JERUSALEM — Republican presidential hopeful Mitt Romney, who touched down here Saturday night for a day of meetings with top Israeli and Palestinian leaders, plans to wrap up his visit to Israel by collecting money from some of his biggest benefactors behind closed doors.

Some of Romney’s Jewish donors are flying here from the United States to attend the Jerusalem fundraiser on Monday morning, including Las Vegas casino mogul Sheldon Adelson, who has pledged to personally give tens of millions of dollars to a pro-Romney super PAC.

But Romney’s campaign announced Saturday that it would block the news media from covering the event, which will be held at the King David Hotel. The campaign’s decision to close the fundraiser to the press violates the ground rules it negotiated with news organizations in April, when Romney wrapped up the Republican nomination and began opening some of his finance events to the news media.

Under the agreement, a pool of wire, print and television reporters can cover every Romney fundraiser held in public venues, including hotels and country clubs. The campaign does not allow media coverage of fundraisers held in private residences.
Campaign spokesman Rick Gorka declined to explain the campaign’s decision to violate protocol with the Jerusalem event. Pressed repeatedly by reporters to offer an explanation, Gorka said only that the fundraiser was “closed press.”
“That’s all I’ve got for you — it’s closed press,” Gorka said.


http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/election-2012/post/romney-bans-media-from-jerusalem-fundraiser-violating-pre-established-protocol/2012/07/28/gJQAAaeVGX_blog.html

xtra water vapor up high coul trigger destructive chemical reactions




Climate change may spur the destruction of ozone in unexpected parts of the globe.

In a warming world, many scientists believe, severe weather will become more common. That could be a problem in part because powerful rainstorms have the potential to erode ozone above the United States, researchers report online July 27 in Science.

“For 30 years, we’ve studied the problems of ozone loss and climate change separately,” says team leader James Anderson, a Harvard atmospheric scientist. “Now it’s pretty clear that climate change appears to be linked directly to the loss of ozone.” High-altitude ozone acts as a protective shield, blocking ultraviolet rays that can cause skin cancer.

Anderson and his colleagues stumbled on the unexpected connection while studying strong summer storms fueled by rising heat. During missions from 2001 to 2007, NASA planes flying close to the edge of space spotted water spewed high into the sky by convective storms over the U.S. The goal was to gather useful measurements for figuring out how high-altitude clouds form and trap heat.

http://www.sciencenews.org/view/generic/id/342528/title/Stronger_storms_may_destroy_ozone


For the past 25 years, it seemed that we’d pretty much solved the ozone problem. In the 1970s and 80s, people around the world grew increasingly alarmed as research revealed that chemicals we were producing—such as CFCs, used in refrigeration— had started destroying the crucial ozone layer, high up in the atmopshere, that protects us from the sun’s harmful UV radiation. In response, world governments came together to sign the Montreal Protocol in 1987, which phased out the production of ozone-depleting chemicals. The concentration of these chemicals in the atmosphere leveled off within a decade.

Yesterday, though, Harvard scientists hit us with some bad news: It looks as if climate change could actually cause the depletion of the ozone layer to resume on a wide scale, with grim implications for the United States.

“If you were to ask me where this fits into the spectrum of things I worry about, right now it’s at the top of the list,” said professor James Anderson in a press release, discussing his team’s paper, published online in Science. “What this research does is connect, for the first time, climate change with ozone depletion, and ozone loss is directly tied to increases in skin cancer incidence, because more ultraviolet radiation is penetrating the atmosphere.”

http://blogs.smithsonianmag.com/science/2012/07/climate-change-could-erode-ozone-layer-over-u-s/

DNA evidence for early 'mystery' humans



SEATTLE, July 26 (UPI) -- Early humans in Africa mated with a mystery species of human that may have been related to Neanderthals that later inhabited Europe, genetic studies show.

No fossil evidence of the previously unknown humans exists, researchers said, but they left their mark in bits of foreign DNA in modern-day African populations.

The existence of that genetic material in modern human populations is proof of interbreeding between the two species, probably 20,000 to 50,000 years ago, they said.



Read more: http://www.upi.com/Science_News/2012/07/26/DNA-evidence-for-early-mystery-humans/UPI-54951343333214/#ixzz21vOJ5IEL

?w=1410



Greenland's ice sheet melt: a sensational picture of a blunt fact


Once you look at the colour coding and absorb what it means it is a mapping of potential climate change catastrophe




The Greenland ice sheet on July 8, left, and four days later on the right. An estimated 97% of the ice sheet surface had thawed by July 12. Photograph: Nasa
This is the most frightening picture you will ever see. The information expressed visually here can be summed up in three words: change or die. So let's take a closer look.

These two juxtaposed images of Greenland are based on observations by satellites monitored by Nasa. The view on the left synthesises their collective view of this inhospitable landmass in the Arctic Circle on 8 July 2012. That on the right shows what Greenland looked like to the same satellites on 12 July, just four days later. A huge amount of ice has melted in an extremely unusual Arctic heatwave.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/jul/27/greenland-ice-sheet-melt

The Reason why the answer to the Universe is 42

It is impossible for an observer to manoeuvre to see any rainbow from water droplets at any angle other than the customary one of 42 degrees from the direction opposite the Sun.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rainbow


I was answering a science question a discovered the answer

It is impossible for an observer to manoeuvre to see any rainbow from water droplets at any angle other than the customary one of 42 degrees from the direction opposite the Sun.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rainbow

Maybe I should have placed this in the Science Forum or
for fans of The hitchhikers guide to the Universe.
But I just discovered this answering a science problem
and realized I had an answer to everything.

Of the Caymans by putting his money there.

Also recognizes Switzerland as a great place
for his wife's tax-free portfolio.


he's so international

'Don't forget Poland" Oh, he'll love it there, the sausages are just the right height.




The Telegraph also notes a passage from Romney's book 'No Apology' in which he offers is extra-special view or our extra-special allies:

'England is just a small island. Its roads and houses are small. With few exceptions, it doesn't make things that people want to buy. And if it hadn't been separated from the continent by water, it almost certainly would have been lost to Hitler's ambitions.'


I love this tour of the Ugly American exceptionalism Candidate
that will make the world even hate us more.


I wonder what he was like when he lived in france....

Oh, yeah they had maids there.

What an international embarrassment.

15.32

Romney is now addressing the press outside Downing Street... rather strangely he just said it was a thrill to "look out the backside of Ten Downing Street and see the Olympics." Odd choice of words and proof that Britain and the US are divided by their common language.


http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/mitt-romney/9428295/Mitt-Romney-in-London-as-it-happened.html