Globe Trot: Kenyan politics, Pope prototype, Kerry firsts, homeschooling hostility

A Kenyan court has cleared the way for Uhuru Kenyatta, the son of the country’s founding president, to run in the March 4 presidential election—even though he and his candidate for deputy are among four Kenyans indicted by the International Criminal Court for crimes against humanity stemming from post-election violence in 2007 that killed 1,200 people.

What kind of pope should the new pope be? “A radically converted Christian disciple who believes that Jesus Christ really is the answer to the question that is every human life,” writes Catholic scholar George Weigel in an op-ed that defines for Catholics and Protestants the “increasingly deracinated world” we live in—“in which there may be your truth and my truth, but nothing recognizable as the truth. …”

Secretary of State John Kerry is giving his first foreign policy speech today at the University of Virginia. He received a long standing ovation but did not take student questions (according to Twitter, as no transcript has been made available from the State Department). Kerry begins his first overseas trip next week with nine stops in Europe and the Middle East. Not on the itinerary: Israel or the Palestinian territories.

We’re looking into: the mysterious death of a U.S. electronics engineer, Shane Todd, in Singapore. And the bizarre and gruesome murders of two Jersey City Copts whose bodies were found outside Philadelphia last week, hands and heads severed.

And WORLD also continues to follow the case of the Romeikes, a homeschooling family of six from Germany who now face deportation from the United States because U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder does not believe their “fundamental rights” are at stake under Germany’s compulsory state education laws.

“I worry about what the future holds in my country,” writes Oglethorpe University professor of politics Joseph Knippenberg, when it comes to “liberal elite hostility” to homeschooling and the Obama administration’s lack of defense for the rights of parents.