The data is said to help the NSA track individuals, and map who they know, to aid the agency's anti-terror work.

The "dragnet surveillance" was condemned by digital rights groups who called for the NSA's snooping efforts to be reined in.

The news comes as Microsoft plans to use more encryption to thwart NSA spying on it and its customers.

Wrong target The huge database built up by the NSA (National Security Agency) keeps an eye on "hundreds of millions" of mobile phones, said the Post, adding that it let the agency map movements and relationships in ways that were "previously unimaginable".

It added that the vast programme potentially surpassed any other NSA project in terms of its impact on privacy. Information about the programme was in papers released to the Post by whistleblower Edward Snowden.

The spying agency is said to have accumulated so much data, about 27 terabytes according to leaked papers seen by the Post, that it was "outpacing" the NSA's ability to analyse the information in a timely fashion.

The analysis, via a computer system called Co-Traveler, was necessary as only a tiny fraction of 1% of the data gathered was actually useful in its anti-terror work, said the paper. The analysis is so detailed that it can be used to thwart attempts to hide from scrutiny by people who use disposable phones or only use a handset briefly before switching it off.

The vast majority of the information gathered is said to come from taps installed on mobile phone networks and used the basic location-information that networks log as people move around. Analysing this data helps the NSA work out which devices are regularly in close proximity and, by implication, exposes a potential connection between the owners of those handsets.

The American Civil Liberties Union said it was "staggering" that the NSA could mount such a vast location-logging system without any public debate. The "dragnet surveillance" broke US obligations that require it to respect the privacy of foreigners and Americans.

"The government should be targeting its surveillance at those suspected of wrong-doing, not assembling massive associational databases that, by their very nature, record the movements of a huge number of innocent people," it added.

Mr. Mandela spent 27 years in prison after being convicted of treason by the white minority government, only to forge a peaceful end to white rule by negotiating with his captors after his release in 1990. He led the African National Congress, long a banned liberation movement, to a resounding electoral victory in 1994, the first fully democratic election in the country’s history.

Mr. Mandela served just one term as South Africa’s president and had not been seen in public since 2010, when the nation hosted the soccer World Cup. But his decades in prison and his insistence on forgiveness over vengeance made him a potent symbol of the struggle to end this country’s brutally codified system of racial domination, and of the power of peaceful resolution in even the most intractable conflicts.

Years after he retreated from public life, his name still resonated as an emblem of his effort to transcend decades of racial division and create what South Africans called a Rainbow Nation.

Yet Mr. Mandela’s death comes during a period of deep unease and painful self-examination for South Africa.

In the past year and a half, the country has faced perhaps its most serious unrest since the end of apartheid, provoked by a wave of wildcat strikes by angry miners, a deadly response on the part of the police, a messy leadership struggle within the A.N.C. and the deepening fissures between South Africa’s rulers and its impoverished masses.

Scandals over corruption involving senior members of the party have fed a broader perception that Mr. Mandela’s near saintly legacy from the years of struggle has been eroded by a more recent scramble for self-enrichment among a newer elite.

After spending decades in penurious exile, many political figures returned to find themselves at the center of a grab for power and money. President Jacob Zuma was charged with corruption before rising to the presidency in 2009, though the charges were dropped on largely technical grounds. He has faced renewed scrutiny in the past year over $27 million spent in renovations to his house in rural Zululand.

Catalyst becomes the fourth entity to opt out after a total of 15 players initially registered to bid in the January 14 auction of 700 MHz spectrum, according to an update posted on the industry ministry's website late on Wednesday.

The government's rules for the upcoming auction, as well as for one held in 2008, are aimed at lowering consumer prices by breaking the stronghold that Canada's three dominant players -Rogers Communications Inc, BCE Inc and Telus Corp - have on the country's mobile phone business.

Ottawa says the upcoming auction is designed to ensure there is a fourth competitor in every wireless market in Canada.

But new entrants have found it hard to survive in the Canadian market, and some analysts and company executives have complained that government policies have confused and spooked investors eyeing a move into the country's telecoms industry.

With no major foreign companies signing up for the 2014 auction and the list of bidders shrinking, the path is clear for the Big Three telecom companies to pick up new spectrum without much competition, one analyst said.

"This suggests to us that investors should not expect any viable incremental players to enter Canadian wireless," said Dvai Ghose, head of research at Canaccord Genuity, in a note to clients.

"In our view, the government's dream of a viable fourth player in every market is in tatters and its $9 million publicity campaign has achieved very little," he said, referring to an advertising war between the federal government and the Big Three earlier this year.

It was not immediately clear why Catalyst, the single largest debt holder in struggling wireless startup Mobilicity, withdrew from the bidding process.

