Pakistani Political Parties Call for Talks With Taliban

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan — Representatives from many of Pakistan’s political parties Thursday called on their government to engage in peace talks with the Pakistani Taliban, on a day when continuing militant violence in the country’s northwest killed at least 18 people.

The call for a “peace through dialogue” was spearheaded by the Awami National Party, a secular political party that rules the restive northwestern Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa Province, where Taliban violence has been most concentrated since 2007. The initiative followed recent overtures from the Pakistani Taliban that suggested it was ready for talks.

The proposal is entirely separate from efforts in Afghanistan, supported by the Western alliance, to draw the Afghan Taliban — a related but separate group — into negotiations.

Following daylong deliberation at a luxury hotel in Islamabad, representatives from 27 political parties issued a joint, one-page statement. But there is widespread skepticism about whether the Pakistani Taliban, which aims to overthrow the state, is really open to negotiations. It is equally unclear whether the powerful military is fully behind the process.

Two opposition political parties, Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf, which is led by Imran Khan, and Jamaat-e-Islami, considered the most organized Islamic party, declined to attend the meeting on Thursday.

The meeting came after a decade of domestic conflict that has cost thousands of civilian lives, and that many Pakistanis blame on their government’s difficult alliance with the United States. Political opinion is increasingly wary of using force against insurgents and many instead advocate holding talks.

“Time has come for Pakistani government to withdraw from United States-led war,” said a meeting participant, Maulana Sami ul-Haq, an extremist religious leader, who leads an alliance of far-right political parties and banned militant groups.

At the same time, political parties are under pressure to curry favor with right-wing voters or demonstrate their effectiveness in combating militancy in advance of the coming national election, due to take place by May.

Cyril Almeida, a columnist for Dawn, the country’s leading English daily, said the Awani National Party was being driven by its own electoral needs in the northwest, and predicted that the calls for peace with the Taliban would go nowhere.

“The A.N.P. is pushing a seemingly vague agenda: keep the door to talks open while trying to build consensus for punitive actions,” Mr. Almeida said, “in the likely scenario of the Taliban reverting to type and continuing down their path of violence.”

Despite the tentative signs of reconciliation, militants have not slowed down their attacks.

On Thursday the police in Hangu district of Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa said they had killed six suicide bombers, probably of Uzbek origins, who had assaulted a police station. Elsewhere in the same district, a suicide bomber rammed his vehicle into a police checkpoint, killing seven people, including four policemen.

In the neighboring Orakzai tribal region, at least eleven people were killed when a roadside bomb targeted a bus carrying members of an anti-Taliban militia. As people gathered for rescue work, another explosion went off, wounding at least 19 people.

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How Ben Affleck & Jennifer Garner Are Making a Hollywood Marriage Work

By Michelle Tauber

02/14/2013 at 07:30 PM EST

Ben Affleck & Jennifer Garner

Ramey

He kept his arm tenderly around her back. She beamed as he told her "I love you" from the stage, and when the show was over, gently reminded him to take his jacket. For Ben Affleck and Jennifer Garner, the British Academy Film Awards in London on Feb. 10 was another successful date night – and a rare grown-ups' weekend getaway, with their three kids staying home with Garner's sister.

Well, almost: "He's just like a child!" Garner lovingly joked to a friend as she tugged her still-schmoozing husband–who won the night's two biggest honors for his film Argo – toward the exit. Could an Oscar for Best Picture be his next stop? "This is a second act for me," he said in his London acceptance speech. "I am so grateful and proud." As he told PEOPLE recently, "I am very lucky. I have to knock on wood about my life."

Especially about the woman who's a lock for Best Supporting Spouse. After seven years of marriage and three kids–Violet, 7, Seraphina, 4, and Samuel, who turns 1 on Feb. 27–Affleck and Garner, both 40, seem to have struck that rarest of things for a Hollywood couple: balance. It's an old-fashioned arrangement, with Garner handling most of the day-to-day responsibility for keeping the children's schedules humming while Affleck rides his Argo hot streak – including Screen Actors Guild and Golden Globe wins, despite a snub for the Oscar directing category.

