Benigno Simeon "Ninoy" Aquino, Jr.

(November 27, 1932 August 21, 1983) was a Filipino Senator (1967-1972) and a former Governor ofTarlac. Aquino, together with Gerry Roxas and Jovito Salonga, formed the leadership of the opposition to the government of President Ferdinand Marcos. Shortly after the imposition of Martial Law, he was arrested in 1972 along with other dissidents and incarcerated for seven years. In 1980 Aquino was permitted to travel to the United States for medical treatment following a heart attack. He was assassinated at the Manila International Airport in 1983 upon returning from his self-imposed exile. His death catapulted his widow, Corazon Aquino, into the political limelight, and prompted her to run for President as member of the UNIDO party in the 1986 snap elections.
[2][3][4][5]

Among other public structures, Manila International Airport has since been renamed Ninoy Aquino International Airport in his honour, and theanniversary of his death is a national holiday. Benigno S. Aquino, Jr. was born in Concepcion, Tarlac, to a prosperous family of hacenderos (landlords), original owners of Hacienda Tinang, Hacienda Lawang and Hacienda Murcia.[6] His grandfather, Servillano Aquino, was a general in the revolutionary army of Emilio Aguinaldo.[7] His father, Benigno S. Aquino, Sr. (18941947) was the Speaker of the House of Representatives during the World War II Japanese collaborationist government of Jos P. Laurel. His father was one of two politicians representing Tarlac during his lifetime. The other was Jose Cojuangco, father of his future wife. His mother, Doa Aurora Aquino-Aquino, was also his father's third cousin. His father died while Ninoy was in his teens prior to coming to trial on treason charges resulting from his collaboration with the Japanese during the occupation.[citation needed] Aquino was educated in different prominent schools He finished his grades school at St. Joseph's College of QC and high school at San Beda College. Aquino took his tertiary education at the Ateneo de Manila to obtain a Bachelor of Arts degree, but he interrupted his studies.[8] According to one of his biographies, he considered himself to be an average student; his grade was not in the line of 90s nor did it fall into the 70s. At age 17, he was the youngest

war correspondent to cover the Korean War for the newspaper The Manila Times of Joaquin "Chino" Roces. Because of his journalistic feats, he received the Philippine Legion of Honor award from President Elpidio Quirino at age 18. At 21, he became a close adviser to then defense secretary Ramon Magsaysay. Aquino took up law at the University of the Philippines, where he became a member of Upsilon Sigma Phi, the same fraternity as Ferdinand Marcos. He interrupted his studies again however to pursue a career in journalism. According to Maximo Soliven, Aquino "later 'explained' that he had decided to go to as many schools as possible, so that he could make as many new friends as possible."[8] In early 1954, he was appointed by President Ramon Magsaysay, his wedding sponsor to his 1953 wedding at the Our Lady of Sorrows church in Pasay with Corazon Cojuangco, to act as personal emissary to Luis Taruc, leader of the Hukbalahap rebel group. After four months of negotiations, he was credited for Taruc's unconditional surrender[9] and was given a second Philippine Legion of Honor award with the degree of Commander on October 14, 1954.[10] He became mayor of Concepcion in 1955 at the age of 22.[11] Aquino gained an early familiarity with Philippine politics, as he was born into one of the Philippines' prominent oligarchic clans. His grandfather served under President Aguinaldo, while his father held office under Presidents Quezon and Jose P. Laurel. As a consequence, Aquino was able to be elected mayor when he was 22 years old. Five years later, he was elected the nation's youngest vice-governor at 27 (which record was erased by Jolo Revilla at the age of 25 in 2013), despite having no real executive experience. Two years later he became governor of Tarlac province in 1961 at age 29, then secretary-general of the Liberal Party in 1966. In 1967 he became the youngest elected senator in the country's history at age 34.[citation needed] In 1968, during his first year as senator, Aquino alleged that Marcos was on the road to establishing "a garrison state" by "ballooning the armed forces budget", saddling the defense establishment with "overstaying generals" and "militarizing our civilian government offices" all these caveats were uttered barely four years before martial law, as was typical of the accusatory style of political confrontation at the time. However, no evidence was ever produced for any of these statements.[citation needed] Aquino became known as a constant critic of the Marcos regime, as his flamboyant rhetoric had made him a darling of the media. His most polemical speech, "A Pantheon for Imelda", was delivered on February 10, 1969. He assailed the Cultural Center, the first project of First Lady Imelda Marcos as extravagant, and dubbed it "a monument to shame" and labelled its designer "a megalomaniac, with a penchant to captivate". By the end of the day, the country's broadsheets had blared that he labelled the President's wife, his cousin Paz's former ward, and a woman he had once courted, "the Philippines' Eva Peron". President Marcos is said to have been outraged and labelled Aquino "a congenital liar". The First Lady's friends angrily accused Aquino of being "ungallant". These so-called "fiscalization" tactics of Aquino quickly became his trademark in the Senate.

