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North Korea Sets Deadline For Diplomats To Leave: Next Wednesday

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The next phase of brinksmanship.

WASHINGTON — North Korea is continuing to escalate its war rhetoric, warning foreign diplomats in Pyongyang on Friday they might not be safe after April 10 in the event of a conflict.

According to Agence France-Presse, British diplomats were warned that their safety can't be guaranteed after April 10.

The Russian foreign ministry Twitter feed tweeted that their diplomats had been told to leave:


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Hillary Clinton's Not Going Anywhere

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The former secretary of state vowed Friday to continue her campaign for women's rights “in all the days and years ahead.”

Image by Cliff Owen / AP

In one of her first public appearances since leaving the State Department in February, Hillary Clinton sent a clear message Friday to a crowd of 2,000 supporters at New York City's Lincoln Center: She's not going anywhere.

Delivering the headline speech at The Daily Beast's fourth annual Women in the World Summit, Clinton cast her four years at the State Department as part of her longtime work as a women's rights advocate, and made a clear promise to continue her campaign at home and abroad on what she called "the unfinished business of the 21st century."

"I look forward to being your partner in all the days and years ahead," said the former secretary of state. "Let's keep fighting for opportunity and dignity. Let's keep fighting for freedom and equality."

Clinton, though, made no reference to her specific plans for the future, nor to the widespread speculation that she is considering a bid for the presidency in 2016 — a fact Tina Brown, editor of The Daily Beast, alluded to in her introductory remarks: "Now, of course, the big question about Hillary, is what's next," said Brown, prompting a flash of applause from the crowd.

In remarks lasting about 30 minutes, Clinton urged the audience to "embrace a 21st century approach" to women's rights, citing social media platforms she herself has not been known to use. "Think about, you know, how technology — from satellite television to cell phones, from Twitter to Tumblr — is helping to bring abuses out of the shadows and into the center of global consciousness," Clinton said.

Although Clinton's speech had a largely global focus — she told stories about female activists empowering women in countries like Pakistan and India — the former secretary of state turned back to the United States in her closing remarks.

Clinton referenced The Economist's "Glass Ceiling Index," a study published last month that ranks what countries give women the best chance of equal treatment in the workplace — America comes in 12th on the list, behind France and Denmark. That the United States "was not even in the top 10," said Clinton, is unacceptable.

"For too many American women, opportunity and the dream of upward mobility — the American dream — remains elusive," said Clinton. "It's hard to imagine turning the clock back on them, but in places in America large and small, the clock is turning back."

"So we have work to do," Clinton said.

Clinton concluded her remarks by reprising her most infamous line, taken from the 1995 speech she delivered at the United Nations' Conference of Women in Beijing.

"Let's keep fighting for opportunity and dignity. Let's keep fighting for freedom and equality. Let's keep fighting for full participation," said Clinton, "and let's keep telling the world over and over again, that yes, 'Women's rights are human rights, and human rights are women's rights' — once and for all."

Conservative Democrats Take Joint Plunge On Gay Marriage

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North Dakota's Heitkamp and Indiana's Donnelly decided to support marriage equality together.

Image by Will Kincaid, File / AP

WASHINGTON — While America was talking about the latest unemployment numbers Friday, two conservative Democrats in the Senate publicly abandoned their opposition to gay marriage.

North Dakota Sen. Heidi Heitkamp and Indiana Sen. Joe Donnelly announced their support for in rapid succession marriage equality Friday morning. The timing was not a coincidence, Heitkamp's office said, but not for the reason cynical Washington viewers might think.

"If I wanted to bury it, I would have put it out at 3 PM today," Whitney Phillips, communications director for Heitkamp, told BuzzFeed. She explained that Heitkamp came to her decision to support same sex marriage Thursday afternoon, and then she and Donnelly decided to put their statements out at the same time.

"I think they both came to a similar conclusion, they come from somewhat similar states and they both wanted to do it together," Phillips said. "Well not together but near to the same time."

Heitkamp announced her support for marriage equality in a statement to the press.