"I've got a great family; I'm really inspired by where my career is," Affleck says. "I've seen a lot of different things rambling around in this business, and I'm just really, really happy to find myself where I am."

Several sources who know the couple well say that both stars are at ease in their "quite traditional roles," as a Garner friend puts it. Garner dialed back on her own career to commit herself to making the ballet-karate-playdate rounds.

"She blows my mind," says Affleck's Argo costar Clea Duvall. "She's such an amazing mom and such an amazing wife and so supportive of him. It's just . . . they're kind of the ideal." Although Affleck has made his share of school runs during a busy awards season, in many ways he's an old-fashioned dad.

Says a source who knows the couple: "Have you ever seen Mad Men? That's how he approaches [marriage and kids] – providing for your family is your priority, and raising the kids day-to-day is the wife's priority." But when he's not working, he's plenty hands-on, reading to the girls at bookstores and taking them to the farmers' market. "His wife and family are the best things that ever happened to him," says an Affleck pal. "They have always come first and always will."

 

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Study: Fish in drug-tainted water suffer reaction

BOSTON (AP) — What happens to fish that swim in waters tainted by traces of drugs that people take? When it's an anti-anxiety drug, they become hyper, anti-social and aggressive, a study found. They even get the munchies.

It may sound funny, but it could threaten the fish population and upset the delicate dynamics of the marine environment, scientists say.

The findings, published online Thursday in the journal Science, add to the mounting evidence that minuscule amounts of medicines in rivers and streams can alter the biology and behavior of fish and other marine animals.

"I think people are starting to understand that pharmaceuticals are environmental contaminants," said Dana Kolpin, a researcher for the U.S. Geological Survey who is familiar with the study.

Calling their results alarming, the Swedish researchers who did the study suspect the little drugged fish could become easier targets for bigger fish because they are more likely to venture alone into unfamiliar places.

"We know that in a predator-prey relation, increased boldness and activity combined with decreased sociality ... means you're going to be somebody's lunch quite soon," said Gregory Moller, a toxicologist at the University of Idaho and Washington State University. "It removes the natural balance."

Researchers around the world have been taking a close look at the effects of pharmaceuticals in extremely low concentrations, measured in parts per billion. Such drugs have turned up in waterways in Europe, the U.S. and elsewhere over the past decade.

They come mostly from humans and farm animals; the drugs pass through their bodies in unmetabolized form. These drug traces are then piped to water treatment plants, which are not designed to remove them from the cleaned water that flows back into streams and rivers.

The Associated Press first reported in 2008 that the drinking water of at least 51 million Americans carries low concentrations of many common drugs. The findings were based on questionnaires sent to water utilities, which reported the presence of antibiotics, sedatives, sex hormones and other drugs.

The news reports led to congressional hearings and legislation, more water testing and more public disclosure. To this day, though, there are no mandatory U.S. limits on pharmaceuticals in waterways.

The research team at Sweden's Umea University used minute concentrations of 2 parts per billion of the anti-anxiety drug oxazepam, similar to concentrations found in real waters. The drug belongs to a widely used class of medicines known as benzodiazepines that includes Valium and Librium.

The team put young wild European perch into an aquarium, exposed them to these highly diluted drugs and then carefully measured feeding, schooling, movement and hiding behavior. They found that drug-exposed fish moved more, fed more aggressively, hid less and tended to school less than unexposed fish. On average, the drugged fish were more than twice as active as the others, researcher Micael Jonsson said. The effects were more pronounced at higher drug concentrations.

"Our first thought is, this is like a person diagnosed with ADHD," said Jonsson, referring to attention deficit-hyperactivity disorder. "They become asocial and more active than they should be."

Tomas Brodin, another member of the research team, called the drug's environmental impact a global problem. "We find these concentrations or close to them all over the world, and it's quite possible or even probable that these behavioral effects are taking place as we speak," he said Thursday in Boston at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Most previous research on trace drugs and marine life has focused on biological changes, such as male fish that take on female characteristics. However, a 2009 study found that tiny concentrations of antidepressants made fathead minnows more vulnerable to predators.

