State Secrets, Wikileaks | featured news

The U.S. Army soldier charged with sending reams of government secrets to WikiLeaks is offering to plead guilty to some less serious offenses. Pfc. Bradley Manning's civilian defense attorney, David Coombs, revealed the offer Wednesday during a pretrial hearing that continues Thursday.

WikiLeaks will have to stop publishing secret cables and devote itself to fund-raising if it is unable to end a financial "blockade" by U.S. firms such as Visa and MasterCard by the end of the year, founder Julian Assange said on Monday.

The U.S. government on Friday announced steps to clamp down on who can access classified information, seeking to avert another WikiLeaks-scale breach of military documents and diplomatic cables.

The WikiLeaks website crashed Tuesday in an apparent cyberattack after the accelerated publication of tens of thousands of once-secret State Department cables by the anti-secrecy organization raised new concerns about the exposure of confidential U.S. embassy sources.

A friend and leading supporter of WikiLeaks suspect Bradley Manning said Wednesday he refused to testify before a grand jury, citing his Fifth Amendment rights against self-incrimination.

In the wake of WikiLeaks' release of more than 250000 classified US diplomatic cables, the Pentagon is reportedly taking measures to prevent this type of breach from happening again.

WikiLeaks has published a secret U.S. diplomatic cable listing sites abroad that the U.S. considers vital to its national security, prompting criticism that the website is inviting terrorist attacks on American interests.

China's GDP figures are "man-made" and therefore unreliable, the man who is expected to be the country's next head of government said in 2007, according to U.S. diplomatic cables released by WikiLeaks.

American officials say that millions of dollars are flowing to extremist groups worldwide, and that some Middle East allies are not helping to stop it.

Wikileaks struggled to stay online Friday as corporations and governments moved to cut its access to the Internet, a potentially crippling blow for an organization dedicated to releasing secret information via the web....