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

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

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

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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

Air Force tells stealth pilots it has no cure for 'Raptor cough'

Air Force pilots employed to fly the US military’s F-22 warplanes are experiencing breathing problems and coughing fits caused by plane’s oxygen system – and officials say they have no solution for this problem.

Despite at least one fatal crash that may have resulted from a pilot’s crippling health condition, the government has refused to acknowledge the danger of keeping these planes in service without making any fixes to its oxygen system.

During a Sept. 2012 congressional hearing concerning health effects of flying F-22 Raptor stealth fighters, members of the Air Force described suffering from physiological conditions that have been considered “a normal part of flying the Raptor, such as the difficulty in breathing and the Raptor cough.”

The NASA Engineering and Safety Center (NESC) found that these health problems were directly related to flying the F-22s, since pilots first experienced the symptoms while flying the plane.

The hypoxia-like symptoms, which are triggered if the air contains more than 60 percent oxygen, include breathing problems, choking, coughing, confusion, memory loss and blackouts. These symptoms, all of which were at some point exhibited by pilots in the F-22 cockpits, can lead to a condition known as ‘acceleration atelectasis’, which is the collapse of alveoli in the lungs.

But despite the health and safety risks facing F-22 pilots, the Air Force refuses to address the problem.

During the congressional hearing, Rep. Roscoe Bartlett (R-MD), referenced a press report in which Air Force medical experts linked the Raptor cough to flaws in the plane’s design, but that “the Air Force decided in 2005 not to make a fix to the F-22 oxygen system.”

And since 2008, pilots have reported choking, confusion, memory loss and blackouts, which may have contributed to at least one fatal crash, Wired reports. Additionally, ground crews have reported growing sick while in the proximity of F-22s with running engines.

Maj. Gen Charles Lyon, who headed the investigation, told Wired that “the Air Force will continue to explore further potential causes through long term breathing air analysis and human systems integration efforts”, but that it will no longer investigate claims of coughing fits from F-22 ground crews.

Air Force officials claim that ground crew members could not have possibly gotten sick from the F-22s and that “factors other than the life support system or the aircraft caused the ground incidents,” Lyon said.

But even though NASA has linked the F-22s to the hypnoxia-like symptoms and the Air Force has already acknowledged the problem, Lyon had no solution to the condition and pilots now consider this a regular part of flying the jets.

“Apparently, from the Air Force’s point of view, coughing is the cost of sitting in the world’s most high-tech fighter cockpit,” writes Wired’s David Axe.

NYPD lied under oath to prosecute Occupy activist

An Occupy Wall Street activist was acquitted of assaulting a police officer and other charges on Thursday after jurors were presented with video evidence that directly contradicted the NYPD’s story.

Michael Premo was found innocent of all charges this week in regards to a case that stems from a December 17, 2011 Occupy Wall Street demonstration in Lower Manhattan. For over a year, prosecutors working on behalf of the New York Police Department have insisted that Premo, a known artist and activist, tackled an NYPD officer during a protest and in doing so inflicted enough damage to break a bone.

During court proceedings this week, Premo’s attorney presented a video that showed officers charging into the defendant unprovoked. The Village Voice reports that jurors deliberated for several hours on Thursday and then elected to find Premo not guilty on all counts, which included a felony charge of assaulting an officer of the law.

Since his arrest, supporters of Premo have insisted on his innocence. “They're trying to make something out of nothing and they're trying to charge him with something that didn't actually occur,” colleague Rachel Falcone told Free Speech Radio News this week.

After being arrested, the Manhattan District Attorney's office presented Premo with a deal that would have let him off the hook by pleading guilty to lesser charges. Maintaining his innocence, however, he was determined to fight the case in court.

Premo was “facing serious charges and potential substantial jail sentence, even though he never should have been arrested at all,” his supporters claimed in a post published on The Laundromat Project website.

Nick Pinto of the Village Voice says he was nearby during the December 2011 rally and recalls watching Premo’s arrest from a distance. In his report from court this week, Pinto explains how the details provided by the NYPD in this trial have been fabricated to such a degree that the allegations presented by the cops turned out to be literally the opposite of what occurred.

“Premo charged the police like a linebacker, taking out a lieutenant and resisting arrest so forcefully that he fractured an officer's bone. That's the story prosecutors told in Premo's trial, and it's the general story his arresting officer testified to under oath as well,” Pinto writes. He adds that attorneys for the defendant underwent a lengthy search to try and find video that verified their own account yjpihj, and found one in the hands of Democracy Now. “Far from showing Premo tackling a police officer,” writes Pinto, that video “shows cops tackling him as he attempted to get back on his feet.”