The other bidders that have withdrawn are Birch Hill Equity Partners, Vecima and a company listed as 1770129 Alberta, connected with Corridor Communications.

The announcement, by the archbishop of Boston, follows a meeting between the Pope and his eight cardinal advisers.

It comes days after the Vatican refused a UN request for information on alleged abuse by priests, nuns or monks.

One of the main Italian associations of clerical abuse survivors has said it has "little trust" in the Vatican.

Pope Francis has said dealing with sex abuse is vital for the Church's credibility.

Earlier this week the Pope expressed his compassion for the many victims of sex abuse by priests around the world.

Scandal Cardinal Sean O'Malley, the archbishop of Boston, said the proposed panel of experts could provide codes of conduct for clergymen, guidelines for Church officials and better checks for would-be priests. "Up until now there has been so much focus on the judicial parts of this but the pastoral part is very, very important. The Holy Father is concerned about that," he said.

"We feel that having the advantage of a commission of experts who will be able to study these issues and bring concrete recommendations for the Holy Father and the Holy See will be very important."

He added that the move was in line with the approach of the former Pope, Benedict XVI, who referred to the "filth" in the Catholic Church. Pope Benedict was, however, accused of failing to do enough to address the problem.

The Commission will keep the Pope informed about programmes in place for the protection of children, will formulate suggestions for new initiatives, the Vatican said in a statement.

The archdiocese of Boston was the centre of a child sexual abuse scandal involving Catholic priests in the US in 2002. It ultimately led to the resignation of the archbishop at the time.

The Catholic Church has faced a raft of allegations of child sex abuse by priests around the world and criticism over inadequate responses by bishops.

Earlier this year the Pope strengthened Vatican laws on child abuse, broadening the definition of crimes against minors to include sexual abuse of children.

The UN Committee on the Rights of the Child put a wide-ranging questionnaire to the Holy See - the city state's diplomatic entity - last July, asking for detailed information about the particulars of all sexual abuse cases notified to the Vatican since 1995.

The Vatican refused, saying the cases were the responsibility of the judicial systems of countries where abuse took place.

They beheaded a sniper from a rival rebel unit, displayed his head in the main square and put roadblocks on major routes.

Not a shot was fired in the takeover, in which informants, including a preacher from a local mosque, played key roles.

The scene in Termanin, recounted by an activist who witnessed it last week, is being repeated in towns along the border with Turkey and at road junctions further inside Syria that have fallen out of President Bashar al-Assad's control.

Whether through weakness or a desire to focus on Assad, rebel units are making way for the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (ISIL), an al Qaeda affiliate led by foreigners hardened by guerrilla warfare in Iraq, Chechnya and Libya.

The landgrab has given radical jihadists a large territorial base in the heart of a Middle East convulsed by the civil war raging in Syria since 2011.

While constant conflict and shifting alliances mean Syria is a long way from becoming a center for global jihad, Western and Arab states backing moderate opponents of Assad are alarmed.

The ISIL is taking over supply lines to rebel areas and attracting members of less organized opposition units by its efficiency, undermining efforts by Washington to contain it ahead of talks in Geneva on a possible peace deal, opposition sources and Middle East security officials say.

As well as an end to Assad's rule, a key aim of such a deal would be to establish a government and moderate army capable of fighting off the ISIL, a Middle East-based diplomat said.

"Realistically it will be very difficult. We could be looking at a proxy sectarian war - whether Assad stays or goes - in which the ISIL will be a major player."

LESSONS FROM LIBYA

Asked about the group's goals, an ISIL commander in the town of Armanaz in northern Syria who had fought in Libya said it is fighting for "the downfall of the tyrant Bashar" but also seeking to impose Islamic law.

Learning lessons from the 2011 war in Libya, he said ISIL was more determined to hold on to territory under its control.

"Our mistake as mujahideen is that we were preoccupied with fighting Gaddafi and did not pay enough attention to how to hold on territory," said the commander, who goes by the nickname al-Jazaeri, or the Algerian.

It said it would conduct a review next year to ensure that the legislative and regulatory framework is in place for such vehicles to be incorporated on Britain's roads.

It will also create a £10m prize to fund a town or city to become a testing ground for autonomous vehicles.

Milton Keynes is already experimenting with driverless pods.

By mid-2017 it is planned that 100 fully autonomous vehicles will run on the town's pathways along with pedestrians, using sensors to avoid collisions.

The plans for self-drive cars were announced in the chancellor's National Infrastructure Plan.

Radical change Much of the hype around driverless cars centres around Google. Its self-drive car recently completed 500,000 miles (804,000km) of road tests.

In the US, California, Nevada and Florida have passed legislation to allow driverless cars.

This month Nissan carried out the first public road test of an autonomous vehicle on a Japanese highway.

Many envisage a future when we may not own cars at all but simply hail one to fulfil all our transportation needs.

