iPhone 5 stuck at "waiting for items to copy"

It's midnight my time actually. Why it says 10:12 pm - must be California time.

I've got the actual fix for this. It requires a total restore of your phone (not from a backup). This is located in your iPhone tab in iTunes next to "check for an update". Be you do the restore make sure you have your phone backed up. Completely restore your phone and once complete it will ask you to then restore from a past backup....choose the latest one you just did before performing the total backup. This entire process takes quite a long time so I'd encourage you to have something else to do during these steps. Upon completion of the backup recovery everything will be fixed and your syncing issues will be back to normal!

This worked for me, I thought I had tried to do this about a month ago with no success, but just tried again and it has worked. Now a fully working iphone 5 again after two months of battery & syncing hassels

Yes, this worked for me too: iPhone, going to Settings --> iCloud --> Storage & Backup ---> then 'stop restoring'