The Telegraph and The Daily Mail say the prime suspect in the latest Wikileaks document disclsoures, including the state department cables leaked today is Bradley Manning, a 23 year old U.S. soldier from Oklahoma who is now in a jail cell at Quantico, VA. Manning spent part of his childhood in the UK, in Wales.

Bradley Manning, 23, enlisted in the US Army in 2007 and became an intelligence analyst in Iraq, sifting through classified information at Forward Operating Base Hammer, 40 miles east of Baghdad....After arriving in Iraq the young soldier, who is gay, complained of feeling socially "isolated" in the military.

His friends describe him as a loner and computer geek. [More...]

The Cleveland Plain Dealer has the results of a nine month investigation, "Presumed Guilty: Prosecutions Without Evidence" in which it examined hundreds of cases ordered dismissed by courts because the prosecution failed to establish even basic elements of a crime.

In the past decade, Cuyahoga County judges have dismissed 364 cases mid-trial because they said prosecutors failed to provide the most basic evidence to sustain a conviction....The judges' rulings indicate that county Prosecutor Bill Mason's office has pushed hundreds of marginal criminal cases to trial in the past decade.

The DA's office prosecuted hundreds of people with little or no evidence. The grand juries serve as a working arm of the DA's office instead of as an independent panel. There's a lack of uniformity among judges in tossing cases for lack of evidence, which raises a question of whether justice is delivered evenly.

It's a terrific series, I recommend reading all five parts, including the profiles of the acquitted defendants.

The anticipated Wikileaks document dump has arrived. It includes 250,000 American diplomatic cables, most from the past three years.

The cables, a huge sampling of the daily traffic between the State Department and some 270 embassies and consulates, amount to a secret chronicle of the United States’ relations with the world in an age of war and terrorism. ...The anticipated disclosure of the cables is already sending shudders through the diplomatic establishment, and could conceivably strain relations with some countries, influencing international affairs in ways that are impossible to predict.

Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton and American ambassadors around the world have been contacting foreign officials in recent days to alert them to the expected disclosures. A statement from the White House on Sunday said: “We condemn in the strongest terms the unauthorized disclosure of classified documents and sensitive national security information.” Among their revelations, to be detailed in The Times in coming days.

Some of what's covered:[More...]

It's Sunday.

Open Thread.

Detroit has a new ambassador, Kid Rock. He's had a great year. GQ has named him Rock Star of the Year. Yesterday, his Jan. 15 show in Detroit (to celebrate his 40th birthday) sold out in 19 minutes.

He's also doing good things. His Kid Rock Foundation purchased 1,000 Thanksgiving meals for the Detroit needy this year. Here's more of his good deeds. [More....]

It's an urban war in the favelas (slums)of Rio De Janeiro. The military have joined police and given an ultimatum to the drug gangs to surrender or face a big-time assault.

Defence Minister Nelson Jobim authorised the deployment of 10 military armoured vehicles, two Air Force helicopters and 800 soldiers, to be added to the 17,500 police already engaged in the crackdown. About 300 federal police were also dispatched to bolster local forces.

[More...]

The latest Wikileaks document release, reported to comprise 3 million documents, may be hours away from release.

The classified files to be released reportedly cover correspondence between US diplomatic missions abroad and the state department in Washington and would possibly reveal "unflattering" views that American officials often held about close EU allies and countries like Russia, China and Saudi Arabia.

Governments around the world on Saturday braced for the publication of potentially embarrassing diplomatic cables, as Washington raced to contain the fallout.

This release will be seven times the size of the October release of 400,000 war documents.

Imagine waking up and logging on to your blog and finding this notice:

"This domain name has been seized by ICE — Homeland Security Investigations, pursuant to a seizure warrant issued by a United States District Court."

ICE and Homeland Security shut down a number of websites Friday (perhaps as many as 70) because of their "association" to online movie and music piracy. Apparently, the sites don't need to be a participant in the activity, just associated with it. Is linking to one of them enough? According to one site's owner, it was: [More...]

Update: Who's Mohamud? A rapping, teenage fitness guru.

Here's the FBI press release describing how Mohamed Osman Mohamud, 19, a naturalized U.S. citizen from Somalia, was set up and caught in an elaborate 6 month plan to set off a car bomb at a tree-lighting ceremony in Oregon. The FBI provided him with an inert device so the public wasn't in danger.

Apparently, Mohamud is not part of any group. He reached out (by e-mail)to a terrorist in Pakistan, who told him to contact someone else. Apparently, they weren't interested. The only response Mohamud got after that was from an FBI agent pretending to be an associate of the terrorist. [More....]

Today's picks: S.Fla (+13) over Miami, Mich. (+18) over Ohio State, VaTech (-23) over UVA, Penn State (+2) over Nich. St., Kentucky (+3) over Tenn,BYU (+10) over Utah, Ark (-3) over LSU, TCU (-44) over N. Mex., Stanford (-14) over Ore. State, Ga. Tech (+14) over Georgia, Oklahoma (+3) over Oklahoma State.

Please note that all these picks are just for the first half, as were my winning picks of Alabama over Auburn and Boise over Nevada. I stopped watching in the second half, what happened in those games?

Open Thread.

President Obama got 12 stitches in his lip today after an errant elbow hit him during a basketball game. Who's the perp? Rey Decerega, director of programs for the Congressional Hispanic Caucus Institute.

Maybe he'll feel better when he learns his new children's book has made the Times best seller list.

I'd love to be online shopping today, but instead I'll be at the car dealership getting a side mirror that shattered on Wednesday replaced ($600, unbelievable) and then the jail.

On the plus side, I finally installed my new wireless extreme N dual band router (to go with my new 3.0 cable modem) and my internet shot up to over 20 mbps. I also installed a gizmo to make my blu-ray player wireless instead of ethernet without the player having to be near the ethernet connection. It plugs into a regular power outlet. Netflix streams just as fast as it did with the ethernet. Now I don't have to upgrade my bluray player from wireless capable to full wireless. Here's the router, the modem and the gizmo. (Note, you might find them cheaper elsewhere.)

This is an open thread, all topics welcome.

In one of the more remarkable moments of the Absurdist play that is our annual Bowl Championship Series, the President of THE Ohio State University (which has largely distinguished itself by being pummelled by the SEC champion in BCS national championhip games) recently stated that non-BCS automatic qualifier schools are not worthy of playing in the BCS national championship game. Oookaay. Whatever, Buckeyes.

Opinion driven, as opposed to performance driven, assessments of college footbsll teams is the modus operandi of the BCS. That and protecting the big bowls. In an attempt to blunt the charge of a fixed system, the BCS added computer rankings to its formula. But that was deemed flawed because, we were told, it encouraged running up the score. As opposed to a poll voter system. Yeah whatever. This year, the REAL computer rankings, as opposed to the gerrymandered version that the BCS has installed, provide the following rankings going into today's games:

Mick Jagger and Fergie are on fire on this version of Gimme Shelter -- Bono and Will-i-Am are good too. What a great concert -- the 2009 25th Anniversary of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Same concert: Patti Smyth, Bruce Springsteen and Bono and U2 in Because the Night:

[More..]

KBCO in Boulder is playing Arlo Guthrie's Alice's Restaurant at noon and 6pm, MT. You can listen live here. It was November 28, 1965 that Arlo was convicted of littering in Stockbridge, MA. You can read the backstory here.

Why is Alice's Restaurant such a ritual, especially for those of us who remember the '60's? Ira Chernus, Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Colorado at Boulder, explains: [More...]