that Sinopec has recognized the highly attractive asset portfolio and exceptional team that we have assembled at Addax Petroleum," CEO Jean Claude Gandur said in a statement.

Shares of Addax Petroleum Corp. jumped more than eight percent to $49.74 Canadian in early afternoon trading on the Toronto stock exchange.

Copyright 2009 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

Ignored safety warnings frustrate NTSB

Board can make recommendations but can't require changes

WASHINGTON - Has the National Transportation Safety Board become the government's "I-told-you-so" agency?

After this week's deadly subway collision in Washington, board member Debbie Hersman pointed to safety recommendations the NTSB made years earlier to replace older subway cars, which might have saved lives — if they had been followed.

A commuter airliner crash near Buffalo, N.Y., on an icy February night killed 50 people and focused attention on recommendations by the board about flying in icy weather and pilot training, some more than a decade old, that the Federal Aviation Administration has yet to fully implement.

Overall, the board is still pressing federal, state and local government agencies responsible for planes, trains, ships, cars and trucks to fully implement 1,025 recommendations — which sometimes become prescient warnings — that emerge from its accident investigations. But the board can't order safety changes.

Why the inaction?
"We are frustrated with recommendations that don't get implemented," said Elaine Weinstein, director of the board's recommendations office. Acting board chairman Mark Rosenker wants to see regulators act faster: "Clearly, when we talk about a decade or more," Rosenker said earlier this year, "that is an unreasonable amount of time."

Three obstacles produce the inaction and delays: money, politics and technology.

Money includes both a lack of public funds and solutions so expensive that regulators and industry executives fear their cost would drive the price of service out of sight. Political will can include a philosophical aversion to government regulation, a tightfisted evaluation of costs versus benefits of any change or just a lack of public pressure. Finally, some board recommendations simply go beyond what existing technology can do.

Congress only gave the NTSB power to investigate accidents and recommend changes. When Congress completely separated the board from the regulatory agencies, it said the panel had to be independent so it could make "conclusions and recommendations that may be critical" of those agencies, if necessary.

Most of the board's nearly 13,000 recommendations since it began work in 1967 are not languishing. More than four out of five have been implemented to the board's satisfaction.

This work is reflected in everyone's life: rules limiting alcohol drinking by pilots, ship captains and recreational boaters, truckers and train engineers; shoulder belts in the back seats of autos and state laws requiring life jackets for children in pleasure boats; not to mention thousands of mechanical and procedural changes to planes, trains, vehicles and ships that are invisible to most who use them.

'They just can't afford it'
When the board's advice goes unheeded, money is usually the reason. In the Washington transit crash, one of the trains involved had cars built more than 30 years ago. Metrorail spokeswoman Candace Smith said it would have cost $888 million to replace 296 cars built more than 30 years ago, including the one that slammed into a stopped train.

"They just can't afford it," said John Tolman, vice president of the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers and Trainman, who has assisted on more than a dozen NTSB rail investigations. "They are totally underbudgeted and you have to weigh that against the cost to the customer." Metrorail is funded by the District of Columbia, Maryland and Virginia.

Sealed divorce record offers Gosselins privacy

TV couple filed for divorce in county that automatically seals papers

ALLENTOWN, Pa. - Jon and Kate Gosselin don't live in Montgomery County, Pa. So why are the stars of "Jon & Kate Plus 8" getting divorced there?

One likely answer: to take advantage of an unusual local rule that keeps prying eyes away from divorce records. In Montgomery County, a wealthy enclave outside Philadelphia, divorce filings are automatically placed under seal — barring access to the media and the public and allowing fractious couples like the Gosselins to dissolve their broken marriages in private.

The rule was written decades ago, before no-fault divorce became an option and at a time when divorce petitions tended to be more explosive and salacious than they are today, said Richard Hodgson, the county's president judge.

"I think it was a feeling that those kinds of allegations shouldn't be available to the public just to trash somebody and put it all over the street," he said Wednesday.

The Gosselins needn't have worried about airing their dirtiest laundry in public, at least at this early stage of the divorce. Kate Gosselin's no-fault petition, filed Monday and obtained Tuesday by The Associated Press, offers boilerplate language but no detail on why the celebrity couple is splitting after 10 years.

"Jon & Kate," which drew record ratings when the Gosselins announced their breakup on Monday night's episode, is going on hiatus until August to allow the couple time to "regroup," according to TLC.

Attorneys for the couple aren't commenting on why they wanted to shift the case out of Berks County — where the Gosselins reside with their eight children — to a court about 50 miles away in neighboring Montgomery County. But in Berks, as in most Pennsylvania counties, divorce records are available to anyone who walks in off the street and asks for them.

Privacy vs. public’s right to know
Open-records advocates say that's how it should be.

"A divorce is a public act," said Robert Richards, founding co-director of the Pennsylvania Center for the First Amendment at Penn State University. "They are not going to private mediators and handling it that way. They are going to the public court system to dissolve their marriage."

e added the policies of Montgomery County and Philadelphia — another jurisdiction that seals divorce records — might be vulnerable to a legal challenge because the Pennsylvania Constitution declares that "all courts shall be open."

"To close off access to a whole category of files, to me, is going much too far," he said.

But supporters of the rule say privacy concerns — especially when children are involved — outweigh the public's right to know.

"Those inside the system think it's enough that kids are involved in a custody matter in the first place, and to subject them to further publicity serves no legitimate purpose," said Harry Byrne, a Montgomery County divorce lawyer.

In Los Angeles, perhaps the celebrity divorce capital of the world, divorce petitions are generally public. However, couples can opt to have their case heard by a private arbitrator. Also, divorces litigated in the public court system can be at least partially sealed, as has frequently been the case with the breakups of stars such as Britney Spears and ex-husband Kevin Federline, Alec Baldwin and Kim Basinger, and Denise Richards and Charlie Sheen.

A celebrity couple will occasionally try to divorce quietly and without attracting the attention of the entertainment press, as actress Kate Walsh and her husband Alex Young sought to do last year when they filed their divorce petition using only their initials.

Copyright 2009 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

CAPTAIN AMERICA

NEW YORK - Captain America has undertaken his last mission — at least for now. The venerable superhero is killed in the issue of his namesake comic that hit stands Wednesday, the New York Daily News reported.

On the new edition's pages, a sniper shoots down the shield-wielding hero as he leaves a courthouse, according to the newspaper.

It ends a long run for the stars-and-stripes-wearing character, created in 1941 to incarnate patriotic feeling during World War II. Over the years, an estimated 210 million copies of "Captain America" comic books, published by New York-based Marvel Entertainment Inc., have been sold in a total of 75 countries.

But resurrections are not unknown in the world of comics, and Marvel Entertainment editor in chief Joe Quesada said a Captain America comeback wasn't impossible.

Still, the character's death came as a blow to co-creator Joe Simon.

"We really need him now," said Simon, 93, who worked with artist Jack Kirby to devise Captain America as a foe for Adolf Hitler.

According to the comic, the superhero was spawned when a scrawny arts student named Steve Rogers, ineligible for the army because of his poor health but eager to serve his country, agreed to a "Super Soldier Serum" injection. The substance made him a paragon of physical perfection, armed only with his shield, his strength, his smarts and a command of martial arts.

In the comic-book universe, death is not always final. But even if Captain America turns out to have met his end in print, he may not disappear entirely: Marvel has said it is developing a Captain America movie.

Copyright 2007 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.