The footage obtained from Democracy Now also showed that an NYPD officer was filming the arrest as well, but prosecutors told Premo’s attorney that no such footage existed.

"There is no justice in the American justice system, but you can sometimes find it in a jury,” Premo tweeted after he was acquitted this week.

In an interview given to NBC in 2012, Premo identified himself as a spokesperson for the Occupy Wall Street movement. He has also led an initiative in the New York area that have provided relief to those that endured last year’s Superstorm Sandy and has also advocated for fair housing.

"The biggest thing for me coming out of this," he told the Voice, "is not being discouraged by the attempts of New York City to quell dissent and prevent us from expressing our constitutional rights."

Texas cop fired after shooting at suspect 41 times, killing him

A police officer in Texas has been terminated from the force after an investigation determined that he violated official policy when he rammed his car into a suspect’s vehicle, cornered him and then fired 41 shots, killing him.

Officer Patrick Tuter shot and killed Michael Vincent Allen on August 12, 2012, but he has only now been fired more than six months later. He has spent the last half year on administrative leave while the Garland Police Department conducted an investigation that has finally concluded this week.

“Tuter has been fired because he was found in violation of two general orders of our department,” Garland PD spokesperson Joe Harn tells the Dallas Morning News. “He violated our pursuit policy as well as our use of force policy.”

The events of last August occurred after Officer Tuter pursued Allen, an unarmed 25-year-old, because he was wanted for running from the police only days earlier. A high-speed chase ensued, and Tuter followed Allen in his cruiser for around 30 minutes. At that point, Tuter slammed into Allen’s pickup, reached for his gun and fired 41 shots.

Only three of the few dozen bullets entered Allen’s body, but he died nonetheless from gunshot wounds to the back, side and arm.

“I don't see anybody reacting like that,” the victim’s father, Randy Allen, tells CBS 11 News. “41 shots, I mean, was the other police officers just standing there?”

''I can't believe somebody didn't tackle him and say, ‘Stop, that's enough,’'' he says. Speaking to NBC News, he adds that the officer’s use of force wasn’t just excessive. “It was excessive on top of excessive,”he says.

According to the officer’s attorneys, “Tuter did feel in fear for his life and was justified in firing his weapon.” The estate of the victim is suing the officer for wrongful-death. Meanwhile, Tuter’s attorneys have been appealing the indefinite suspension that was enacted in August and according to some report will appeal his termination.

South Dakota Approves Guns In The Classroom

Lawmakers in South Dakota have passed a bill that would allow school districts to arm staff and teachers with guns to make their schools “safer”.

State Senators on Wednesday voted 21-14 to pass the measure, despite large-scale opposition from school administrators and personnel, who are largely opposed to bringing weapons into their schools.

Supporters of the bill claim that arming teachers could prevent tragedies like the Dec. 14 massacre in Newtown, Conn. The bill’s sponsor, Sen. Craig Tieszen, R-Rapid City, said that he would leave the decision to arm teachers up to individual school districts, but that he strongly recommends it.

When Craig advocated for the measure earlier this year, he said that having gun-free schools would simply make them more vulnerable and invite potential mass murderers.

“The possibility of an armed presence in any of our schools is a deterrent,” Craig told Fox News, claiming that no shooter would attack a school whose teachers are armed.

Supporters of the bill also argue that teachers would only become armed after partaking in a “School Sentinel program” that would provide them with firearms training by law enforcement officers. No teachers would be forced to take part in the program and could choose to remain unarmed.

But opponents, including many teachers themselves, remain uncomfortable about the prospect of having dangerous firearms in schools. Rep. Troy Heinert, D-Mission, said teachers should not be employed to act as law enforcement officers and that arming them would make him uncomfortable about sending his child to kindergarten.

“Doesn’t this blur the line between a teacher and a law enforcement officer?” he told Fox News. “Do we want to tell our children the only way to be safe is to carry a gun?”

The South Dakota Education Association claims that guns should only be provided to trained professionals and that no training program could properly instruct a teacher how to respond to a situation like the massacre in Newtown, Conn.

“It’s one thing to have firearms training,” the group’s spokesperson, Sandra Waltman, told KTIV TV. “It’s a completely different thing to be trained on how to handle those very difficult circumstances if they should arise. We believe that students should be taught by professional teachers, and we think they should be protected by professional law enforcement.”