It is not clear exactly how long-term drug exposure, beyond the seven days in this study, would affect real fish in real rivers and streams. The Swedish researchers argue that the drug-induced changes could jeopardize populations of this sport and commercial fish, which lives in both fresh and brackish water.

Water toxins specialist Anne McElroy of Stony Brook University in New York agreed: "These lower chronic exposures that may alter things like animals' mating behavior or its ability to catch food or its ability to avoid being eaten — over time, that could really affect a population."

Another possibility, the researchers said, is that more aggressive feeding by the perch on zooplankton could reduce the numbers of these tiny creatures. Since zooplankton feed on algae, a drop in their numbers could allow algae to grow unchecked. That, in turn, could choke other marine life.

The Swedish team said it is highly unlikely people would be harmed by eating such drug-exposed fish. Jonsson said a person would have to eat 4 tons of perch to consume the equivalent of a single pill.

Researchers said more work is needed to develop better ways of removing drugs from water at treatment plants. They also said unused drugs should be brought to take-back programs where they exist, instead of being flushed down the toilet. And they called on pharmaceutical companies to work on "greener" drugs that degrade more easily.

Sandoz, one of three companies approved to sell oxazepam in the U.S., "shares society's desire to protect the environment and takes steps to minimize the environmental impact of its products over their life cycle," spokeswoman Julie Masow said in an emailed statement. She provided no details.

___

Online:

Overview of the drug: http://www.nlm.nih.gov/medlineplus/druginfo/meds/a682050.html

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Wall Street ends slightly higher, helped by acquisitions

NEW YORK (Reuters) - The S&P 500 eked out a small gain for a third straight session on Thursday, helped by a flurry of merger activity, though investors see no catalysts to lift the market further with major averages near multi-year highs.

The market's slowed advance took the S&P 500 to its highest intraday level since November 2007 on Wednesday. While the index notched its third straight day of gains, none was more than 0.2 percent.

Shares of H.J. Heinz Co jumped 20 percent to $72.50 after it said Warren Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway and 3G Capital will buy the food company for $72.50 a share, or $28 billion including debt. Berkshire's class B shares rose 1.3 percent to $99.21.

Also supporting the market was data showing the number of Americans filing new claims for unemployment benefits fell more than expected in the latest week. The CBOE Volatility index <.vix> fell 2.4 percent, dropping to 12.67.

"While I'm not bearish, I don't see many upside motivations at these levels," said Donald Selkin, chief market strategist at National Securities in New York, who cited the low level of the VIX as a sign the market was overbought.

Equities have struggled to break above current levels where they have been hovering for almost two weeks. The S&P 500 is up more than 6 percent so far this year.

"We need to digest some of our gains to go higher, but people are so eager to buy on the dips that we're not even seeing dips anymore. People are just chasing the market higher," said Selkin, who helps oversee about $3 billion in assets.

Stocks fell earlier after a report the euro zone's gross domestic product contracted by the steepest amount since the first quarter of 2009. In addition, Japan's GDP shrank 0.1 percent in the fourth quarter, crushing expectations of a modest return to growth.

The Dow Jones industrial average <.dji> was down 9.52 points, or 0.07 percent, at 13,973.39. The Standard & Poor's 500 Index <.spx> was up 1.05 points, or 0.07 percent, at 1,521.38. The Nasdaq Composite Index <.ixic> was up 1.78 points, or 0.06 percent, at 3,198.66.

Constellation Brands soared 37 percent to $43.75 after AB InBev's deal to take over Mexican brewer Grupo Modelo was revised to grant Constellation perpetual rights to distribute Corona and other Modelo brands in the United States. U.S. shares of AB InBev gained 5.1 percent to $92.77.

American Airlines and US Airways Group said they plan to merge in a deal that will form the world's biggest air carrier, with an equity valuation of about $11 billion. US Airways shares fell 4.6 percent to $13.99.

