The 2008 Democratic presidential nominee, Senator Barack Obama of Illinois, 47, is projected to win at least 349 electoral votes, more than enough to clinch the Presidency of the United States. Obama is the first African American to be elected President in U.S. history. His Republican opponent, Arizona senator John McCain is projected to win at least 173 electoral votes. McCain has phoned Obama to concede the election. Obama officially became the President-elect when John McCain issued his concession speech shortly after 9:00PM Mountain Time.

The Electoral College will officially elect Obama on December 15 and he will be inaugurated as the 44th President on January 20, 2009 at noon.

"We have come to the end of a long journey. The American people have spoken and spoken clearly. This is an historic election and I realize the significance this has for African-Americans  Let there be no reason now, for any American should fail to cherish their citizenship in this, the greatest nation on Earth," said McCain at a final event in Arizona.

Barack Hussein Obama was born on August 4, 1961 in Honolulu, Hawaii to Barack Obama, Sr. from Kenya and Ann Dunham from Wichita, Kansas. He grew up in Hawaii and Indonesia. He graduated from high school in 1979 and attended Occidental College and Columbia University, receiving his B.A. in political science in 1983. Afterwards he moved to Chicago and worked as a community organizer.

He enrolled in Harvard Law School in 1988, became the first black president of the Harvard Law Review, and graduated magna cum laude in 1991. He returned to Chicago, lecturing at the University of Chicago and practicing as a civil rights attorney.

He was elected to the Illinois State Senate in 1997, and became the Democratic nominee for U.S. Senator from Illinois in March 2004. The following July, he delivered the keynote address at the Democratic National Convention, catapulting him into the national spotlight.

He won election to the U.S. Senate with 70% of the vote. On February 20, 2007 he announced his candidacy for President and clinched the Democratic nomination on June 3, 2008, after a tense primary battle with Hillary Clinton. Obama is married to Michelle née Robinson, with whom he has two daughters.

• ECV = Electoral College votes

A medical study has identified a previously unknown risk to children of parents who smoke tobacco: hunger. Children who live in households with at least one adult smoker are more likely to be underfed, according to Dr. Cynthia Cutler-Triggs of the New York University School of Medicine and Bellevue Hospital.

Dr. Cutler-Triggs's study measured food insecurity, a concept used by the U.S. Department of Agriculture since the 1990s to measure the frequency of skipped meals and how often people go to bed hungry. Researchers examined data on 8,817 households from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey. The study parsed the survey, which tracked the health and nutritional status of adults and children in the United States, according to smoking habits and household income.

17 percent of children in low income smoking households suffered food insecurity, compared to an overall food insecurity rate of 11 percent among children. Severe food insecurity occurred among 3.2 percent of children in smoking households.

Only 0.9 of children from nonsmoking households had severe food insecurity. Similar rises in food insecurity occurred among adults from smoking households, but researchers were more concerned about the effects on the health of growing children.

Dr. Michael Weitzman, chairman of pediatrics at New York University School of Medicine, told The Washington Post, "We know that there are long-term consequences of food insecurity for children. They are more likely to do poorly in school, to have iron deficiency and anemia, and to have behavioral and social problems."

An estimated 2 percent to 20 percent of smokers' incomes goes for tobacco, which may compete with the grocery budget in some families. Household income accounted for some but not all of the difference in food security. Dr. Weitzman expressed concern that a continued recession may worsen the problem. "If the economic downturn persists, both food insecurity and adults smoking are likely to increase... [because smoking] is one of the hardest addictions to give up."