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• Up, but not far away: Lawn chair balloonists get 30 miles before weather ends flight to Mont.
• BEND, Ore. (AP) -- Hours into their lawn-chair balloon flight, two men made a hard landing after they were hit by hail and snow as thunderstorms swept into central Oregon. But their back-yard aircraft floated away.
• Kent Couch and Fareed Lafta were about seven hours into their flight Saturday when they descended, coming down near the community of Post, about 30 miles east of their starting point. But after they scrambled out of the contraption, it floated away, flight organizer Mark Knowles said.
• "They came down hard," Knowles said by cellphone. "The craft went back up. It's sitting up in the sky right above us."

• A flight website tracker showed it continuing east across Oregon.
• Couch, a gas station owner, and Lazfta, an Iraqi adventurer, were trying to fly from Oregon to Montana in tandem lawn chairs suspended from party balloons.
• ___

• CLIFTON, Va. (AP) -- An unrelenting President Barack Obama jabbed at Mitt Romney's record with a private equity firm in an ad Saturday that aimed to keep his rival on the defensive just as the Republican challenger's campaign hoped to take advantage of poor economic data to gain an edge on the incumbent.
• Obama met Romney's plea for an apology for the attacks with a mocking ad that charged that the firm shipped American jobs to China and Mexico, that Romney has personal wealth in investments in Switzerland, Bermuda and the Cayman Islands, and that as Massachusetts governor, he sent state jobs to India.
• "Mitt Romney's not the solution. He's the problem," the ads says as Romney is heard singing "America the Beautiful."
• Pressure was building on Romney from within his own party to be more forthcoming with his finances, a day after he declared he would not release past income tax returns beyond his 2010 tax records and, before the November election, his 2011 taxes
• On the sidelines of the National Governors Association meeting in Williamsburg, Alabama's Republican governor, Robert Bentley, called on Romney to release all the documents requested of him.
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