Weakness in Europe contributed to a 5 percent drop in revenue from the region for Cisco Systems , which nonetheless beat estimates as it reported its results late Wednesday. The company's shares dipped 0.7 percent to $20.99.

General Motors Co reported a weaker-than-expected fourth-quarter profit, also citing bigger losses in Europe alongside lower prices in its core North American market. The stock was off 3.3 percent to $27.73.

Only five more stocks rose than fell on the New York Stock Exchange, while 51 percent of Nasdaq-listed shares closed higher.

Volume was light, with about 6.36 billion shares changing hands on the New York Stock Exchange, the Nasdaq and NYSE MKT, below the daily average so far this year of about 6.48 billion shares.

(Editing by Nick Zieminski and Kenneth Barry)

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IHT Special: Sanctions Chill Reaches Banking Clients in the Persian Gulf

DUBAI — For Syrian and Iranian citizens living in the Gulf, finding a bank to deal with just became a little tougher.

Banks like Barclays and HSBC have begun turning away new customers from countries that are facing sanctions. They are closing down some existing accounts, further isolating Syrian and Iranian citizens from the global financial industry.

Mary Rose Khamasmieh, a Syrian public relations professional who has lived and worked in Dubai since 2005, has used HSBC as her bank for the past six years. Since last November, she has received a flurry of notices from HSBC requesting more information, including her visa validity and work history.

“This is the most information they requested since I opened the account, and they said if I didn’t give them information my account would have to close,” she said. “It went well for me and I continue to bank with HSBC, but I do have some Syrian friends that were forced to find another bank or even leave the country.”

Also under the new measures, Syrian or Iranian customers with bank balances of less than 100,000 dirhams, or $27,225, will be asked to close their accounts within 30 days. Customers with salaries of less than 15,000 dirhams will also be affected.

This is because the cost to the bank of making the enquiries necessary to enforce compliance is higher than the benefit or “profit potential” of keeping a customer with a small bank balance. It is cheaper for HSBC to close an account or not to open a new one with a balance of less than 100,000 dirhams.

Banks have increased due diligence procedures for clients from countries facing sanctions by the United States or the European Union and for any customer who conducts business or lives there. This means that if the bank is not satisfied with the information a customer provides, it will not accept the customer’s business. By doing this, banks are hoping to avoid hefty penalties imposed by regulators related to sanction evasion.

In December 2011, the U.S. government issued a new set of laws that were enforced in March 2012 to penalize any significant transaction by a foreign bank involvijng a country like Iran that was facing sanctions by threatening to close down a bank’s correspondent account. This means that the bank would not be permitted to make a wire transfer in U.S. dollars anywhere in the world.

“This will bankrupt banks, not being able to conduct dollar transactions,” said Ramsey Jurdi, a compliance attorney specializing in sanctions who is based in the Dubai office of Chadbourne & Parke, a New York law firm. “This is in line with a gradual tightening of sanctions focused on this point of leverage over the last two years.”

HSBC’s stricter compliance approach in the region is part of a global measure to avoid penalties and improve transparency. In December, HSBC, one of the largest banks in Europe, paid a $1.92 billion fine related to illegal funds from Mexican drug cartels and money-laundering from Iran. To avoid further risk, HSBC is now closing the accounts of some customers with links to Syria and Iran, though it has no presence in those countries. In all, HSBC has 14 offices in the Middle East and North Africa.

“HSBC has a commitment to adopt the highest compliance standards, and as a result we must apply enhanced oversight on any customer with connections to sanctioned countries,” an HSBC spokeswoman, based in Dubai, wrote in an e-mail. “Where we are unable to maintain sufficiently detailed information about such a customer through a relationship managed account, we have to discontinue that relationship.”

Enforcement is becoming stricter. In 2010, Barclays paid $298 million in fines related to sanctions breaches, including transactions connected with Iran, Cuba and Sudan. More recently, Standard Chartered Bank settled $327 million in fines in December 2012 over dealings with Iran, Libya, Myanmar and Sudan.

