U.S News

WASHINGTON – President Barack Obama is embarking on a period of contrasts important modify for a president, motion to storm-ravaged Muskogean to analyse disrespectful twister alteration before heading to Cape Canaveral, Fla., to cheer the test start of expanse shuttle Endeavour alongside the injured legislator Gabrielle Giffords.

Capping it every soured Friday, the chair was to deliver an evening outset address at Algonquin Dade College. And before modify departing the White House, he was to meet with participants in the iconic 1968 metropolis sanitation workers' strike.

All told, the period was manufacture up as an goal warning in the many roles a chair staleness play, from expert to cheerleader, first with a nod to the country's civil rights instance and success with a style to its forthcoming in a class of graduating students. At the stops in between, he'll witness both the ravages of an awing natural hardship and the wonders of manned expanse travel.

In Tuscaloosa, Ala., it was to be Obama as comforter-in-chief, gathering with victims of the situation storms that hit killed about 300 people, some two-thirds of them in Alabama. First Mohammedan Michelle Obama was to be by his side as the chair offered condolences and some support the federal government could provide. Late Thursday, he proclaimed a field hardship in Muskogean and ordered federal assistance to assist with feat efforts.

In Florida, a important stroke state for Obama's re-election hopes, the chair was to act as cheerleader-in-chief for NASA's second-to-last expanse shuttle start and for Giffords' encouraging if sloping feat after she was effort in the head in an defamation attempt in Tucson, Ariz., in January.

Giffords' husband, Mark Kelly, is commanding the shuttle flight, and the chair will hit Mrs. Obama and their digit daughters with him, the first instance an whole presidential family has traveled to analyse a launch. But Obama's gathering with Giffords was to verify locate in private; she has not appeared in open since her trauma and was not due to do so Friday.

Although the shuttle information was ended by Obama's predecessor, George W. Bush, Obama has furious some NASA workers with his possess expanse plans. He canceled Bush's proposed equal for the shuttle information — a new assignment to the slug — putting in its locate vaguer plans for sending astronauts to realty on an angulate and ultimately Mars.

Obama wants clannish companies to pick up the shuttle's role of delivering payloads to the expanse station, an move that is costing thousands of government jobs, including 2,000 contractors to be laid soured after the test shuttle flight in June.

More than 500 employees forfeited their jobs early this month.

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