World: Pope Benedict XVI got on a big white helicopter today and left the Vatican. He will live at a Papal retreat outside Rome until a permanent residence is ready inside the Vatican grounds. The Catholic Church must now pick a pope who can deal with its ever-growing sex-abuse scandal and the shifting concentration of Catholicism to Africa and South America.

Sequesters Eve: The automatic federal budget cuts known as “the sequester” go into effect at midnight. The cuts for 2013 are $109 billion to be levied uniformly across all programs in a range of 7.6 to 9.6 percent. The cuts were designed to be indiscriminate, cutting both the necessary and the wasteful, in order to force Congress to vote a nine-year, $1.2 trillion budget reduction plan. So far they have not acted.

National: Conservative Supreme Court justices had tough things to say about the provision of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 that requires nine mostly southern states to get federal permission to change voting laws. Antonin Scalia called the law “a perpetuation of racial entitlement.” The lawyer for Shelby County, Ala., arguing the case, said the problem of racial discrimination the act was meant to address has been resolved. Last year the Alabama legislature considered a bill that would require photo ID to vote and passed a law requiring proof of citizenship. Such laws tend to make it harder for the poor, elderly and nonwhite to vote.

Music Beat: Bobby Brown, the former husband of the late Whitney Houston, has been sentenced to 55 days in jail on a DUI rap. Meanwhile the drug and alcohol addled front man for the Stone Temple Pilots has been fired by the rest of the band. Scott Weiland’s response: “Not sure how I can be ‘terminated’ from a band that I founded, fronted and co-wrote many of its biggest hits, but that’s something for the lawyers to figure out.”

Finale Note: Classical pianist Van Cliburn has died at age 78 in Ft. Worth. He became instantly famous in 1958 when he won the first International Tchaikovsky Competition, created by the Soviet Union to display Russian cultural superiority. Premier Nikita Kruschev gave him a hug, but it was a Cold War victory for the US in the era of the Russian satellite Sputnik circling the globe. Van Cliburn was given a ticker-tape parade at age 23 and played all over the word for the next 20 years until he burned out and returned to a quiet private life.

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