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July 31, 2012 | | Where’s the Heat? Who cares about synchronized diving? Is beach volleyball really a sport? And where is the good-versus-evil-empire competition that characterized U.S.–Russian match-ups and made the games so much more fun? The Daily Beast’s Buzz Bissinger sorts it out. Lashing Out Mitt Romney’s overseas tour hit a rocky end when, on his last day in Poland, a campaign spokesman lashed out at a group of reporters. As the Republican presidential hopeful walked back to his car after a silent wreath-laying ceremony at Warsaw’s Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, reporters shouted questions. “Kiss my ass,” Romney spokesman Rick Gorka said to the reporters. “This is a holy site for the Polish people. Show some respect.” One of the reporters noted that Mitt had addressed almost none of their questions throughout the whole trip. UGLY AMERICAN Romney went overseas to show he was qualified to be president—but seldom if ever has any such an effort made someone look so foolish so fast, with so much blowback coming from across the political spectrum. The Daily Beast’s Robert Shrum on why Mitt’s gaffes in London and Jerusalem manifest not only his incapacity abroad, but his lack of sound instincts—two of the qualities that are the bedrock of the hardest presidential decisions. SWIMMING This is a big day for Michael Phelps. The swimmer took home the gold medal in the 4x200 freestyle relay—earning him his 19th Olympic medal, the most ever. It's also his 15th gold medal. Earlier on Tuesday, Phelps won silver in the finals of the 200m butterfly. He went into the fly final with the fourth-fastest qualifying time of 1:54.53, but was only 0.28 seconds behind Japan’s Takeshi Matsuda. He only had about an hour to rest before the men's 4x200 relay, where he edged past Serbia's Milorad Cavic by 0.01 seconds. BLACKOUT More than half of India is still without power two days after the country’s northern, then eastern electrical grid collapsed. The blackout, one of the world’s biggest, has left 680 million people in the dark and heat. India’s eastern grid went down one day after the northern grid, sparking discussion over whether India’s infrastructure is outdated and what the government needs to do to be able to feed the country’s need for energy, especially in the summer. New Delhi’s metro system, which serves about 1.8 million people daily, and traffic have stalled, leaving commuters and drivers stranded. The latest failure, of the eastern grid, affected more people than live in the entire European Union. | | 
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