“The Iranian financial industry has become very isolated,” said Mr. Jurdi of Chadbourne & Parke, adding this was one reason banks had become more diligent with regard to Iranians and Syrians. “With financial isolation, people are finding new ways of evading sanctions by conducting banking offshore or listing a company account as an individual account so fewer questions are asked.”

While this has raised compliance standards and costs, some banks are not universally turning down customers from certain countries, so long as enough due diligence is done.

“Standard Chartered does not sever relationships with clients based on their nationality, and we adhere to the highest standards of compliance to local and international standards,” Ramy Lawand, spokesman for Standard Chartered Bank in the Middle East and North Africa, wrote in an e-mail. Standard Chartered is focused on Asia, Africa and the Middle East, which generate 90 percent of its profit and revenue.

Barclays and Mashreq Bank have also tightened their compliance standards. Barclays no longer accepts corporate accounts for Syrian, Iranian or Sudanese companies, and assesses more carefully any funds flowing to or from residents of countries facing sanctions.

“Barclays works closely with regulators and abides by their requirements in all the jurisdictions we operate in,” a spokesman for Barclays, based in Dubai, wrote in an e-mailed statement.

Hossein Asrar Haghighi, co-founder of the Iranian Business Council, a nonprofit, nongovernmental network for Iranian businessmen in the United Arab Emirates, said banks were playing it safe, preferring to eliminate Iran from their portfolios. “It doesn’t really matter if a person is rich or poor, the problem is that they are Iranian, and it’s getting harder to find a bank that’s O.K. with that.”

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Mom's 'Birth Announcement' for Teenage Son Goes Viral

Mom & Babies
Celebrity Baby Blog

02/13/2013 at 04:00 PM ET

Introducing their bouncing baby … er, teenage boy!

After Kelli Higgins and her husband adopted son Latrell and his sister Chanya in 2011, the proud parents realized they would never be able to add their two newest children’s baby photos to the family album.

“I was very sad too because I didn’t have any photos of him either,” Higgins tells Today. “I think it’s really hard to have children and not know what they looked like when they were younger.”

That is, until the couple’s 12-year-old daughter suggested staging a newborn photo shoot featuring none other than her big brother, Latrell.

Courtesy Kelli Higgins

And, with that, Higgins, a professional photographer, pulled out the swaddling blanket and went to work. The result? A cute collage of Latrell in classic poses — feet included.

“Here’s my sweet not so little newborn! His name is Latrell and he weighs 112 lbs.,” Higgins captioned the series on Facebook.

With the funny take on tradition going viral — it’s earned over 3,000 shares on Facebook — Higgins is hopeful it will shed light on a more serious topic.

“The one reaction that is really humbling and I’m really excited about is there have been a lot of parents that come to me telling me that they were thinking about adopting a baby, but after seeing those photos it’s changed their minds and they want to adopt an older child,” Higgins explains.

– Anya Leon

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Clues to why most survived China melamine scandal

WASHINGTON (AP) — Scientists wondering why some children and not others survived one of China's worst food safety scandals have uncovered a suspect: germs that live in the gut.

In 2008, at least six babies died and 300,000 became sick after being fed infant formula that had been deliberately and illegally tainted with the industrial chemical melamine. There were some lingering puzzles: How did it cause kidney failure, and why wasn't everyone equally at risk?

A team of researchers from the U.S. and China re-examined those questions in a series of studies in rats. In findings released Wednesday, they reported that certain intestinal bacteria play a crucial role in how the body handles melamine.

The intestines of all mammals teem with different species of bacteria that perform different jobs. To see if one of those activities involves processing melamine, researchers from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro and Shanghai Jiao Tong University gave lab rats antibiotics to kill off some of the germs — and then fed them melamine.

The antibiotic-treated rats excreted twice as much of the melamine as rats that didn't get antibiotics, and they experienced fewer kidney stones and other damage.

A closer look identified why: A particular intestinal germ — named Klebsiella terrigena — was metabolizing melamine to create a more toxic byproduct, the team reported in the journal Science Translational Medicine.

