Strange usage of dependent clauses

Before asking my question, I would like to point out that English is not my mother tongue, and that consequently, my choice of terminology might be inappropriate.

I have noticed that in many cases, there is a very strange combination of dependent (sub?) clauses in the English language.To be more specific, consider the following quote from wikipedia's artcile on Barack Obama:

Born in Honolulu, Hawaii, Obama is a graduate of Columbia University and Harvard Law School, where he was president of the Harvard Law Review.

What does, apart from any weak and uncited statistical correlation there might be, the fact that Barack Obama was born in Honolulu have to with the fact that he is a graduate of Columbia and Harvard? To me this is a very bizarre way of writing a sentence, and it makes just as much sense as saying "Born in Honolulu, Obama ate an apple on the 4th of july 1990" (no idea if he actually did).

Has anybody else noticed this absurdity? Does anybody have an explanation for it? Is it merely a failed attempt at giving the text a good "flow"?

If I may chime in belatedly in support of Robusto's first comment above, the posted example is simply an instance of newspaperese.

Journalists (and other writers) are trained to avoid composing series of simple declarative sentences because, all too often, the resulting prose sounds wooden:

Obama was born in Honolulu, Hawaii.

Obama is a graduate of Columbia University and Harvard Law School.

Obama was president of the Harvard Law Review.

But when a ham-handed writer attempts to combine a series of loosely related (or utterly unrelated) details, the result can be off-putting to readers who expect to see some causal (or at least transitional) connection between the various details that appear in the same sentence.

Thus, for example, a scattershot reporter might turn in a sentence like this:

Left-handed, Obama attended Occidental College in Eagle Rock, California, two decades before achieving passage of an ambitious but controversial federal healthcare law.

Like the OP's example, this sentence passes muster grammatically, and it isn't boring in the "Obama is... Obama was... Obama was..." way that the details might be if presented as a series simple sentences. But at some point, the unrelatedness of the points that the writer puts in such close proximity begins to wear on readers, who expect to find some closer relation among the details than the fact that they all refer to the same person.

To the extent that readers infer that Obama's left-handedness, matriculation at Occidental College, and championing of the federal healthcare law are mentioned together because they are related in some unstated way, readers are allowing their expectation of the details' relevance to each other in the sentence to lead them astray. To a lesser extent, the same issue arises in connection with the OP's example.

My advice is to read defensively: Try not to assume that a causal relationship exists between details that merely happen to appear contiguously. Skillful writers don't habitually assemble such potentially misleading amalgams, but everyone makes mistakes—and many writers simply aren't very skillful.