Jewish & World News

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.

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.

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.

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.

Sheldon Adelson, a major contributor to Republican Mitt Romney’s presidential campaign, has asked Romney to speak out publicly for the release of Israeli spy Jonathan Pollard. Romney, the presumptive GOP nominee, has said he needs to see the relevant intelligence material accessible to a president before deciding whether to grant Pollard clemency, sources told the Daily Beast website.

The sister of an Israeli athlete murdered at the Munich Olympics said Mitt Romney's failure to press for a moment of silence on the 30th anniversary of the killings was painful. Barbara Berger, whose brother, David, was on the Israeli wrestling team in 1972, wrote in Haaretz on Wednesday that families of the 11 victims of a Palestinian terrorist attack at the Munich Olympics would continue to advocate for a formal moment of silence at the Olympics, despite the refusal of the International Olympics Committee to allow such a moment this year, the massacre's 40th anniversary.

While campaigning for the presidency in 2008, then-Senator Barack Obama called Jerusalem the capital of Israel when addressing a pro-Israel audience, just as Republican presidential hopeful Mitt Romney did this week. On June 4 of that year – one day after announcing he had secured the required number of delegates to win the Democratic nomination – Obama delivered a speech at the annual American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) policy conference.

Mitt Romney toured the site of the future Museum of the History of Polish Jews in Warsaw. The presumptive Republican presidential nominee, completing the third leg of a three-country tour that also included Britain and Israel, on Tuesday met with museum chairman Piotr Wislicki, deputy chairman Marian Turski, interim director Waldemar Dabrowski, exhibition director Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, and representatives of the museum’s two largest benefactors, the Taube Foundation and the Koret Foundation, Helise Lieberman and Yale Reisner.

It became clear on Wednesday that, despite an abundance of meetings with representatives of the Jewish community this week, presumptive Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney was not done yet with the 2% of the U.S. population, when he announced a new campaign group: The "Jewish Americans for Romney coalition." Romney said in a statement released on Tuesday, "The Jewish community has made contributions to American society that stand in amazing disproportion to its numbers, and I am genuinely honored to have so many of its leading thinkers, diplomats, and political leaders support my campaign."

Mitt Romney's campaign announced Tuesday that supporters can sign up to be the first to learn of the presumptive Republican nominee's vice presidential choice by downloading a new smartphone app. “The first official way to learn the name of the Republican vice presidential candidate is by using our new ‘Mitt's VP’ app,” said Romney digital director Zac Moffatt in a statement. “Users of the app will be the first to get the news on the biggest political decision of the year through an instantaneous alert on the one device most people carry around the clock — their phone.”

Officials in the Prime Minister's Office delivered a letter from Knesset faction heads to presumptive Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney Monday, urging him to support clemency for Israeli agent Jonathan Pollard. The letter was signed by the heads of every non-Arab Knesset faction from Meretz to the National Union, representing 109 MKs. A similar letter was delivered to US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton two weeks ago.