"In speaking with North Dakotans from every corner of our great state, and much personal reflection, I have concluded the federal government should no longer discriminate against people who want to make lifelong, loving commitments to each other or interfere in personal, private, and intimate relationships," she said.

Donnelly announced his shift on Facebook. Both Senators had been under pressure from marriage equality supporters to change their minds.

Phillips said high-level staff in both offices communicated before releasing the news Friday morning. The two first-term Senators spoke too, she said.

"Heidi is pretty close to all of the freshmen," Phillips said.

Local News In Boston Says Democratic Senate Frontrunner Running From Debate, Interviews

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Fox 25 in Boston is saying that Democratic Senate frontrunner Congressman Ed Markey is a “run away,” ducking from interviews and a debate on the network while the other candidates have agreed. A classic case of local news trolling.

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Incredible Shrinking Al Sharpton And Shep Smith GIFs

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Take a look at the dramatic transformation that has happened to these two cable news talkers since Obama got elected.

Fox News anchor Sheppard Smith

Fox News anchor Sheppard Smith

MSNBC host Al Sharpton

MSNBC host Al Sharpton

LINK: Images found at archive.org

Susan Rice: China Could "Do More" To Pressure North Korea

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The UN ambassador said the neighboring country knows Kim Jung-un has “gone too far.”

Image by Eduardo Munoz / Reuters

United Nations Ambassador Susan Rice said Friday that the latest round of threats and provocations from North Korea have escalated to a level at which China is now "of the view that Kim Jung-un has gone too far," but added that the country could do more to pressure its neighbor to comply with U.N. sanctions.

The United States has received threats of war from North Korea before, said Rice at a panel sponsored by The Daily Beast's Women in the World summit, but "what seems to be somewhat different is the level of rhetoric and pace of provocation."

Asked by moderator Andrea Mitchell of NBC whether or not China could increase pressure on North Korea, Rice said that although China has been implementing the sanctions passed by the UN in February, "clearly with the border they have, with the economic relationship that they have, they can do more."

"What's interesting about China's stance now, is that you can tell by the nature of their statements, by the nature of their actions, that unlike in the past," said Rice, "they've also are very much of the view that Kim Jung-un has gone too far, and that this now is a situation that has the potential to directly threaten their interests in the region — both economic and security."

Rice cautioned, though, that the United States and its allies "are fully capable of defending ourselves" against Kim Jung-un, adding that Americans shouldn't "get too jumpy when he wakes up in the morning and issues another provocative statement."

The recent threats from North Korea, said Rice, have been "isolating [the country] more and more, impoverishing its people more and more, and taking itself further into the realm of becoming a full-scale international pariah with maximum sanctions on its doorstep."

Rice, speaking from New York City's Lincoln Center, advised Kim Jung-un to "step back and to heed what has been the call of President Obama and other world leaders to choose the path of peace."

"We remain in very close communication with the Chinese, with the Russians, and of course, with South Korea and Japan, our allies in the region, about the collective way to deal with this threat," Rice said. "The reality is, we are united with the rest of the world in ensuring that this threat is contained."

Marine Corps: We Didn't Give Pamela Geller A Flag As A Gift

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“The Marine Corps as a whole wouldn't do something like that,” Flanagan says.

Geller speaks at a conference she organized entitled "Stop Islamization of America" in New York on September 11, 2012.

Image by David Karp / AP

WASHINGTON — A Marine Corps spokesman said on Friday that the Marines had not officially given anti-Islam activist Pamela Geller a U.S. flag as a gift, contrary to a Long Island local news report.

"It's entirely plausible that a Marine gave her a flag, but it wouldn't be accurate to say that the Marine Corps gave her a flag," said Captain Eric Flanagan, a spokesman for the Marine Corps. "The Marine Corps as a whole wouldn't do something like that."

Great Neck, New York's Patch site, in a story about Geller's controversial upcoming appearance at the Great Neck synagogue, reported:

At the April 14 Great Neck event, Geller will be introduced by Greg Buckley, whose son, Lance Cpl. Greg Buckley, Jr., was one of three U.S. Marines killed in a "Green on Blue" insider attack on a military base in the Helmand province, Afghanistan, on Aug 10. Buckley Sr. is calling for swift justice for the murderers of his son and demanding prosecution on American soil as terrorists.

