As cardinals prepare for the conclave to elect the next pope, the victims of sex abuse by clergymen are trying to ensure the vote doesn't go to anyone they accuse of helping cover up the scandal.

The Catholic hierarchy had a final day of talks in Rome on Monday before going into lockdown in the Sistine Chapel for the vote, after former pontiff Benedict XVI's shock resignation - the first for 700 years.

The endless scandals over sexual abuse by pedophile priests and cover-ups by superiors will be a factor in the debate, and victims' groups have been campaigning in the Vatican and at home to try to make it a deciding one.

"If the Church elects a new Pope that has a poor record of dealing with abuse, that will be a sign that nothing has changed," said James Salt, director of victims' pressure-group Catholics United.

The group has launched an appeal calling for "all Cardinals tarnished by scandal to recuse themselves from upcoming Papal conclave," eliminating themselves not just as candidates, but as electors.

Witnesses to the shooting death of a 16-year-old Brooklyn teenager at the hands of New York City Police detectives have begun raising questions over authorities' account of the fatal encounter.

WNBC-TV reported on Monday that Kimani Gray was shot 11 times by the detectives. A 19-year-old man who was allegedly at the scene told the station the officials did not identify themselves as police before approaching them.

"They shot him," said the witness, who did not identify himself. "They didn't ask him no questions, no nothing, they just shot him."

But department spokesperson Paul J. Browne told the New York Times that Gray threatened the detectives.

"After the anti-crime sergeant and police officer told the suspect to show his hands, which was heard by witnesses, Gray produced a revolver and pointed it at the officers," Brown said.

A military plane has crashed after setting off from Naval Air Station Whidbey Island in eastern Washington, the Lincoln County Sheriff's Office has confirmed. All three people on board are believed dead.

The plane went down around 10 miles outside of Harrington, Washington on Monday morning, Lincoln County Sheriff Wade told Komo 4 News.

He said there were no survivors and police were cordoning off the crash site while waiting for investigators to reach the scene. The victims of the crash have yet to be identified.

Local resident Halee Walter told the station she heard a huge explosion that rattled her home.

Despite President Obama's promise that openness will prevail, America's government agencies continue to tighten their grip over free public access of state documents, AP reports. Papers are mostly being censored to conform to the security policy.

America's Freedom of Information Act has been increasingly sacrificed for the sake of national security, revealed the latest analyses of the Associated Press.

Having examined the annual document workflow of the 33 federal government agencies, the Associated Press concluded that just over a third of the private requests applied to US government agencies in 2012 were turned down altogether for various reasons, the most common of which are matters of national security.

In some cases the requested records could not be found, while in others the requests were determined improper or the requestor refused to pay for the copies.

A considerable part of the remaining nearly two-thirds of the requests that were finally handed over to the applicants had been either preliminarily censored or selectively curtailed.

Rural Vermont director Andrea Stander has no doubt about what will happen if the legislature passes a GMO labeling bill that requires food products containing genetically modified organisms to say so on the packaging.

"Yes, there will be a lawsuit," says Stander, whose organization advocates for Vermont's family farmers. "But this is a case we can win."

After two failed attempts in 2011 and 2012, Vermont lawmakers are making a third try at passing a bill requiring food producers to label products containing genetically engineered ingredients. Food manufacturers conservatively estimate that between 60 and 80 percent of processed foods contain at least one ingredient derived from genetically engineered corn, soybeans or other crops. Yet consumers have no way of knowing what products contain "GE" ingredients.

The European Union, Australia and China already require food labels to disclose genetically engineered ingredients, but so far neither the U.S. nor any individual state has succeeded in enacting a GMO labeling law.

Just seconds after the trigger of a gun is squeezed, police officers in cities and towns across America are alerted thanks to the latest and greatest state-of-the-art technology. Up-to-the-moment accuracy isn't always enough, though.

Programs like the ShotSpotter system were already in place in 44 US cities by 2009, and in recent years the company has only added more names to its list of customers that can learn about gun activity the second shots are fired. ShotSpotter's developers describe it as "a gunfire alert and analysis solution" that uses specialized sensors and software to triangulate and pinpoint the precise location of each spent round within seconds, and dozens of law enforcement agencies across the United States have signed-on.

When it's a matter of life or death, though, seconds can mean all the difference. That's the reasoning, at least, for why a number of police departments across America are relying not just on systems like ShotSpotter but other, more Orwellian surveillance techniques to spy on citizens and predict problems before they even occur. The result, depending on who you ask, means a drop in crime. It also, however, could mean no one is safe from the ever watching eye of Big Brother.

