Mitt Romney To Skip Iowa's Straw Poll

Republicans in Iowa are disappointed that GOP Presidential candidate Mitt Romney will not participate in the Iowa straw poll in August. It is considered one of the marquee events of the Iowa campaign, and it's by far the most-watched straw poll in the presidential election campaign season.

John Stineman, a long-time Iowa GOP strategist, says the problem for Romney is that the expectations game is far tougher than it is for any other candidate.

Romney poured tremendous resources into the 2007 straw poll in Iowa. He won, but it was as if he peaked too soon and lost the caucuses to upstart Mike Huckabee five months later.

Romney is polling well in a match up against President Obama, and his campaign is trying to figure out how to play, nurture and capitalize on his front-runner status. And, that will be tricky, according to Stineman.

 

Romney's message is that he's skipping all straw polls, and that he'll use his resources to run a campaign aimed at winning contests where the votes actually count.

Romney has insisted in recent appearances that he'll still campaign in Iowa, but that he's running a very different campaign than the previous one.

Stineman says a lot of people in the state like Romney and they want him to compete. They also want a full roster of candidates in the caucuses. But Stineman adds it's only pundits who talk about the stature of the caucuses diminishing, if not everyone competes.

By not competing in the Iowa straw poll, Romney may have a hard time keeping his troops in the state energized.

Activists want to be active, Stineman says. And the straw poll is one way to do that.

Plus, the straw poll comes at a point when it helps the organization get it into high gear for the final push through the fall pre-caucus campaign.

Romney won't have that if he skips the straw poll, and he'll need to find some other way to get it. That is, if he wants to do well in the caucuses.

Source: http://www.npr.org/blogs/itsallpolitics/2011/06/10/137097845/mitt-romney-to-skip-iowa-s-straw-poll?ft=1&f=1014

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Huntsman's New Hampshire Gamble (Taegan Goddard's Political Wire)

Jon Huntsman has publicly declared that he won't compete in the Iowa caucuses and now he seems on course to scuttle his bid at the New Hampshire primary as well, according to Politico. "Huntsman's decision to skip the first New Hampshire presidential debate on Monday has Republicans in the state confused -- and predicting that he'll suffer politically for it... Huntsman's aides say the decision not to participate was simple: He's not yet a declared candidate... The other argument: It's a long campaign, and many voters still aren't tuned in... But the media are already paying attention -- and by skipping an event sponsored by state ABC affiliate WMUR and, more critically, the Union Leader newspaper -- Huntsman could risk angering the paper's powerful publisher, Joe McQuaid, and the paper's editorial page editor, Andrew Cline." Share With Friends: | | Politics - Top Stories Stories, RSS Feeds and Widgets via Feedzilla.

Source: http://news.feedzilla.com/en_us/stories/politics/top-stories/99966039?client_source=feed&format=rss

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A Great Mystery Comes Into Focus: Antimatter Trapped For 16 Minutes

Yesterday my son and I were driving through Pennsylvania when we stopped for gas. As I drained my wallet filling the tank, he went to the Quickie Mart and returned with $10 worth of 'poppers'. A popper, for those who don't know, is small paper-wrapped wad of explosive. Throw one down on a hard surface and it cracks with the report of a .22, leaving only a few paper shreds behind. Within about two minutes my son had gone through the entire box. Poppers don't last long in the hands of a teenage boy and that makes them a good analogy for antimatter — the universe's strange and elusive "twin" version of mass.

For decades physicists have been trying to trap enough antimatter to perform detailed experiments on its properties. But, like my son's poppers, the antimatter always disappeared quickly, annihilating itself on first contact with any speck of "real" matter in a burst of energy.

Those elusive, antimatter hunting days appear to be over. Yesterday, a team of researchers at CERN managed to trap a significant chunk of antimatter for a full quarter-hour. That's a world record and it means an era of regular antimatter experiments may be just ahead of us.

Antimatter came as a surprise to physicists when it was discovered 80 years ago. Back then scientists had only just started getting used to the idea that all matter was made up of a zoo of particles like the electrically charged electrons (negative charge) and protons (positive charge). Then in 1928 Paul Dirac predicted that electrons must have an oppositely charged "antimatter" twin.

