Pravda (Russian: Правда; IPA: [ˈpravdə] ( listen), "Truth") was a leading newspaper of the Soviet Union and an official organ of the Central Committee of the Communist Party between 1912 and 1991.

The Pravda newspaper was started in 1912 in St. Petersburg. It was converted from a weekly Zvezda. It did not arrive in Moscow until 1918. During the Cold War, Pravda was well known in the West for its pronouncements as the official voice of Soviet Communism. (Similarly Izvestia was the official voice of the Soviet government.)

After the paper was closed down in 1991 by decree of then-President Boris Yeltsin, many of the staff founded a new paper with the same name, which is now a tabloid-style Russian news source. There is an unaffiliated Internet-based newspaper, Pravda Online, run by former Pravda newspaper employees. A number of other newspapers have also been called Pravda, most notably Komsomolskaya Pravda, formerly the official newspaper of the now defunct Komsomol and currently the best-selling tabloid in Russia.

Barack Hussein Obama II (ⁱ/bəˈrɑːk huːˈseɪn oʊˈbɑːmə/; born August 4, 1961) is the 44th and current President of the United States. He is the first African American to hold the office. In January 2005, Obama was sworn in as a U.S. Senator in the state of Illinois. He would hold this office until November 2008, when he resigned following his victory in the 2008 presidential election.

Born in Honolulu, Hawaii, Obama is a graduate of Columbia University and Harvard Law School, where he was the president of the Harvard Law Review. He was a community organizer in Chicago before earning his law degree. He worked as a civil rights attorney in Chicago and taught constitutional law at the University of Chicago Law School from 1992 to 2004. He served three terms representing the 13th District in the Illinois Senate from 1997 to 2004.

Following an unsuccessful bid against the Democratic incumbent for a seat in the United States House of Representatives in 2000, Obama ran for the United States Senate in 2004. Several events brought him to national attention during the campaign, including his victory in the March 2004 Illinois Democratic primary for the Senate election and his keynote address at the Democratic National Convention in July 2004. He won election to the U.S. Senate in Illinois in November 2004. His presidential campaign began in February 2007, and after a close campaign in the 2008 Democratic Party presidential primaries against Hillary Rodham Clinton, he won his party's nomination. In the 2008 presidential election, he defeated Republican nominee John McCain, and was inaugurated as president on January 20, 2009. Nine months later, Obama was named the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize laureate. In April 2011, he announced that he would be running for re-election in 2012.