Previous studies have estimated that fewer than 1 percent of healthy people harbor that bacteria species. A similar fraction of melamine-exposed children in China got sick, the researchers wrote. But proving that link would require studying stool samples preserved from affected children, they cautioned.

Still, the research is pretty strong, said microbiologist Jack Gilbert of the University of Chicago and Argonne National Laboratory, who wasn't involved in the new study.

More importantly, "this paper adds to a growing body of evidence which suggests that microbes in the body play a significant role in our response to toxicity and in our health in general," Gilbert said.

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Wall Street pauses after rally to five-year high

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Stocks drifted in light volume on Wednesday, ending little changed, as investors remained cautious after the S&P 500 index briefly hit its highest intraday level since November 2007.

The S&P 500 was buoyed by General Electric after cable company Comcast Corp said it will buy from GE the the part of NBCUniversal it didn't already own for $16.7 billion.

Comcast's stock hit the highest since 1999 before closing up 3 percent at $40.13 and GE gained 3.6 percent to $23.39.

The S&P 500 is up 6.6 percent so far this year, partly due to stronger-than-expected corporate earnings and a better economic outlook. The Dow industrials is about 1 percent away from an all-time intraday high, reached in October 2007.

Volume has been weak in recent days with the S&P moving sideways around 1,520. The index is about 3 percent away from closing at a record high.

A scarcity of sellers after a consistent string of gains is a positive sign and shows the uptrend is intact, King Lip, chief investment officer at Baker Avenue Asset Management in San Francisco, said.

"Last year we had double-digit returns in the first quarter. It's fairly possible we can move higher from here," he said.

The Dow Jones industrial average <.dji> fell 35.79 points or 0.26 percent, to 13,982.91, the S&P 500 <.spx> gained 0.9 point or 0.06 percent, to 1,520.33 and the Nasdaq Composite <.ixic> added 10.38 points or 0.33 percent, to 3,196.88.

The S&P gained 12 percent in the first three months of 2012.

Deere & Co , the world's largest farm equipment maker, forecast a modest increase in sales this year despite the prospect of the biggest corn crop in U.S. history. The forecast fell short of analysts' expectations, sending shares of Deere down 3.5 percent to $90.68.

In extended trading, shares of technology bellwether Cisco Systems fell 2 percent after it posted results.

Dr Pepper Snapple fell 5.8 percent to $42.69 after it forecast profit for the current year below analysts' estimates.

Cliffs Natural Resources lost a fifth of its market value a day after the miner reported a quarterly loss and slashed its dividend by 76 percent. Its shares fell 20 percent to 429.29.

According to the latest Thomson Reuters data, of the 364 companies in the S&P 500 that have reported results, 70.3 percent have exceeded analysts' expectations, above a 62 percent average since 1994 and 65 percent over the past four quarters.

About 5.9 billion shares changed hands on the New York Stock Exchange, the Nasdaq and NYSE MKT, below the daily average in February last year of 6.94 billion.

On the NYSE, roughly seven issues rose for every five that fell and on Nasdaq more than six rose for every five decliners.

(Editing by Kenneth Barry and Bernadette Baum)

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After Retirement, Pope Will Live in Vatican City

ROME — Though it may have come as a shock Monday to the world’s one billion-plus Catholics, Pope Benedict XVI’s plan to retire on Feb. 28 appears to have been in the works for some time, and was known to a handful of close advisers.

Still unclear, however, are some of the practical consequences of Benedict’s decision, Vatican officials acknowledged Tuesday, from how the former pope will be addressed, to what to do with the papal ring used to seal important documents, traditionally destroyed upon a pope’s death.“There are a series of questions that remain to be seen, also on the part of the pope himself, even if it is a decision that he had made some time ago,” the Rev. Federico Lombardi, the Vatican spokesman, said at a news conference. “How he will live afterward, which will be very different from how he lives now, will require time and tranquillity and reflection and a moment of adaptation to a new situation.”