Some school officials and administrators have expressed their concern about gun-related accidents. Others say the weapons would distract from the purpose teachers serve in schools.

“It defects everything we’re trying to do with reading, writing and arithmetic, and getting the kids ready for society,” Dakota Valley Superintendent Al Leber told KTIV. “All we do, we spend hours and hours debating whether there should be a gun or shouldn’t be a gun in school.”

Despite the ongoing debate on such a sensitive matter, the legislature has passed the bill, leaving the decision to arm schools in the hands of the state’s individual school districts.

The vote comes days after an online national survey by the School Improvement Network found that 91.6 percent of teachers feel safe in their schools and 72.4 percent would most likely refuse to carry a firearm, even if it were allowed. The South Dakota bill goes against the wishes of the national majority, but legislators believe that the solution to gun violence is arming instructors and giving them to capability to protect their students.

Obama Signs Sequester Bill

Austerity has hit the United States as President Barack Obama signed into law a directive ushering in significant cuts to federal agencies' budgets and triggering the sequester that has been debated in Washington during the last several weeks.

In the White House on Friday, President Obama inked his name to the order, and with it signed off on automatic budget cuts that the country's political class say will save the United States over $1 trillion over the course of the next decade. In doing so, though, $85 billion will be erased from this year’s budget and a number of government departments will see their funding slashed immediately.

Through the sequester deal, roughly half of all cuts will be imposed on the Pentagon, drastically reducing funding for America’s defense. While uniformed personnel are protected from the directive, civilian employees and contractors across the world will be faced with layoffs and furloughs. The Department of Defense has already published a plan explaining who exactly will be impacted, and at its worst it could mean roughly $500 billion dollars cut from the Pentagon during the next decade.

The second half of all cuts triggered by the sequester will be implemented on domestic non-military spending. While crucially important programs like Social Security are exempt from the changes, practically all federal departments and agencies will face some degree of slashed funding. The Departments of Education, Agriculture and dozens of other agencies will see serious changes during the coming days, weeks, months and years. Many have already announced that the order will bring dire consequences. The Department of Transportation, for example, has warned that budget cuts might affect its ability to control air traffic; cuts to the Department of Homeland Security will mean longer lines at international borders and airports due to personnel layoffs. Rollbacks on education are expected to cause as many as 40,000 jobs to disappear nationwide, and more than half of a million women and children across the US will no longer have access to food aid due to reductions in the Women, Infants and Children program.

With the sequester deal essentially effecting each sector and every US resident alike, lawmakers in Washington have hoped to find another solution for solving the country’s ever-increasing economic woes. During an address from the White House Friday morning, though, Obama blamed Congress for not being able to prevent the cuts.

“What I can’t do is force Congress to do the right thing,” said the president. “The American people may have the capacity to do that, but in the absence of a decision on the part of the speaker of the House and others . . . we are going to have these cuts in place.”

The Obama administration has come under fire as of late for blaming the sequester deal on House Republicans. “The sequester is not something that I've proposed. It is something that Congress has proposed,” the president said last year. By some reports, though, the budget cuts were brought to the table by White House officials during the president’s first term in office. A bipartisan commission chaired by former Sen. Alan Simpson (R-Wyoming) and former Clinton White House Chief of Staff Erskine Bowles offered a way to cut America’s ever-growing deficit. Under this proposal, Congress and the president would have to both raise taxes and cut spending across the board. Knowing that neither party was willing to agree on these measures, lawmakers and Obama agreed on a law that would trigger automatic cuts beginning March 1, 2013, unless a deal could not otherwise be reached. Back then, it was seen as a sword of Damocles that would prompt action from either party.

“Nobody who ‘agreed’ to sequestration actually wanted it to happen,” reports Molly Ball of The Atlantic. “The supercommittee was supposed to forge the deal that Obama and House Speaker John Boehner could not in their July 2011 debt-ceiling talks. It was this hypothetical future deficit reduction that got Republicans, grudgingly, to agree to raise the debt limit,” she says.

As time passed, though, the lawmakers that agreed to make the sequester an option stopped searching for other solutions. A failure to find a compromise between lawmakers on the Hill left the spending cuts scheduled for March 1 inevitable, and as the clock wound down on Friday the only option left was to slash the budget.

“In the end, nobody could agree, and nobody took the deadline very seriously anyway,” adds Ball.

While the sequester officially starts today following President Obama’s signature on the directive, most government agencies won’t feel the pinch until later in the year. Many departments have already published their plans for handling the crisis, including outlines of how spending will be conducted during the coming months. But with funds drying up quickly and a further deal reversing the sequestering uncertain, the impact of the cuts are likely to only increase over time.

