President Barack Obama handily defeated Gov. Mitt Romney and won himself a second term Tuesday after a bitter and historically expensive race that was primarily fought in just a handful of battleground states. Obama beat Romney after nabbing almost every one of the crucial battleground states.
The Romney campaign's last-ditch attempt to put blue-leaning Midwestern swing states in play failed as Obama's Midwestern firewall sent the president back to the White House for four more years. Obama picked up the swing states of New Hampshire, Michigan, New Mexico, Iowa, Virginia, Wisconsin, Colorado, Nevada, Pennsylvania, Minnesota, and Ohio. Of the swing states, Romney only picked up North Carolina. Florida is still too close to call, but even if Romney won the state, Obama still handily beats him in the Electoral College vote. The popular vote will most likely be much narrower than the president's decisive Electoral College victory.
The Obama victory marks an end to a years-long campaign that saw historic advertisement spending levels, countless rallies and speeches, and three much-watched debates.
The Romney campaign cast the election as a referendum on Obama's economic policies, frequently comparing him to former President Jimmy Carter and asking voters the Reagan-esque question of whether they are better off than they were four years ago. But the Obama campaign pushed back on the referendum framing, blanketing key states such as Ohio early on with ads painting him as a multimillionaire more concerned with profits than people. The Obama campaign also aggressively attacked Romney on reproductive rights issues, tying Romney to a handful of Republican candidates who made controversial comments about rape and abortion.
These ads were one reason Romney faced a steep likeability problem for most of the race, until his expert performance at the first presidential debate in Denver in October. After that debate, and a near universal panning of Obama's performance, Romney caught up with Obama in national polls, and almost closed his favoribility gap with the president. In polls, voters consistently gave him an edge over Obama on who would handle the economy better and create more jobs, even as they rated Obama higher on caring about the middle class.

Mitt Romney's sharply-worded attack on President Obama over a pair of deadly riots in Muslim countries last night has backfired badly among foreign policy hands of both parties, who cast it as hasty and off-key, released before the facts were clear at what has become a moment of tragedy.

Romney keyed his statement to the American Embassy in Cairo's condemnation of an anti-Muslim video that served as the trigger for the latest in a series of regional riots over obscure perceived slights to the faith. But his statement — initially embargoed to avoid release on September 11, then released yesterday evening anyway — came just before news that the American Ambassador to Libya had been killed and broke with a tradition of unity around national tragedies, and of avoiding hasty statements on foreign policy. It was the second time Romney has been burned by an early statement on a complex crisis: Romney denounced the Obama Administration's handling of a Chinese dissident's escape just as the Administration negotiated behind the scenes for his departure from the country.

"They were just trying to score a cheap news cycle hit based on the embassy statement and now it’s just completely blown up," said a very senior Republican foreign policy hand, who called the statement an "utter disaster" and a "Lehman moment" — a parallel to the moment when John McCain, amid the 2008 financial crisis, failed to come across as a steady leader.
Source : http://www.buzzfeed.com/bensmith/foreign-policy-hands-voice-disbelief-at-romney-cai

 if anyone hadn’t had enough of undressed royals, a French magazine on Friday published topless photos of Catherine, Duchess of Cambridge. In an unprecedented move, her spokesman has released a statement calling the photos, published by Closer magazine, a “grotesque” invasion of privacy and “unjustifiable.” The Duke and Duchess acted fast: by Friday afternoon, the palace confirmed they had filed a lawsuit against the magazine. The couple, on a tour of Southeast Asia, appeared long-faced in Malaysia before boarding a flight.

ALL NUDE PICTURES ARE HERE

http://imgchili.com/show/16422/16422396_kate_middleton_02.jpg
http://imgchili.com/show/16422/16422397_kate_middleton_04.jpg
http://imgchili.com/show/16422/16422399_kate_middleton_06.jpg
http://imgchili.com/show/16422/16422401_kate_middleton_1509_.jpg

A porn site is eager to get its hands on Kate Middleton's alleged sexual footage. Y*u****.com has sent Closer magazine editor Laurence Pieau a letter to offer unlimited money for the ownership of intimate pictures of the Duchess and her husband Prince William. "We'd like to make an offer on this footage since we believe this is an incredibly newsworthy story and we are already being slammed with emails from our site's loyal visitors begging us to make an offer." Y*u**** honcho Corey Price said in the letter which was obtained by TMZ. Price assured Pieau that they will be able to show the footage legally and noted that they have an "open checkbook" for the offer.