Even though the Code of Canon Law allows popes to resign, the occurrence was rare enough to have caught Vatican officials off guard, including on issues like the protocol and potentially awkward logistics of having a former pope and his successor share a backyard.

When he leaves the papacy at the end of the month, Benedict will retire to his summer home in Castel Gandolfo, in the hills outside Rome, before moving to the Mater Ecclesiae convent, a plain, four-story structure built 21 years ago to serve as an international place “for contemplative life within the walls of Vatican City,” as it is described on a Vatican Web site.

Workers began transforming the building into a residence in November, after the cloistered nuns who had occupied the convent left, Father Lombardi said. He did not tip his hand about whether the renovations were carried out with the pontiff as the future occupant in mind. “The pope knew this place, this building and thought it was appropriate for his needs,” he said.

The timing, however, raised suspicions that the pope had been planning the details of his retirement for some time. The editor of the Vatican newspaper, L’Osservatore Romano, wrote Monday that the pope had made his decision “many months ago,” after a demanding trip to Mexico and Cuba in March 2012, “and kept with a reserve that no one could violate.”

Father Lombardi said that the stress of that trip had further convinced the pope that he no longer had the stamina to do the job.

In fact, the pope had meditated on the possibility of resigning for years. In the 2010 book “Light of the World: The Pope, the Church and the Signs of the Times,” from a series of interviews conducted by Peter Seewald, a German journalist, Benedict said that if a pope “clearly realized that he is no longer physically, psychologically and spiritually capable of carrying out the duties of his office,” he would have “the right, and under some circumstances also an obligation, to resign.”

Rumors of his imminent resignation began to appear periodically in the Italian news media in recent years, as the pope appeared increasingly frail in public appearances.

A Vatican official, who asked not to be named because he was discussing papal business, said that the number of people who had known about the pope’s decision “a long time, could be counted on one hand.” But the pope had informed a small group of other collaborators “in recent days.”

When he retires to Vatican City, the pope will be able to move freely, Father Lombardi said, though it was “premature” to say how involved he will be in day-to-day activities — like saying Mass — at the Vatican.

He would not, however, intervene in the choice of his successor. “You can be sure that the cardinals will be autonomous in their decision and he will have no specific role in this election,” Father Lombardi said, adding that the pope was “a very discreet person.”

The conclave to choose the next pope will begin 15 to 20 days after the pope resigns, and a new leader of the Roman Catholic Church is expected to be in place by Easter, which falls on March 31 this year.

Father Lombardi said the pope would continue to perform his regular duties until the end of the month, and would keep all the appointments on his calendar. Some parts of his schedule will be modified to take into account the heightened public interest in the pope during his final days in office, Father Lombardi indicated.

For instance, this week’s commemoration of Ash Wednesday, beginning the 40-day period of Lent preceding Easter, usually takes place in a church on the Aventine Hill. But this year it will be conducted in St. Peter’s Basilica at the Vatican instead, to allow a greater number of the faithful to attend, Father Lombardi said.

His final audience, on Feb. 27, will be moved to St. Peter’s Square instead of the usual indoor venue used in winter, “to allow the faithful to say goodbye to the pope.”

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Lady Gaga: I Can't Walk Due to Injury

02/12/2013 at 06:45 PM EST

Lady Gaga is feeling like a little monster for postponing concerts because of an injury.

"I barely know what to say," she writes on her Facebook page, Tuesday. "I've been hiding a show injury and chronic pain for some time now, [and] over the past month it has worsened. I've been praying it would heal. I hid it from my staff. I didn't want to disappoint my amazing fans. However, after last night's performance I could not walk and still can't."

The pop star, 26 – whose Twitter page explains that she has a case of synovitis, which is severe inflammation of the joints – was forced to postpone two concerts in Chicago, one in Detroit and one in Hamilton, Ontario.

"I hope you can forgive me, as it is nearly impossible for me to forgive myself," the rest of her Facebook post says. "I'm devastated & sad. It will hopefully heal as soon as possible. I hate this. I hate this so much. I love you and I'm sorry."

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