"I call it mobility on demand. You pop out your mobile phone, say where you want to go and how many people and in a short amount of time a vehicle rolls up," said Brad Templeton, software engineer and adviser to Google on its self-drive car project.

"People will be like the millionaires of old where you just had a driver that did everything. These cars will worry about recharging, parking and refuelling. They will drive down a road without you paying much attention to it," he said.

Such cars will make cities both safer and greener, he thinks.

"It will radically change the amount of energy we use, how congested our streets are and eliminate most of the parking lots that take up a huge amount of space in our cities.

"Humans kill 1.2 million people in car accidents each year so the idea of being able to make a safer vehicle is very appealing," he said.

Many think that the issue of who will be liable in the event of accidents will hold up the development of autonomous vehicles but Mr Templeton is not convinced.

"I think only the barristers will find it the most interesting question," he said.

"For me the more interesting question is whether a machine is more liable than a drunk driver. Countries that decide a machine is more liable will slow the development of this technology," he added.

Car manufacturers suggest that autonomous vehicles will be on the roads within the decade.

Top Ford executives, including Chief Executive Alan Mulally, will fan out across six cities to take the wraps off the 2015 Mustang on Thursday. The car will be shown in Dearborn, Michigan, Shanghai, Sydney, Barcelona, New York and Los Angeles.

This will be the first Mustang sold in Europe and Asia. The second-largest U.S. automaker expects most sales to come from North America, but the car's mystique should prompt new consumers to visit Ford showrooms in other markets.

A new influx of buyers could help Ford increase sales of its other high-performance models, such as the Focus ST, boosting profit margins and the Ford brand image, analysts said.

"We kept seeing them show up even though we don't sell them in China, Australia and other places," Joe Hinrichs, Ford's head of North and South America, said of the Mustang on the sidelines of the Los Angeles Auto Show last month.

"People (are) figuring out a way to get it into the country, even though it's not sold there, which tells you something," added Hinrichs, who previously led Ford's operations in Asia, the Middle East and Africa.

The Mustang was redesigned to appeal to a global audience, in keeping with Mulally's effort to cut costs by building models that can be sold around the world with a few tweaks.

The new look may alienate some enthusiasts. Leaked images of the car earlier this week drew varied responses.

"If I were planning the next Mustang today, I'd try to recreate a low-priced sports car that was more exciting than the Focus and would appeal to younger buyers," said Hal Sperlich, the chief architect of the original Ford Mustang.

"I'm not sure this will sell well in Europe, where gasoline is close to 10 bucks a gallon," he said. "A $50,000 Mustang with a V8 engine probably isn't going to have a significant impact there."

The new Mustang also features the trapezoid grill that lends a more premium look to the updated Fusion midsize sedan that was given a global redesign of its own last year.

It also has a new suspension system to improve handling and a lower, wider stance. Ford is offering a 2.3 liter turbocharged engine in the Mustang as well.

The Investigative Committee opened the case after the reports found "adopted Russian children being transferred to different families in breach of their rights", spokesman Vladimir Markin said in a statement on Thursday.

The Reuters investigation uncovered an underground market where desperate parents sought new families for children they had adopted but no longer wanted.

Parents connect through online forums on Yahoo and Facebook, privately arranging custody transfers that can bypass government oversight and sometimes violate the law.

Markin said that 26 Russian children had been among those traded through such forums. Some later became victims of sexual abuse.

Russia banned adoptions of its children by U.S. families nearly a year ago, in a tit-for-tat diplomatic row over a law passed by Congress that denied visas to Russians suspected of human rights violations.

In October, a month after the Reuters investigation, U.S. lawmakers called for federal action to prevent parents from giving unwanted adopted children to strangers met on the Internet. The Illinois attorney general has also urged Facebook and Yahoo to police online groups where children may be advertised.

A study last month by Donaldson Adoption Institute, a major U.S. adoption research group, called for "targeted laws, policies and practices" to stop adoptive parents from giving up children to strangers through the Internet.

The report said that problems exposed by the Reuters investigation "should be seen as the tip of an iceberg of unmonitored, unregulated adoption-related activities taking place on the Internet."

Netflix, which was created in the United States and is now available in 41 countries, has to-date focused on English-speaking markets in Europe such as Britain, the Netherlands, and the Nordics, although rumors of their arrival in France have been recurrent for years.

"Netflix wanted information about the legal conditions that would affect its potential arrival in France," an official at the president's office said, adding that the executives were also visiting Germany and other European countries.

Netflix sells monthly subscriptions that allow users to watch television series and movies via the Internet on their televisions, tablet computers and mobile phones.

The service poses a challenge to traditional television companies that rely on advertising as well as pay-TV operators, and has been criticized by telecom companies for overloading their broadband networks with traffic.