Bangladesh government blocked the popular video search engine late yesterday.
Google has blocked access to the video in Libya and Egypt following violence there, and in Indonesia and India because it says the video broke laws in those countries.
Bangladesh has blocked YouTube after the video-sharing website failed to take down an anti-Islam film that has sparked furious protests across the Muslim world, government officials said Tuesday.

The country's telecommunications regulator blocked the website "to prevent violence and social disorder over the derogatory video", its acting chairman Giashuddin Ahmed told AFP.
On Sunday, the chief of the Bangladesh Telecommunication Regulatory Commission said the government sent a letter to Google, which owns YouTube, urging it to remove the video. Premier Sheikh Hasina made the same request.
Pakistan also blocked this Youtube.
Pakistan’s premier said in his statement that “blasphemous material would not be tolerated.” Both countries have seen protests against the movie in recent days.
The film, which depicts the Prophet Muhammad as a womanizer, triggered a series of violent demonstrations and attacks on U.S. and European-linked targets across the Muslim world. U.S. ambassador to Libya Chris Stevens and three colleagues were killed in an attack in Benghazi last week, while Muslim protesters in Tunis and elsewhere were killed in clashes with government security forces.
Attempts to access YouTube in Islamabad and Dhaka were unsuccessful, with users in Pakistan receiving a message that the service was unavailable.

Throughout the night of Sept. 11, according to a senior State Department official, employees had monitored the fast-moving events in Benghazi from their Operations Center. First there was a report of injured embassy personnel. Then American security personnel on the ground in Benghazi discovered the body of Sean Smith, a ten-year foreign-service officer who had been detailed to Libya from his post in the Hague. Smith had been in the Benghazi consulate with Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens, but the two men had become separated in the smoke and chaos created as attackers lobbed rocket-propelled grenades and fired weapons into the compound.

Rising flames and gunfire forced the security officers to flee the consulate, cutting off their search for Stevens. When they returned, Stevens was nowhere to be found. Hope flared briefly when word reached Washington that a blond, blue-eyed man had arrived at the local hospital. Perhaps Stevens was alive and being treated? Then the terrible news came through: Stevens had been transported from the consulate to the hospital, probably by Libyans who were trying to save his life. But he was dead on arrival.

By 7:30 a.m. in Washington on Wednesday, Sept. 12, an alert was transmitted to senior officials that four Americans had been killed in the stunning assault, including Stevens. As employees streamed into Foggy Bottom, they began trading stories about Stevens and the other victims. “People were heartsick,” recalls a senior official who had worked on Libya’s governmental transition with Stevens. “What was so tragic was that Chris thought he had succeeded, and that the hard part was over.” Soon after arriving that morning, senior officials, many of whom had worked closely with Stevens, received a briefing on the assault. When the briefer described the discovery of the ambassador’s body at the hospital, one woman began to weep. Several people at the meeting got out of their chairs, bringing her tissues. “It was an overwhelming moment,” recalls one participant. “These were some of the people who appointed him to his job.”

Through it all, Hillary Clinton was a source of strength for her wounded department, employees say. She moved back and forth between public appearances and private internal diplomacy, showing her trademark combination of resolve, empathy, and hyper-competence. She began at State, looking drawn but determined, calling the events in Benghazi “an attack that should shock the conscience of people of all faiths around the world.” Later that morning she stood by President Obama at the White House, looking alternately stoic and stricken. Then the president and his secretary of state traveled to Foggy Bottom where they met with shocked employees.
Source: http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2012/09/15/inside-the-state-department-during-the-benghazi-attacks.html