The Marine Corps presented Geller with the flag flown on September 11, 2011, over Camp Leatherneck, "amid the battlefields of Afghanistan during decisive operations against enemy forces in Helmand Province."

According to Flanagan, individual Marines can bring home flags from where they served.

"It would just be like if I were out there, I could have flown one and given it to you," Flanagan said.

Geller has made headlines for her anti-Islam ads in the New York City subway, which she followed up with an ad series about "Islamic apartheid" on Metro-North trains last month, as well as bus ads in Chicago.

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The Progressive Honeymoon Is Over

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Obama trolls his base with his new budget.

Image by Olivier Douliery/Abaca Press/MCT

WASHINGTON — That spring in the step of progressives after President Obama mentioned climate change in his inaugural speech and the minimum wage in his State Of The Union address is gone.

On Friday morning, the White House selectively released news of the President's next budget ahead of the new package's official rollout Wednesday. Progressives had braced themselves for disappointment, and they got it: the president's budget includes cuts to entitlement benefits that the left say are giving away the farm to Republicans eager to rollback the welfare state.

Progressives had the predictable reaction after the news came out, spitting out venomous press releases at Obama and generally throwing up their hands at the situation.

"I am quite concerned by reports that the forthcoming White House budget proposal might include chained CPI and other accommodations to Republicans determined to dismantle our social safety net and the progress our nation has made since the New Deal," Rep. Jerry Nadler, a New York Democrat, said in a release. "I must reiterate that I will never support any reductions in Social Security, Medicare or Medicaid benefits – and chained CPI is a direct reduction in Social Security benefits. Along with my fellow progressives, I will vehemently oppose any such cuts."

And that's a big part of the point. With Senate Democrats and House Republicans staking out strikingly different positions with their budgets, the White House is clearly intent on framing it's version as a moderate compromise, and to do that they need to stoke liberal outrage.

After putting more progressives in the Senate last year and reelecting the president on a platform that included raising taxes, progressives think they deserve more from a White House budget than what they're getting. At the White House briefing Friday, White House Press Secretary Jay Carney told Obama's upset base to, basically, deal with it.

"The budget reflects his priorities within a budget world that's not ideal," Carney said. "Within a budget decision-making process that's not ideal, yeah obviously as he sees it, it requires compromise and negotiation and a willingness to accept that you won't get 100% of what you want."

The left, meanwhile, sounds more frustrated than anything else.

"Our negotiator-in-chief is now serving up cuts to Social Security benefits in a mystifying attempt to appease Republican hostage-takers in Congress," said Becky Bond, poltical director of the San Francisco-based CREDO. "The American people are overwhelmingly opposed to cutting Social Security benefits, and if Democrats don't want to go down in history as the party that destroyed one of the greatest social programs of all time, they need to stand up and unambiguously reject the president's proposed cuts."

CREDO and other national groups on the left are already trying to kill Obama's budget plan. Groups have threatened to primary Congressional Democrats who support Obama's proposed changes to entitlements. The Progressive Change Campaign Committee says it has a handful of volunteer leaders from Organizing for Action, the group formed out of Obama's 2012 campaign, who are willing to step back from the organization over the president's budget.

The back and forth between the president and the left Friday is something Washington hasn't seen much in the second Obama term. For the most part, progressives have been overjoyed to see the president make gun control, immigration reform and early childhood education his priorities. While there's simmering worry over what Obama will do with the KeystoneXL pipeline, progressives have been happy to see Obama talk about climate change and promise action on the issue.

The White House is trying to target Republicans with the budget, trying to box the party in with what Carney called a balanced combination of spending cuts and revenue increases. The goal is to sell the House Republican budget passed earlier this year as draconian in contrast to the White House plan. For now, anyway, Republicans are passing the popcorn as progressives howl.

"Looks like the president has managed to do it for a third year in a row: put together a budget sure to garner zero votes from either party," said Brendan Buck, spokesperson for Speaker John Boehner.

