  Recent highlights from Brookhaven National Laboratory and the Relativistic
Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) are reviewed and discussed in the context of the
discovery of the strongly interacting Quark Gluon Plasma (sQGP) at RHIC in 2005
as confirmed by results from the CERN-LHC Pb+Pb program. Outstanding RHIC
machine operation in 2012 with 3-dimensional stochastic cooling and a new EBIS
ion source enabled measurements with Cu+Au, U+U, for which multiplicity
distributions are shown, as well as with polarized p-p collisions. Differences
of the physics and goals of p-p versus A+A are discussed leading to a review of
RHIC results on pi0 suppression in Au+Au collisions and comparison to LHC Pb+Pb
results in the same range 5<pT<20 GeV. Results of the RHIC Au+Au energy scan
show that high pT suppression takes over from the "Cronin Effect" for c.m.
energies > 30 GeV. Improved measurements of direct photon production and
correlation with charged particles at RHIC are shown, including the absence of
a low pT (thermal) photon enhancement in d+Au collisions. Attempts to
understand the apparent equality of the energy loss of light and heavy quarks
in the QGP by means of direct measurements of charm and beauty particles at
both RHIC and LHC are discussed.
