Jewish & World News

A stolen rental truck packed with equipment for a vice presidential Labor Day campaign event in Detroit was found on Monday, the Secret Service said. Agency spokesman Ed Donovan said the U-Haul truck that disappeared on Sunday from the Westin Hotel was discovered by police near Henry Ford Hospital.

The most re-distributed tweet of the Republican National Convention came from a Democrat. A representative of Twitter said Sunday that President Barack Obama’s message rebuffing Clint Eastwood’s speech was the most re-tweeted message of the GOP event. "@BarackObama  This seat's taken. OFA.BO/c2gbfi, pic.twitter.com/jgGZTb02"

U-Haul truck loaded with equipment for a Monday event featuring Vice President Joe Biden was stolen in Detroit Sunday, a spokesman for the U.S. Secret Service said. "A U-Haul that we were utilizing was stolen at the Westin Hotel overnight," Ed Donovan told CNN.

Three days after accepting his party's nomination for president, Mitt Romney on Sunday crossed the one-million mark in Twitter followers. Saturday night, he fell just 3,000 followers short of threshold, and around 2 p.m. ET on Sunday, Romney posted that he now had 1million .

A member of Mitt Romney’s Secret Service detail was removed today from a campaign trip after she accidentally left her firearm unattended in the candidate’s charter plane bathroom. The agent in question left a gun unattended in the bathroom of the plane during a flight between Tampa and Indiana. The gun was found by a reporter on board who immediately informed the agent, who then went back into the bathroom and retrieved the weapon.

Two people were removed from the Republican National Convention Tuesday after they threw nuts at an African-American CNN camera operator and said, “This is how we feed animals.” Multiple witnesses observed the exchange and RNC security and police immediately removed the two people from the Tampa Bay Times Forum.

Rabbi Meir Soloveichik is scheduled to deliver the opening invocation at the Republican National Convention. “It is an extraordinary privilege to deliver an invocation at a cherished ritual of American democracy,” said Soloveichik of the invocation, which he is scheduled to deliver on Tuesday in Tampa, Fla.

New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie (R) on Monday denied a report he did not want to be Mitt Romney's running mate because he feared the presumptive GOP nominee's chances of winning the election were "unlikely." In a Monday afternoon interview with MSNBC on the convention floor, Christie ripped the report by the New York Post, calling the article "completely shoddy reporting."

President Barack Obama continues to beat Mitt Romney among African American voters with a staggering 94 percent to 0 percent lead, according to a poll released Tuesday.

More than 600 rabbis joined a campaign initiative called Rabbis for Obama. Obama for America announced Tuesday that Rabbis for Obama is designed to “engage and mobilize grassroots supporters.”

President Obama has several times more fake followers on Twitter than Mitt Romney, according to a new Twitter analysis.  StatusPeople, a tool designed specifically to check for fake followers, finds that of Obama’s 18.6 million Twitter followers @BarackObama, 41 percent are fake, 29 percent inactive, and just 30 percent "good," or presumably real users.

A pro-Barack Obama super PAC’s controversial ad surged to the top of the online charts last week, outstripping a slew of other new spots, according to data from Visible Measures. “Understands” — which features a steel worker who was laid off from a company owned by Bain Capital, the company Mitt Romney co-founded  – had over 725,000 views in the week ended Sunday, putting it No. 1 for the week. Visible Measures said the spot’s traffic has gotten a boost from paid advertising.

After only 72 hours as the GOP vice presidential contender, Paul Ryan has helped the Romney campaign bring in some big bucks. Campaign spokeswoman Andrea Saul posted on Twitter that the Romney-Ryan ticket has raised $7.4 million online with over 101,000 donations. Mitt Romney formally introduced Ryan as his running mate Saturday at an event near the USS Wisconsin in Norfolk, Va. The campaign sent out a fundraising pitch within hours of the event.

Candy Crowley, CNN's chief political correspondent and anchor of "State of the Union With Candy Crowley," will be the first female moderator of a U.S. presidential debate since 1992. The Commission on Presidential Debates announced the names of the moderators of this year's three presidential debates and one vice-presidential debate. In addition to Crowley, Jim Lehrer of PBS' "NewsHour" and Bob Schieffer of CBS' "Face the Nation" will moderate the presidential debates and Martha Raddatz, senior foreign affairs correspondent for ABC News, will moderate the vice presidential debate.

Mitt Romney has reached the halfway mark in filling his $800 million campaign war chest, a leading fundraiser for the campaign said on Thursday. Woody Johnson, the owner of the New York Jets, said the campaign's joint committee had raised nearly $400 million, which was about half of its goal.

Presidential candidate Mitt Romney told an audience of hundreds of supporters Wednesday, which included a large contingent of local Jewish Republicans, that the key to a successful economy lies in American individualism. Romney said small business owners are the key to building the American economy, and he criticized President Barack Obama as “being so far out of touch with the American character.”

Mitt Romney, speaking at a fundraiser in Chicago, said American entrepreneurship is not like a "collective" or a "kibbutz." Per the pool report: “It’s individuals and their entrepreneurship which have driven America," Romney said. "What America is not a collective where we all work in a kibbutz or we're all in some little entity, instead it’s individuals pursuing their dreams and building successful enterprises which employ others and they become inspired as they see what has happened in the place they work and go off and start their own enterprises.”

The White House dismissed a report Tuesday that President Obama leaked word of Republican Mitt Romney wooing CIA Director Gen. David H. Petraeus to become his running mate. "Be mindful of your sources," White House press secretary Jay Carney said of the story on the Drudge Report. Reporters at the briefing laughed.

Looking to make inroads among Jewish voters, Mitt Romney is out with a new television ad that criticizes President Barack Obama for failing to visit Israel while at the same time playing up his own ties to the country. "Who shares your values?" a voice-over says as the ad begins. "As president, Barack Obama has never visited Israel and refuses to recognize Jerusalem as its capital."

Mitt Romney will be back in New Jersey this week for a fundraiser in Lakewood hosted by attorney Larry Bathgate II and Ocean County GOP Chairman George Gilmore. But Gov. Chris Christie won't be there. Christie will be in California at the end of this week on another fundraising trip for Romney, who he endorsed in October. Christie spoke last of 10 governors who attended a rally outside of Colorado with Romney last week.