The White House and the left are still walking arm-in-arm on many things, including immigration reform and guns. But on the budget, a fight the left thought it won at the ballot box, Obama and the left are back on the outs.

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A Fox News Reporter Could Be Jailed For Protecting Her Sources, And Nobody Seems To Care

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Jana Winter refuses to reveal who leaked information about the Aurora, Colorado, shooter. Judith Miller is “surprised and disappointed” at how little attention the case is getting.

Source: foxnews.com

A Fox News reporter is facing jail time over her refusal to reveal a source she used in a story, an episode receiving remarkably little attention in the mainstream press — and prompting suggestions on the right that the media and advocates are ignoring Jana Winter's plight because of hostility to her employer.

Jana Winter, a reporter for FoxNews.com and former New York Post reporter, reported on July 25 on a notebook alleged Aurora, Colorado, shooter James Holmes sent to a University of Colorado psychologist "full of details about how he was going to kill people."

In Winter's story, she described the notebook, indicating it included illustrations of a massacre drawn using stick figures. The notebook and other items in a package the alleged shooter sent to the psychologist were "made subject to a protective order," according to court documents filed in Arapahoe County Courthouse.

The court has subpoenaed Winter to give testimony in the case.

Holmes' defense attorney indicated the confidential source in Winter's story violated the court's order to limit pretrial publicity, and efforts to discover who the source was have been unsuccessful, according to court documents. Colorado's shield law protects reporters from being jailed for refusing to name sources but allows judges to compel disclosure if the identity of the source cannot be obtained by other means.

She is expected to return to court Wednesday.

The story has received some attention online, but a search for "Jana Winter" on TVEyes indicates the story has only been covered on Fox News, which has begun to focus on it intensely.

"If she worked for mainstream newspapers or CNN, I think the case would have been covered," said Judith Miller, a Fox News contributor who was jailed for 85 days for refusing to reveal a source she used for a story in The New York Times in 2005. "There's a certain reluctance because it's Fox News."

"When I got into trouble, people were very supportive of me because I was with The New York Times," Miller said. "I'm surprised and disappointed there hasn't been more coverage."

Miller said she talked with Winter and had a meeting with her on Friday.

"She didn't do anything wrong," Miller said. "She did her job."

Only one advocacy group appears to have weighed in on Winter's behalf: In a statement Friday, the National Press Club urged the judge to drop his push.

"Courts have the right to enforce the confidentiality of investigations, and that may in some cases require punishing leakers," National Press Club President Angela Greiling Keane said. "But attempting to get that information by subpoenaing reporters in order to learn their anonymous sources goes too far. It jeopardizes a value of greater significance. If anonymous sources believe their identities can be dredged up in court, they will be less likely to disclose to the press information of vital public importance. That's not a risk worth increasing."

The American Civil Liberties Union didn't immediately have a statement ready in response to a question about the case Saturday, and other groups didn't immediately respond to a query about it.

Winter referred a reporter's questions to Fox News but made her case that Holmes' lawyers should be blocked from seeking her testimony in an affidavit late last month.

"A source's wilingness to come forward to the press often depends on my ability to earn the source's trust and to maintain his or her confidentiality," she said in the sworn statement, posted by Fox. "Being made to testify as Holmes requests will force me to 'burn' not one, but two confidential soruces. My reputation as a journalist will be irreparably tarnished."

Winter also told the court that she is "fearful for my safety based on numerous threatening internet postings about my work pertaining to the Holmes case."

"She knows what's at stake," Miller said. "She is, in my view, a very brave person."

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Obama Takes Control In The Second Term

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No BlackBerrys in meetings, no question who's in charge. “His personal favorite issues have really come out,” says a labor leader.

Image by Charles Dharapak / AP

WASHINGTON — President Barack Obama has begun his second term by consolidating his personal control of the White House, Democrats in and outside the administration say, reflecting a shift from his less centralized first term.

The shift has become clear in the new style of management under Obama's new chief of staff, Denis McDonough, who — unlike his predecessors — acts more as Obama's enforcer than as a principal in his own right.

