The conclave to choose Pope Benedict's successor could start earlier than expected, giving the Roman Catholic Church a new leader by mid March, the Vatican said on Saturday.

Less than two weeks away from a historic papal resignation, the Vatican also stressed again that the pope was not abandoning the Church in times of difficulties and urged the faithful to trust in God and in the next pope.

Five days after Benedict announced his resignation in Latin to a small group of cardinals, the Vatican was still in a state of spiritual and bureaucratic shock, groping for ways to deal with a situation without precedent for at least six centuries.

Some 117 cardinals under the age of 80 will be eligible to enter the secretive conclave to elect Benedict's successor. Church rules say the conclave has to start between 15-20 days after the papacy becomes vacant, which it will on February 28.

But since the Church is now dealing with an announced resignation and not a sudden death, Vatican spokesman Federico Lombardi said the Vatican would be "interpreting" the law to see if it could start earlier.

Cardinals around the world have already begun informal consultations by phone and email to construct a profile of the man they think would be best suited to lead the Church in a period of continuing crisis.

A bomb targeting Shiite Muslims in a busy market in Pakistan's insurgency-hit southwest killed 79 people including women and children and wounded 180 others.
The powerful bomb in a water tanker ripped through a packed bazaar in Hazara town, an area dominated by Shiites on the outskirts of Quetta - capital of oil and gas rich Baluchistan province - at around 6pm local time yesterday.

"We have recovered more dead bodies from the debris of a collapsed building. The death toll has now risen to 79,'' senior Quetta police official Wazir Khan Nasir said.

Quetta city police chief Zubair Mehmood said the water tanker, which officials said was packed with some 800 kilograms of explosives, was placed near a pillar of a two-storey building, which collapsed in the blast.

"We fear that several people have been trapped inside. Rescue work is ongoing but I see very little chance of their survival,'' Mr Mehmood said.

Mr Nasir said the bombing ''was a sectarian attack, the Shiite community was the target''.

A spokesman for the banned Sunni Muslim extremist group Lashkar-e-Jhangvi claimed responsibility for the bombing.

The body of Christopher Dorner has been identified by authorities searching through the remains of a California cabin.

One of the big questions now emerging is whether law enforcement set fire to the cabin in which Dorner was hiding.

Ben is investigating in a Reality Check you won't see anywhere else.

The zombie attack alert issued on a handful of U.S. TV stations this week is more serious than a mischievous hacker prank say cyber experts, who warn the incident exposes lax security practices in a critical public safety system.

While broadcasters said poor password security paved the way for the bogus warning, security experts said the equipment used by the Emergency Alert System remained vulnerable when stations allow it be accessed via the public Internet.

The fear is that hackers could prevent the government from sending out public warnings during an emergency or attackers could conduct a more damaging hoax than a warning of a zombie apocalypse.

"It isn't what they said. It is the fact that they got into the system. They could have caused some real damage," said Karole White, president of the Michigan Association of Broadcasters.

In a major step toward opening U.S. skies to thousands of unmanned drones, federal officials Thursday solicited proposals to create six drone test sites around the country.

The Federal Aviation Administration also posted online a draft plan for protecting people's privacy from the eyes in the sky. The plan would require each test site to follow federal and state laws and make a privacy policy publicly available.

Privacy advocates worry that a proliferation of drones will lead to a "surveillance society" in which the movements of Americans are routinely monitored, tracked, recorded and scrutinized by the authorities.

The military has come to rely heavily on drones overseas. Now there is tremendous demand to use drones in the U.S. for all kinds of tasks that are too dirty, dull or dangerous for manned aircraft. Drones, which range from the size of a hummingbird to the high-flying Globalhawks that weigh about 15,000 pounds without fuel, also are often cheaper than manned aircraft. The biggest market is expected to be state and local police departments.

The FAA is required by a law enacted a year ago to develop sites where civilian and military drones can be tested in preparation for integration into U.S. airspace that's currently limited to manned aircraft.

The law also requires that the FAA allow drones wide access to U.S. airspace by 2015, but the agency is behind schedule, and it's doubtful it will meet the deadline, the Transportation Department's inspector general said in a report last year.

HIghly disturbing behavior by newspaper and Live TV sources in complying with the San Bernardino Sheriffs.

At approximately 7 PM ET, I listened through a police scanner as San Bernardino Sheriffs gave the order to burn down the cabin where suspected murderer Christopher Dorner was allegedly hiding. Deputies were maneuvering a remote controlled demolition vehicle to the base of the cabin, using it to tear down the walls of the cabin where Dorner was hiding, and peering inside.

In an initial dispatch, a deputy reported seeing "blood spatter" inside the cabins. Dorner, who had just engaged in a firefight with deputies that killed one officer and wounded another, may have been wounded in the exchange. There was no sign of his presence, let alone his resistance, according to police dispatches.