The Morning Report -- Friday March 1, 2013

Sequester Arrives To Cold Welcome -- Sinkhole Swallows Florida Man -- Congressional Democrats Urge Supreme Court On DOMA -- Woodward, Axelrod Clash -- Bradley Manning Pleads Guilty -- Cardinals Summoned For Conclave -- Congress Skips Town -- A $2,500 iPad Bill

GOVERNMENT STARES DOWN START OF STEEP CUTS

WASHINGTON -- The U.S. government hurtled on Friday toward deep spending cuts that threaten to hinder the nation's economic recovery, after Republicans and Democrats failed to agree on an alternative deficit-reduction plan.

Locked in during a bout of deficit-reduction fever in 2011, the time-released “automatic” cuts can only be halted by agreement between Republican lawmakers and the White House. 

FLORIDA MAN SWALLOWED BY MASSIVE SINKHOLE IN BEDROOM

www.myfoxtampabay.com

A large sinkhole opened under the bedroom of a house near Tampa, trapping a 36-year-old man in the rubble.

The home collapsed late Thursday in a Seffner neighborhood. By early Friday, Hillsborough County Fire Rescue officials determined the home had become too unstable to continue rescue efforts.

"Right now, the potential for a collapse is very, very high," Jessica Damico, a Hillsborough Fire and Rescue spokeswoman told MyFoxTampaBay.com. 

CONGRESSIONAL DEMOCRATS URGE SCOTUS TO STRIKE DOWN DOMA

WASHINGTON — More than 200 congressional Democrats are urging the Supreme Court to overturn a key provision of the federal law against gay marriage.

The lawmakers are filing a friend-of-the-court brief with the justices Friday, asking them to strike down Section 3 of the Defense of Marriage Act, known as DOMA. The provision denies all federal benefits to same-sex couples.

The Democratic brief is meant as a counterweight to House Republicans, who have been defending DOMA in court ever since President Barack Obama ordered the Justice Department to stop doing so. The president believes the measure is unconstitutional, but it will remain federal law unless it is repealed by Congress or overturned by the court.

BOB WOODWARD, DAVID AXELROD CLASH ON TV

David Axelrod and Bob Woodward clashed Friday over The Washington Post reporter’s claim that a top White House official had sent him an inappropriate email.

Axelrod and Woodward argued over the same two topics the White House has been disputing for the past week — whether President Barack Obama had “moved the goalposts” on the sequester and whether economic aide Gene Sperling had warned Woodward in an email.

BRADLEY MANNING SAYS HE LEAKED WIKILEAKS TO SPARK PUBLIC DEBATE

FORT MEADE, Md. -- After almost three years in custody, the Army private accused in the biggest leak of classified material in U.S. history said he did it because he wanted the public to know how the American military was fighting wars in Iraq and Afghanistan with little regard for human life.

Bradley Manning, 25, pleaded guilty Thursday at a military hearing at Fort Meade, Md., to 10 charges that could carry a maximum sentence of 20 years. Prosecutors plan to pursue 12 more charges against him at court-martial, including a charge of aiding the enemy that carries a potential life sentence.

VATICAN SUMMONS CARDINALS FOR CONCLAVE

ROME -- The Vatican is moving quickly to start the process of selecting the next pope, announcing Friday that the official invitation had gone out to the 115 eligible cardinals who will take part in selecting the next pope.

The Vatican said that "congregations" leading up to the actual conclave will start Monday.

CONGRESS HEADS OUT AS SEQUESTER BLOWS IN

One day before automatic spending cuts were due to hit the Pentagon and other federal agencies, Congress on Thursday abandoned efforts to avert the reductions and left town for the weekend. The sequester is here, and policymakers have no plans to end it.

President Obama is scheduled to meet Friday at the White House with congressional leaders, but expectations for the meeting are low. House Republicans are already turning their attention to the next deadline on March 27, drafting a measure that would avoid a government shutdown while leaving the sequester in place through the end of September.

FIVE YEAR OLD RUNS UP $2,500 BILL ON iPAD IN TEN MINUTES

Danny Kitchen had asked for the passcode for the device so that he could download a game, Zombie v Ninja, from the Apple store.

Greg and Sharon Kitchen eventually agreed and left their son alone with the tablet computer as they entertained friends at their home in Warmley, near Bristol.

But after downloading the free app Danny found his way into the game's online store and innocently ordered dozens of costly add-ons - totalling £1,710.43.