If Netflix were to launch in France, it would face a complex system of rules on when movies can be released in different formats such as in cinemas or on DVD. The framework, which dates back decades, is aimed at protecting French movie producers and cinemas, and does not affect TV series.

Under current rules, a film cannot appear in an on-demand video service that is bought as a monthly subscription until three years after its debut in cinemas.

But if a consumer rents the video of the same film using his set-top box, for example, it would be available four months after its premiere.

The long delays for movies by subscription have so far crippled attempts to launch video streaming services in France. Vivendi's Canal Plus, France's largest pay-TV service, created one in 2011 called Canal Play Infinity that has attracted few users.

A recent study commissioned by the French culture ministry recommended shortening the delays, and discussions are ongoing with content owners and media companies.

The official said Netflix executives used the meeting in Paris on Wednesday to ask questions about the local rules to "better understand the French system".

Netflix was not reachable for comment outside of business hours at their California headquarters.

HP's statement came after the Unite union said it had attended a meeting where managers were outlining their plans to cut jobs at the group's sites in Bracknell, Sheffield and Warrington by next year.

The union said HP, which employs between 15,000-20,000 people in Britain, blamed falling demand and reorganization for the job losses.

A HP spokeswoman confirmed the number of job cuts but declined to comment on which locations they would hit. She said the company wants to complete the process by the end of January next year.

A spokesman confirmed the effort was being headed up by Andy Rubin, who was previously in charge of the Android operating system.

The spokesman was unwilling to discuss what kind of robot was being developed.

But the New York Times reports that at this stage Google does not plan to sell the resulting product to consumers. Instead, the newspaper suggests, Google's robots could be paired with its self-driving car research to help automate the delivery of goods to people's doors.

It notes the company has recently begun a same-day grocery delivery service in San Francisco and San Jose, called Google Shopping Express.

That would pitch the initiative against Amazon's Prime Air Project, which envisages using drones to transport goods to its customers by air.

"Any description of what Andy and his team might actually create are speculations of the author and the people he interviewed," said Google of the NYT article.

One UK-based expert welcomed the news.

"This is a clear sign that days of personalised robotic technology entering the mainstream market is imminent," said Prof Sethu Vijayakumar, director of the Robotics Lab at the University of Edinburgh.

"Movement and sensing systems for robotics technology have made great strides. Now, with mainstream companies like Google taking up the challenge, other elements such as robust software integration, standardisation and modular design will pick up pace." The search giant's robotics project is based in Palo Alto, California, and will have an office in Japan - one of the world's leading nations in the field.

Speaking to the NYT, Mr Rubin said Google had a "10-year vision" for bringing the effort to fruition.

"I feel with robotics it's a green field," he said.

"We're building hardware, we're building software. We're building systems, so one team will be able to understand the whole stack." The companies acquired by Google to jumpstart its effort are:

Autofuss - a San Francisco company that employed robotics to create adverts. It has worked on several campaigns for Google's Nexus-branded products. Bot & Dolly - a sister company to Autofuss that specialised in precise-motion robotics and film-making. Its systems were used to make the film Gravity.

Watsa earlier this year sought partners in a $4.7 billion bid to take BlackBerry private. But his company, Fairfax Financial, then opted for a lead role in a $1 billion note offering to provide the Canadian company with money to fund a turnaround.

John Chen, a turnaround specialist with Sybase in the late 1990s, was brought in as interim CEO.

"John's committed for the long haul, he's an exceptional leader, he's going to do very well," Watsa told Reuters in a telephone interview from his Toronto office, where he described BlackBerry as an iconic company that deserves to succeed.

BlackBerry virtually invented the idea of on-the-go email, but lost its stranglehold on the market as rivals brought out more consumer-friendly devices like Apple's iPhone and phones using Google's Android software.

BlackBerry's struggles before Chen took over on November 25 were well documented, and analysts had already described the changes Chen was making as going beyond what would be expected from an interim appointment.

"In any of my investments we always look at the leadership, in this case it's John Chen, he's an outstanding leader," Watsa said, adding that Chen had already made "some very significant changes" at BlackBerry.

Watsa said the injection of cash from the new note meant BlackBerry was well financed. "It's got lots of cash, it has a long runway for John to make sure that the company is successful," he said. "We take the long-term view, we don't worry about quarter by quarter."

"Companies are built over time, they're built by good people working together under the leadership of a very good leader."

The failure to press ahead with the $4.7 billion takeover could be seen as a black mark on the resume of Watsa, who was on the right side of the U.S. housing crash in 2007 and 2008 and also won big in Tokyo's 1990 market collapse.

"You never look back, you deal with the hand that you have, there's no use looking at whether you can get four aces or a flush, you deal with the hand that you have," he said.