China’s biggest political trial in decades starts today – The US Soldier who exposed wrongdoing in the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars is sentenced to a lengthy prison term – And the former Pope explains the divine inspiration for his historic resignation.

The trial of Bo Xilai gets underway in the Chinese city of Jinan.  The former Politburo member stands accused of corruption and covering up his wife’s alleged involvement in the murder of UK businessman Neil Heywood.  It’s China’s biggest political scandal since the “Gang of Four” was brought down in 1976 at the end of the Cultural Revolution.

The secret court that oversees American surveillance programs ruled in 2011 that the National Security Agency (NSA) went too far and illegally collected tens of thousands of emails between Americans.  The Obama administration declassified the opinion on Wednesday, and intelligence officials said the violation was caused by a technical problem.  The judge’s opinion said the NSA misled the court, specifically stating that the “volume and nature of the information it has been collecting is fundamentally different from what the court had been led to believe”.

A US military judge sentenced whistleblower Bradley Manning to 35 years in prison for leaking 700,000 secret items to the WikiLeaks website.  Much of what was leaked detailed the deplorable conduct of some US soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan as they tortured and abused innocent civilians, sometimes laughing as they did it.  None of those errant soldiers got 35 years in prison, nor did any of the Bush Administration officials who are widely believed to have churned intelligence to justify a war in a nation that did not attack the US.

Pontiff emeritus Benedict XVI is giving a fuller explanation of why he resigned as Pope:  God told him to.  Contradicting his earlier explanation, Benedict says God told him to quit during a “mystical experience”.  He says it wasn’t a visit by an apparition or a voice, but an “absolute desire” to dedicate his life to prayer rather than push on as pope, that he now says God put there.  Benedict was the first pope to resign in many centuries.

Angela Merkel is the first active German Chancellor to visit the former Dachau concentration camp.  Accompanied by an elderly holocaust survivor, Merkel laid a wreath for the more than 200,000 people imprisoned there by Germany’s former Nazi government, at least 41,000 of whom perished.  She did not directly address that far-right protest in Berlin this week or the fascist political parties in Greece, Hungary, and the Netherlands, but she did warn against far-right extremism.

Forget Camels.  Health officials now say the Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (MERS) virus comes from bats.  The MERS outbreak from the Arabian Peninsula has been going on for about 15 months, has sickened 96 people, and killed 47 of them.  A new report says an international team of doctors blamed bats for the human outbreak.  But they’re unsure how it made the leap from bats to people, because the virus was found in a feces sample from one bat, and the species in question has practically no contact with humans.

A young woman from Germany died in hospital, a week after losing her right arm to a shark attack while snorkeling off Maui in Hawaii.  20-year old Jana Lutteropp had been on life support in Maui Memorial since the attack.

37-people died when a bus flew off a road in Malaysia and crashed 70 meters down in a ravine. This happened in the Genting Highlands, famed for an exclusive gambling and entertainment resort about an hour's drive from the capital, Kuala Lumpur.  16 people were sent to hospitals with carious injuries.

1970s teen heartthrob David Cassidy blew a .10 into a cop’s Breathalyzer device, racking up his second drunk-driving arrest in recent years. The legal blood alcohol limit in New York State where the star of “The Partridge Family” was nabbed is .08.  He put up US$2,500 bond and was released.  In November, Cassidy was pulled over in Florida and failed a drunk test on video, and had his license suspended for six months.