President Obama has met his Republican challenger Mitt Romney for the first time since the US presidential election earlier this month. They’ve had a private lunch at the White House, fulfilling a promise Mr. Obama made in his victory speech to work with the Republican Party.
A major new study in the polar ice sheets has discovered that the rate of melting has accelerated in the past 20 years. David Shukman is our science correspondent.
Remote, vast and inaccessible, the ice sheets covering Greenland and Antarctica are extremely difficult to measure. But by comparing readings from different satellites, researchers have come up with a single estimate for the rate at which the ice has been melting into the ocean. Over the past twenty years, they say, melting is added about 11mm to the global sea level. And crucially, they found that this loss of ice is accelerating. Greenland is losing ice the fastest. Western Antarctica is also shedding some, but eastern Antarctic is gaining ice while it remains well below zero.
The new manager of the Brazilian football team Luiz Felipe Scolari has angered the bank workers with remarks made soon after his appointment to lead the squad into the 2014 World Cup. Scolari said players who didn't want to face pressure should get a job at the country state bank, Banco do Brasil, where they would in his words sitting in an office doing nothing.
BBC News.
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