Obama was born on August 4, 1961,[1] at Kapiolani Maternity & Gynecological Hospital (now Kapiolani Medical Center for Women and Children) inHonolulu, Hawaii,[2][3][4] and would become the first President to have been born in Hawaii.[5] His mother, Stanley Ann Dunham, was born in Wichita,Kansas, and was of mostly English ancestry.[6] His father, Barack Obama, Sr., was a Luo from Nyangoma Kogelo, Kenya. Obama's parents met in 1960 in a Russian class at the University of Hawaii at Mnoa, where his father was a foreign student on scholarship.[7][8] The couple married inWailuku on Maui on February 2, 1961,[9][10] and separated when, in late August 1961, Obama's mother moved with their newborn son to attend theUniversity of Washington in Seattle for one year. In the meantime, Obama, Sr. completed his undergraduate economics degree in Hawaii in June 1962, then left to attend graduate school at Harvard University on a scholarship. Obama's parents divorced in March 1964.[11] Obama Sr. returned to Kenya in 1964 where he remarried; he visited Barack in Hawaii only once, in 1971.[12] He died in an automobile accident in 1982 when his son was 21 years old.[13] In 1963, Dunham met Lolo Soetoro, an Indonesian EastWest Center graduate student in geography at the University of Hawaii, and the couple were married on Molokai on March 15, 1965.[14]After two one-year extensions of his J-1 visa, Lolo returned to Indonesia in 1966, followed sixteen months later by his wife and stepson in 1967, with the family initially living in a Menteng Dalam neighborhood in the Tebet subdistrict of south Jakarta, then from 1970 in a wealthier neighborhood in the Menteng subdistrict of central Jakarta.[15] From ages six to ten, Obama attended local Indonesian-language schools: St. Francis of Assisi Catholic School for two years and Besuki Public School for one and a half years, supplemented by Englishlanguage Calvert Schoolhomeschooling by his mother.[16] In 1971, Obama returned to Honolulu to live with his maternal grandparents, Madelyn and Stanley Dunham, and with the aid of a scholarship attendedPunahou School, a private college preparatory school, from fifth grade until his graduation from high school in 1979.[17] Obama lived with his mother and sister in Hawaii for

three years from 1972 to 1975 while his mother was a graduate student in anthropology at the University of Hawaii.[18] Obama chose to stay in Hawaii with his grandparents for high school at Punahou when his mother and sister returned to Indonesia in 1975 to begin anthropology field work.[19] His mother spent most of the next two decades in Indonesia, divorcing Lolo in 1980 and earning a PhD in 1992, before dying in 1995 in Hawaii following treatment for ovarian cancer and uterine cancer.[20] Of his early childhood, Obama recalled, "That my father looked nothing like the people around methat he was black as pitch, my mother white as milkbarely registered in my mind."[8] He described his struggles as a young adult to reconcile social perceptions of his multiracial heritage.[21] Reflecting later on his years in Honolulu, Obama wrote: "The opportunity that Hawaii offeredto experience a variety of cultures in a climate of mutual respectbecame an integral part of my world view, and a basis for the values that I hold most dear." [22] Obama has also written and talked about using alcohol,marijuana, and cocaine during his teenage years to "push questions of who I was out of my mind".[23] Obama was also a member of the "choom gang", a self-named group of friends that spent time together and occasionally smoked marijuana.[24][25] 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 participate in the disinvestment from South Africa in response to that nation's policy of apartheid.[26] In mid1981, Obama traveled to Indonesia to visit his mother and half-sister Maya, and visited the families of college friends in Pakistan and India for three weeks.[26] Later in 1981, he transferred as a junior to Columbia College, Columbia University in New York City, where he majored in political science with a specialty in international relations[27] and lived off-campus on West 109th Street.[28] He graduated with a Bachelor of Arts in 1983 and worked for a year at theBusiness International Corporation,[29] then at the New York Public Interest Research Group.[30][31] Around 1984 or 1985, Obama was among the leaders of May Day efforts to bring attention to the New York City Subway system, which was in a bad condition at the time. Obama traveled to several subway stations to get people to sign letters addressed to local officials and theMetropolitan Transportation Authority, and was photographed at the City College subway station holding a sign protesting the system's condition.