 

Dirac saw that when an electron meets an oppositely charged antielectron (called a positron) they would annihilate each other in a flash of energy (light). The positron's existence was verified in experiments just a few years later and scientists soon came to realize that every matter particle had an antimatter version as well. An entire periodic chart of antielements should, in principle, be possible, starting with simple antiatoms like antihydrogen (a positron orbiting an antiproton). But they quickly ran headlong into a dilemma.

Where is all the universe's antimatter?

For cosmologists studying the origin of the universe it was pretty clear that equal amounts of matter and antimatter must have spewed out from the fireball at the beginning of creation. But the universe we live in, thankfully, is not made of equal parts matter and antimatter (if it was, every move we made would lead to terrible explosions). There must be some subtle difference between matter and antimatter that blew away the "anti-stuff" early in cosmic history, leaving only our matter-dominated Universe.

In our current epoch antimatter makes only fleeting appearances in man-made particle accelerators or in very high-energy natural events.

The problem for physicists is they have never been able to collect large enough quantities of antimatter to study its properties in detail. Antielements such as antihydrogen just disappear too quickly through collisions with matter. What they needed was a means of producing stable blobs of antimatter to poke, probe and prod in experiments that would allow us to understand its properties on the deepest level.

Now, it appears, they have found the means.

Last year scientists at CERN, the main European particle physics laboratory (also the home of the LHC), were able to form antihydrogen and keep it around for a whopping two-tenths of a second. That was a world record. They achieved their milestone by finding novel ways to keep the antihydrogen from hitting the walls of the container and annihilating itself.

Now the same team (called the ALPHA antimatter experiment) has extended their antimatter trapping out to 16 minutes and 40 seconds. That is a 5,000-fold increase in confinement time. After decades of getting nothing more than a fleeting glimpse of the stuff, keeping a treasure trove of antihydrogen captive for that long is both very impressive and very important.

The strange existence of antimatter and its radical imbalance as a cosmic constituent is a fundamental mystery that has persisted for eight decades. With the ALPHA team's achievement, we may finally be poised to understand not only the universe that is but also the universe that might have been.

Source: http://www.npr.org/blogs/13.7/2011/06/08/137028191/binding-the-universe-s-other-half-anti-matter-trapped-for-15-minutes?ft=1&f=1007

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Citigroup Confirms Customer Accounts Hacked

Thursday, Citigroup confirmed that some customer account information was accessed by hackers. The attack affected only about 1 percent of customers. But still, it's another example of hackers breaking into companies that are supposed to be super secure. Recently, data storage company EMC Ltd had to replace millions of electronic keys, Sony faced several attacks, Google got hit, and now Citigroup. Is anything hack proof?

Source: http://www.npr.org/2011/06/09/137089303/citigroup-confirms-customers-hacked?ft=1&f=1003

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Union Workers Cry Foul Over New S.C. Boeing Plant

A new Boeing plant in South Carolina is the subject of a legal battle that's playing out across the South and in Congress.

The controversy is over Boeing's decision to assemble its fuel-efficient 787 Dreamliner in non-union South Carolina instead of in Washington state, where it has built planes for decades.

The company says South Carolina offered a lot of incentives to get the plant, but the union says Boeing broke the law and violated workers' rights.

Plant Timeline Not Affected

Boeing's enormous assembly plant near the airport in North Charleston is almost finished. Inside, workers are installing equipment where new employees will build the Dreamliner.

Candy Eslinger, a spokeswoman for Boeing in South Carolina, says she can't talk specifically about the union complaint. But she says it hasn't changed anything at the plant.

"Our plans are still going forward," Eslinger says. "We will be starting production here in July of 2011 and we'll deliver our first airplane out of South Carolina in 2012."

The long-term plan is to produce three planes a month in South Carolina and seven in Washington state. Boeing spokesman Tim Neale says the company negotiated with the union, but failed.

Source: http://www.npr.org/2011/06/09/137081954/union-workers-cry-foul-over-new-s-c-boeing-plant?ft=1&f=1003

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Researchers Make A Stink To Fight Mosquitoes

When they're hungry for blood, mosquitoes can sniff out a human meal. Some researchers are using that sense of smell against the pests. University of California Riverside entomologist Anandasankar Ray explains how odors might one day be used to repel and trap mosquitoes.

Source: http://www.npr.org/2011/06/03/136925545/researchers-make-a-stink-to-fight-mosquitoes?ft=1&f=1007

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