It was then that the deputies decided to burn the cabin down.

"We're gonna go ahead with the plan with the burner," one sheriff's deputy told another. "Like we talked about." Minutes later, another deputy's voice crackled across the radio: "The burner's deployed and we have a fire."

Next, a sheriff reported a "single shot" heard from inside the house. This was before the fire had penetrated deeply into the cabin's interior, and may have signaled Dorner's suicide. At that point, an experienced ex-cop like him would have known he was finished.

On February 11, 2013, the New York Times reported about the funeral of retired Navy Seal sniper Chris Kyle, portraying him as a "warrior and family man." The highly politicized and massive public funeral, held at Cowboys Stadium in Arlington, Texas, points to the severe moral schizophrenia our nation has internalized. We see ourselves as the shining "city on a hill" and therefore a U.S. citizen who kills people in other lands becomes an unquestionably renowned hero. This must appear offensive and ridiculous to many people living beyond U.S. borders.

Mr. Kyle was a man who professed "no regret" for killing 160 people during his four tours in Iraq. A fellow soldier and former Marine, struggling with PTSD, murdered Kyle at point blank range while they were practice shooting for fun and "therapy" at a gun range in Texas. Despite the bizarrely karmic nature of his death and setting aside the much needed conversation on gun culture and pervasive violence which our nation is being forced to address, I am just as worried by our collective need to construct a fig leaf cover up over the legacy of Chris Kyle.

Glorifying Chris Kyle's story integrally connects to U.S. media and military efforts to affect public perception of ongoing warfare in Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as expanding war on terror policies which the Obama administration is aggressively attempting to institutionalize. Now, the U.S. not only retains the right to attack those whom it dubiously asserted were responsible for 9/11, it regards the entire world as a potential battlefield, dismissing any need for constituent and congressional approval nor any evidence of an attack being planned against the U.S. Though President Obama ran on an anti-war platform, he needs the legacy of Chris Kyle and others as much as any of the previous war criminals from the Bush years to sustain his current militarism.

© Zak Hussein/PA
Longtime peace activist and Nobel Prize winner, Archbishop Desmond Tutu.

Tutu: 'Does the US really want to tell those of us in the rest of the world that our lives are not of the same value as yours?'

In a letter to the In a letter to the New York Times published Wednesday, South African Nobel Peace Prize laureate Archbishop Desmond Tutu challenged the hypocrisy of the US and its citizens for accepting a killer drone program when it pertains to foreign suspects while demanding judicial review when those targets are American citizens.

He writes:

Do the United States and its people really want to tell those of us who live in the rest of the world that our lives are not of the same value as yours? That President Obama can sign off on a decision to kill us with less worry about judicial scrutiny than if the target is an American? Would your Supreme Court really want to tell humankind that we, like the slave Dred Scott in the 19th century, are not as human as you are? I cannot believe it.

I used to say of apartheid that it dehumanized its perpetrators as much as, if not more than, its victims. Your response as a society to Osama bin Laden and his followers threatens to undermine your moral standards and your humanity.

According to a report from the "Combatting Terrorism Center" at West Point, 'Anti-Federalists' who oppose a New World Order as well as members of several other far right wing activist groups are potential terrorist threats.

West Point is the U.S. Military Academy that trains, educates, and prepares Cadets for their service in the U.S. Army. The CTC (Combatting Terrorism Center) at West Point was established following the events on September 11, 2001 because of the belief that strong initiative was needed to prepare Cadets for the new environments they would be headed into upon graduating in the post-9/11 era. The CTC provides a unique terrorism-based education and since its creation, the program has received international recognition for its studies, reports, and teachings on terrorism and terrorist threats. A new report from the CTC, however, suggests that far right wing political activists, not radical Islamic groups, are the new terrorist threat in America and even goes so far as to say that those who oppose a 'New World Order' are potentially violent terrorists.

A senior official for the Guantanamo Bay prison said under questioning today that the government had placed a hidden microphone inside a meeting room but that he was assured it was not used to monitor the private conversations that prisoners have with their lawyers and the Red Cross.

Navy Capt. Thomas Welsh, the senior legal adviser to the commander of the Guantanamo Bay prison, conceded the microphone appeared to be intended to resemble a smoke detector in the ceiling of a meeting room for men labeled "high-value" detainees by the Pentagon and held in a special top security camp at the U.S. base in Cuba.

"I agree with your point that it was not recognisable, it was not readily identifiable," Welsh said under questioning by David Nevin, a lawyer for Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, who has portrayed himself as the mastermind of the September 11 terrorist attacks.

The admission came during a pretrial hearing. Lawyers for the five men charged with planning and aiding the attacks have asked the judge presiding over the military tribunal to immediately halt the proceedings in the long-stalled case over fears that authorities have been monitoring their private conversations in violation of attorney-client privilege.