Kenya Prepares For Elections -- The Ratzinger Legacy -- Chavez Fights For Life -- Iran Says Assad To Run...For President -- Police Discontinue Search For Missing FL Man -- Apple, Samsung Settlement -- McConnell Defends Wife -- Spending Cuts Are Here -- Keystone XL Poses No Threat
KENYA SEEKS TO AVOID VIOLENCE AS NATION PREPARES FOR ELECTIONS
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| Getty Images |
Kenyans vote tomorrow in a tight two-way election for a new president as politicians urged supporters not to repeat deadly ethnic violence that marred the last national vote and led to slower economic growth.
An increase in support for Deputy Prime Minister Uhuru Kenyatta, 51, has put him in a dead heat with Premier Raila Odinga, 68, in a race that includes six other challengers. The first round may fail to produce an outright victory, which would mean Kenyatta and Odinga face off in a second round.
THE RATZINGER LEGACY
THE helicopter that carried Pope Benedict XVI into retirement left behind a Catholicism in crisis. So say his critics, his admirers and everyone in between.
The church needs “shock therapy” from its next pontiff, writes one observer. Catholicism faces its worst crisis “since the French Revolution,” argues another. “Not since the Reformation,” writes a third, “has the Church been so shaken to its core.”
VENEZUELA'S CHAVEZ UNDERGOING 'TOUGH' CHEMOTHERAPY
| Reuters |
(Reuters) - Ailing Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez has been undergoing "tougher" new treatment for cancer, including chemotherapy at the military hospital where he has been for the past two weeks, his vice president said.
Speaking after a Catholic Mass to pray for Chavez's health, Nicolas Maduro described how the socialist president had personally given the order to leave Cuba in mid-February, two months after his latest cancer surgery there.
ASSAD TO RUN FOR SYRIAN 2014 ELECTIONS
| AFP |
TEHRAN, March 2 (Xinhua) -- Iranian Foreign Minister Ali-Akbar Salehi said here Saturday that Bashar al-Assad is currently the " legal" president of Syria and will take part in the presidential elections in 2014.
Salehi made the remarks at a joint press conference with his visiting Syrian counterpart Walid al-Moallem in Tehran.
Syria, like any other country, has a president by elections, said Salehi, adding that by the next elections in Syria, Assad is the legal president of the Syrians and this is the official stance of the Islamic republic.
BODY IN FLORIDA SINKHOLE 'NOT POSSIBLE TO RECOVER'
The effort to find the body of a Florida man who was swallowed by a sinkhole under his Florida home was called off Saturday and crews planned to begin demolishing the four-bedroom house.
The 20-foot-wide opening of the sinkhole is almost completely covered by the house and rescuers feared it would collapse on them if they tried to search for Jeff Bush, 37. Crews were testing the unstable ground surrounding the home and evacuated two neighboring homes as a precaution.
APPLE'S AWARD AGAINST SAMSUNG CUT IN HALF
On Friday, Judge Lucy Koh of the U.S. District Court Northern District of California in San Jose lopped off at least 40 percent of the $1.05 billion jury award Apple had won against Samsung, last year.
Judge Koh has ordered a new trial to ascertain claims and damages of the portion that she took out from the jury award. According to Koh a new trial was required to determine the damages amount properly as the jury had committed errors in calculating the part of damages for which she ordered a new trial.
Lamentably, on Friday, Apple moved to have the jury damages award increased. Judge Koh, rejected that motion, put a $450.5 million portion of the jury award under question by mandating a retrial.
OBAMA FOCUSING ON RESTORING DEMOCRATIC CONTROL OF CONGRESS
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| Associated Press |
WASHINGTON -- President Barack Obama, now facing the consequences of automatic spending cuts and the complications they raise for his broader domestic agenda, is taking the most specific steps of his administration in an attempt to ensure the election of a Democratic-controlled Congress in two years.
"What I can't do is force Congress to do the right thing," Obama said Friday after a fruitless meeting with Republican leaders to avert the country's latest fiscal crisis, known as the sequester. "The American people may have the capacity to do that."
Obama and his advisers believe that winning a Democratic majority in the House in 2014 is crucial to the outcome of his second term and to his legacy as president.
MITCH MCCONNELL CRITICIZES ATTACKS AGAINST WIFE
| Getty Images |
WINCHESTER, Ky. (AP) — Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell has lambasted a liberal group for criticizing the ethnicity of his wife, former Labor Secretary Elaine Chao.
McConnell told home-state supporters at a Republican dinner in Winchester that Progress Kentucky engaged in "the ultimate outrage" when it used Twitter to distribute a message making an issue of Chao's Asian heritage. The tweet said McConnell's marriage to Chao "may explain why your job moved to (hash)China!"
McConnell's described the tweet as "a racial attack" against Chao, who was born in Taiwan.
Progress Kentucky removed the tweet after Louisville public radio station WFPL-FM aired a story. And the group issued two apologies over the past week for what they described as "inappropriate tweets sent by our organization."
AUTOMATIC SPENDING CUTS UNWANTED CONSEQUENCE OF A TRIGGER NOBODY LIKED OR EXPECTED
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| Associated Press |
WASHINGTON — It’s not the first time that government economic engineering has produced a time bomb with a short fuse.
Back in 2011, few lawmakers, if any, thought deep and indiscriminate spending cuts, totaling about $85 billion and now starting to kick in, were a smart idea.
The across-the-board cuts, set up as a last-resort trigger and based on a mechanism used in the 1980s, are a reality largely because President Barack Obama and House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, failed to find a way to stop them.
KEYSTONE XL OIL PIPELINE TO GET US APPROVAL
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| Bloomberg |
A long-awaited environmental assessment of TransCanada Corp. (TRP)’s Keystone XL pipeline cheered oil executives who see it as a signal the Obama administration will approve a project that has come to be viewed as a fight between jobs and the environment.
The draft assessment, released yesterday by the U.S. State Department, makes no recommendation as to whether the Keystone pipeline should be built, and an administration official cautioned the report was a work in progress.
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