A joint media-government attempt to justify the assassination of a US citizen ends up doing the opposite

The New York Times and the Obama administration have created a disturbing collaborative pattern that asserted itself again on Sunday with the paper's long article purporting to describe the events leading up to the execution by the CIA of US citizen Anwar Awlaki. Time and again, the Obama administration shrouds what it does with complete secrecy, and then uses that secrecy to avoid judicial review of its actions and/or compelled statutory disclosure under the Freedom of Information Act. "Oh, we're so sorry", says the Obama DOJ, "but we cannot have courts deciding if what we did is legal, nor ordering us to disclose information under FOIA, because these programs are so very secret that any disclosure would seriously jeopardize national security".

But then, senior Obama officials run to the New York Times by the dozens, demand (and receive) anonymity, and then spout all sorts of claims about these very same programs that are designed to justify what the US government has done and to glorify President Obama. The New York Times helpfully shields these officials - who are not blowing any whistles, but acting as government spokespeople - from being identified, and then mindlessly regurgitates their assertions as fact. It's standard government stenography, administration press releases masquerading as in-depth news articles.

Sunday's lengthy NYT article on the Awlaki killing by Mark Mazzetti, Charlie Savage and Scott Shane is a classic case of this arrangement. It purports to provide "an account of what led to the Awlaki strike" that is "based on interviews with three dozen current and former legal and counterterrorism officials and outside experts". But what it really does is simply summarize the unverified justifications of the very officials involved in the killing, most of whom are permitted to justify themselves while hiding behind anonymity. It devotes itself with particular fervor to defending the actions of former Obama OLC lawyers David Barron and Marty Lederman, who concocted the theories to authorize due-process-free assassinations of American citizens (those same Democratic lawyers were, needless to say, among the most vocal critics of the Bush administration's War on Terror policies that denied due process and relied on rampant secrecy).

Jay Victorino was standing outside his mother's apartment when he was grabbed by police, and he says if she hadn't come downstairs to identify him he would've been arrested on a trespassing charge.

That's because his mother's South Bronx building is one of thousands of private dwellings patrolled by the New York Police Department under a program known as Operation Clean Halls.

Victorino, 28, has mixed feelings about the program - on one hand, he has seen his neighborhood become safer. On the other, he doesn't think it's right to be targeted.

"I don't want to be stopped," he said. "But I also don't want something bad to happen to my family. It's not easy to say what the right answer is. ... It's not a perfect world."

His ambivalence was echoed by dozens of people around the city who live in buildings enrolled in the program, the only one of its kind in a major U.S. city that gives police standing permission to roam the halls of private buildings. Some residents say they feel safer, while others say they believe they are being harassed at home and, in some cases, illegally stopped and arrested. More than a dozen residents have filed a federal lawsuit saying their civil rights were violated.

"We don't feel safe, but it's because of the police," said Jaenean Ligon, one of the plaintiffs, who said her sons have been wrongly arrested.

A police officer opened fire on U.S. and Afghan forces at a police headquarters in eastern Afghanistan on Monday, sparking a firefight that killed two U.S. troops and two other Afghan policemen. The attacker was also killed in the shootout, officials said.

Outside of Kabul, meanwhile, U.S. troops fired on a truck approaching their military convoy, killing two Afghan men inside it.

The incident in the eastern Wardak province was the latest in a series of insider attacks against coalition and Afghan forces that have threatened to undermine their alliance at a time when they need to work increasingly close together in order to hand over responsibility as planned next year.

The attack also comes a day after the expiration of the Afghan president's deadline for U.S. special forces to withdraw from the province following accusations of abuse by those under their command.

Chalmers Johnson called the CIA the president's private army. Imperial Rome had its praetorian guard. It served and protected emperors.

CIA rogues work the same way. They do lots more than that. Extrajudicial killing is prioritized. Much that goes on is secret. Unaccountability keeps Congress and ordinary people uninformed.

Johnson said US presidents have "untrammeled control of the CIA." It's "probably (their) single most extraordinary power."

It puts them beyond checks and balances. What's constitutionally mandated doesn't exist.

CIA originally had five missions. Four dealt with collection, coordination and dissemination of intelligence.

The fifth is vague. It lets agency operatives "perform such other functions and duties related to intelligence affecting the national security as the National Security Council may direct."