The Morning Report -- Sunday March 3 2013

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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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

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

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

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.

Read more here: http://www.star-telegram.com/2013/03/02/4656022/obama-focusing-on-restoring-democratic.html#storylink=cpy

The Morning Report -- Monday February 18, 2013

Egyptian Sheikh Says Rape Is 'Halal' -- NASA's New ATLAS Program -- BofA Get's Bailed Out...Quietly -- At Facebook: Make $1BN Profit, Get $429m Refund -- "VatiLeaks" Reveals Fractured Vatican -- 'Maker's Mark' Learns Painful Lesson -- Mississippi Ratifies 13th Amendment...149 Years Later -- Tiger Woods Joins Obama

DETAINED EGYPTIAN SHEIKH SAYS IT IS 'HALAL' TO RAPE WOMEN

Reuters

Egypt has issued an arrest warrant on Sunday against the Salafi preacher, who recently said it was “halal” (permissible) to rape female protestors, charging him with the defamation of religion, an Al Arabiya correspondent reported. 

Ahmad Mahmoud Abdullah, known as “Abu Islam” owner of the private television channel of “al-Ummah,” sparked further controversy after he attacked women and Christianity. 

POPE BENEDICT XVI 'LEAKED' DOCUMENTS SHOW FRACTURED VATICAN

New  York  Times

VATICAN CITY — Guests at the going-away party for Carlo Maria Viganò couldn’t understand why the archbishop looked so forlorn. Pope Benedict XVI had appointed Viganò ambassador to the United States, a plum post where he would settle into a stately mansion on Massachusetts Avenue, across the street from the vice president’s residence.

“He went through the ordeal making it very clear he was unhappy with it,” said one former ambassador to the Vatican, who attended the Vatican Gardens ceremony in the late summer of 2011. “And we just couldn’t figure out, us outsiders and non-Italians, what was going on.”

AN ASTEROID ALERT SYSTEM

PopSci

In the realm of potential planetary disasters, asteroids are among the ones to fear -- like the meteorite that hit Russia, they can inflict serious damage on Earth. 

With the aid of a $5-million grant from NASA, a University of Hawaii team of astronomers is developing ATLAS, a system to identify dangerous asteroids before their final plunge to Earth. 

The team is on track to build and operate an asteroid detection system that will patrol the visible sky twice a night looking for faint objects moving through space. 

BLINK AND MISS THE NEXT BANK BAILOUT

MANY people became rightfully upset about bailouts given to big banks during the mortgage crisis. But it turns out that they are still going on, if more quietly, through the back door.

The existence of one such secret deal, struck in July between the Federal Reserve Bank of New York and Bank of America, came to light just last week in court filings.

That the New York Fed would shower favors on a big financial institution may not surprise. It has long shielded large banks from assertive regulation and increased capital requirements.

FACEBOOK PAYS NO TAX FOR 2012

Bloomberg News

Facebook will not pay any tax for 2012 despite making $1.1 billion in pre-tax profits from U.S. operations, according to a report released on Thursday.

But Mark Zuckerberg's company will also get a multimillion dollar tax refund of around $429 million according to Citizens for Tax Justice (CTJ).

The refunds reportedly come from tax deductions on executive stock options and share awards.

MAKER'S MARK LEARNS A PAINFUL SOCIAL LESSON

Associated Press

The reversal speaks to how brands often misjudge their relationship with customers, who can now vote more powerfully with their Twitter accounts than with their wallets. “What we’ve learned is that this is the customer’s brand,” Maker’s Mark COO Rob Samuels, grandson of the bourbon’s creator, said today in an interview. “It was an overwhelming response, we listened all week, and tomorrow morning we’ll immediately return Maker’s Mark to 90 proof.”

The company had emailed loyal customers on Feb. 9 to say it was lowering its proof to 84, or 42% alcohol, in order to address a supply shortage driven by bourbon’s surging popularity in the United States and certain other markets like Australia, Germany, and Japan. The announcement, first reported by Quartz, spread quickly in social media, rising from a small firestorm to an all-out backlash. The companydefended itself in interviews, saying the taste wouldn’t change, but it didn’t help.

HISTORIC OVERSIGHT CORRECTED: 'LINCOLN' INSPIRES LOOK INTO SLAVERY VOTE

Oscar-nominated “Lincoln,” which depicts the political fight to pass the 13th Amendment abolishing slavery, played a role in Mississippi officially ratifying the amendment this month — a century and a half later.

The story opens, not surprisingly, in a movie theater.

Last November, Dr. Ranjan Batra, associate professor of neurobiology and anatomical sciences at the University of Mississippi Medical Center, saw the Steven Spielberg film and wondered afterward what happened when the states voted on ratification.

TIGER WOODS JOINS VACATIONING OBAMA

PALM CITY, Fla. (AP) - President Barack Obama played golf Sunday with Tiger Woods, the White House said.

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Once the sport's dominant player before his career was sidetracked by scandal, Woods joined Obama at the Floridian, a secluded and exclusive yacht and golf club on Florida's Treasure Coast where Obama is spending the long Presidents Day weekend. The two had met before, but Sunday was the first time they played together.

The White House, which has promised to be the most open and transparent in history, has prohibited any media coverage of Obama's golf outing.