Polls suggest US President Barack Obama holds only a small, perhaps meaningless lead over Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney in the race for the White House, as he awaits a new jobs report on Friday.
With unemployment remaining high, Romney and Obama are running neck and neck, with no sign that either can break away, as the race enters a final summer lull before the sprint to Election Day in November.
Both candidates are taking a break this week, which includes the Fourth of July holiday, with Romney at his lakeside compound in New Hampshire and Obama at the Camp David presidential retreat in Maryland.
“When it’s a 2 or 3-point race, that’s not good for an incumbent president,” said Republican strategist Rich Galen, who is not affiliated with Romney’s campaign.
“Obama’s political career is totally dependent on [German Chancellor] Angela Merkel holding the eurozone together,” he said.
Obama tomorrow starts a two-day bus tour of Ohio and Pennsylvania, two crucial battleground states that could go either way in the state-by-state contests that decide the election.
Meanwhile, he needs money to compete with Romney. In a leaked recording of a conference call Obama recently placed from Air Force One to top donors from his 2008 campaign, he implored them to match their earlier generosity.
The two campaigns, including their allied political action committees, are matching each other nearly dollar-for-dollar on TV ads in Florida, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Nevada, Virginia and New Hampshire. Romney’s forces are outspending Obama’s in Iowa and Michigan. The opposite is true in Colorado.
An aide on Monday confirmed that Romney plans this summer to visit Israel, a trip that could appeal to Jewish voters and to conservatives who see Israel as a vital military and political ally.
Meanwhile, Republicans worry that Democrats are making headway with claims that Romney supported shipping jobs overseas when he headed a private equity firm called Bain Capital. His campaign says Romney did not oversee the export of US jobs, although Bain at times invested in companies that helped pioneer outsourcing certain jobs to countries such as India and China.
Summer vacations and the Olympic Games might distract voters for the next several weeks, and political and legal activists might keep arguing over healthcare and immigration. However, Romney is staking his candidacy on the claim that Obama has failed on the economy.
Packed crowds in India celebrating their cricket team’s victory ended in a deadly stampede on Wednesday, with 11 mainly young fans crushed to death, the local state’s chief minister said. Joyous cricket fans had come out to celebrate and welcome home their heroes, Royal Challengers Bengaluru, after they beat Punjab Kings in a roller-coaster Indian Premier League (IPL) cricket final on Tuesday night. However, the euphoria of the vast crowds in the southern tech city of Bengaluru ended in disaster, with Indian Prime Minister Narendra calling it “absolutely heartrending.” Karnataka Chief Minister Siddaramaiah said most of the deceased are young, with 11 dead
By 2027, Denmark would relocate its foreign convicts to a prison in Kosovo under a 200-million-euro (US$228.6 million) agreement that has raised concerns among non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and residents, but which could serve as a model for the rest of the EU. The agreement, reached in 2022 and ratified by Kosovar lawmakers last year, provides for the reception of up to 300 foreign prisoners sentenced in Denmark. They must not have been convicted of terrorism or war crimes, or have a mental condition or terminal disease. Once their sentence is completed in Kosovan, they would be deported to their home country. In
Brazil, the world’s largest Roman Catholic country, saw its Catholic population decline further in 2022, while evangelical Christians and those with no religion continued to rise, census data released on Friday by the Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics (IBGE) showed. The census indicated that Brazil had 100.2 million Roman Catholics in 2022, accounting for 56.7 percent of the population, down from 65.1 percent or 105.4 million recorded in the 2010 census. Meanwhile, the share of evangelical Christians rose to 26.9 percent last year, up from 21.6 percent in 2010, adding 12 million followers to reach 47.4 million — the highest figure
LOST CONTACT: The mission carried payloads from Japan, the US and Taiwan’s National Central University, including a deep space radiation probe, ispace said Japanese company ispace said its uncrewed moon lander likely crashed onto the moon’s surface during its lunar touchdown attempt yesterday, marking another failure two years after its unsuccessful inaugural mission. Tokyo-based ispace had hoped to join US firms Intuitive Machines and Firefly Aerospace as companies that have accomplished commercial landings amid a global race for the moon, which includes state-run missions from China and India. A successful mission would have made ispace the first company outside the US to achieve a moon landing. Resilience, ispace’s second lunar lander, could not decelerate fast enough as it approached the moon, and the company has
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