Here’s what I’ve been reading up on this morning: 

• Obama and Kerry meet the Pope. Wild guess: they’re not discussing Hobby Lobby. 

• Amnesty’s annual death penalty report is out; the US remains the only country in the Americas that executes people, and is fourth on the worldwide executors list. 

• Meanwhile, Japan frees the world’s longest held death-row inmate. 

• 90 people are still missing as a result of the Washington mud slide. 

• Not sure I can take Nate Silver seriously anymore after reading this. 

• The GDP expands higher than expected to 2.6 percent in the fourth quarter. 

• And jobless claims fall lower than expected. 

• Preparing for its IPO, cloud computing is thinking outside of the, um, Box. 

• C.R.E.A.M., get the money. Wu Tang will sell one copy of its new album that you can pay to listen to at a museum.

• Live better, play union. The NLRB confirms that college football players can unionize. 

• India eliminates polio. But Orange County, California has a measles outbreak. 

• Thanks to federal public funding, Chad Trujillo observes a planet on the edges of our solar system–80 AU away in the Oort cloud.