Once, McDonough's predecessors, notably Rahm Emanuel, made strategic choices and served as the key liaisons to Congress. Now Obama sets the strategy and priorities and makes the calls to Capitol Hill himself; and the chief of staff's role has been handed to a trusted ally who shares the president's vision. Obama "is in complete control of the White House," said Jonathan Prince, a Democratic political consultant who was a foreign policy aide in Obama's first term. And the coming years will reveal whether the president's command of the details and sense of himself as the smartest man in the room will produce a newly effective presidency — or a worrisome centralization.

"Denis is the most powerful chief of staff he's had, because he is completely aligned with the president," Prince said. "Obama doesn't have to worry what Denis' own agenda is, because Denis' agenda is Obama's agenda."

The shift toward complete presidential control has been, in many ways, gradual. By the late first term, insiders say, Obama felt he had mastered the use of presidential power and had begun to dictate not just policy but also strategy more forcefully. But in one way, it has been abrupt: McDonough's management style has been a marked departure from that of the mild-mannered Jack Lew, his immediate predecessor, and even more from the tenures of Emanuel and Bill Daley.

McDonough, who was known for his preoccupation with proper, formal process as a top national security aide, has imported from the National Security Council a ban on BlackBerrys and other smartphones at staff meetings, one current and one former official said. He has sometimes turned the morning meetings of top officials from debates into quicker, tougher forums, at times shutting down the musings of more freewheeling aides, like National Economic Council director Gene Sperling, with a terse "Yes or no?"

"Maybe it means you get a little less debate, but you also get a lot more pulling in the same direction, which is good," Prince said of McDonough's approach as a whole.

But the intense new mood of the McDonough regime — which has imposed long hours and high expectations even by the workaholic standards of the White House — is a pure projection of the boss. McDonough works so hard himself that few aides feel comfortable questioning early mornings and evening meetings, but some worry about the coming burnout.

And if McDonough's role is narrower than his predecessors' — well, Obama was famous during the 2008 campaign for his confidence in his own abilities.

"I think that I'm a better speechwriter than my speechwriters," the candidate told Patrick Gaspard, who is now executive director of the Democratic National Committee, according to a New Yorker article on the campaign. "I know more about policies on any particular issue than my policy directors. And I'll tell you right now that I'm going to think I'm a better political director than my political director."

But Obama did not, when he took office just over four years ago, pretend to know more about running a White House than aides like Emanuel, who had been schooled in the battles of the Clinton administration. And while the president made the big calls, like pushing for a health-care overhaul, he did not always drive the administration's strategy on getting his agenda achieved.

That has now, fully, changed.

"You're talking about somebody who has a tremendous amount of confidence in his own capacities," said a top Democrat. "It's hard to imagine that four or five years into the thing now, he does not at this point feel like he has a better handle on it than any else in the building."

"On most days it's hard to tell him he's wrong about anything — it's hard to tell him five years in he knows the rhythm of the place and he knows what works best for him," the Democrat said.

To the White House's allies on the left, who have always believed (in spite of occasional evidence to the contrary) that the president is privately more liberal than his policies, the management shifts come with hints of a leftward policy turn. There are no more pet projects, and no more doubts. Obama is calling the plays, and McDonough is making sure they are run.

"He is quarterbacking in a way that maybe he didn't or maybe he deferred to others in the first term," said a labor leader. The leader and other activists pointed to the White House's focus on immigration, guns, LGBT equality, and the minimum wage among other things as examples of where they see Obama taking charge.

"His personal favorite issues have really come out," the leader said. "These are the things that are important to him."

The second term is freeing for any president, liberating the Oval Office from the pressures of reelection polls. But a second term is also a race against time, and activists say the feverish pace with which the White House is taking up big, politically risky issues is an indication Obama is seeing the sand running out of the hourglass.

Obama's allies on the left, though, have also seen a downside to the centralization of power. It's a lot tougher for Obama's base to get their complaints in the president's orbit in the second term, activists said. Progressives have lost a lot of their go-to contacts in the administration as White House staff like Jon Carson have split for OFA or other outside organizations. So even as they welcome Obama's more central role, they say they're less plugged into what he's thinking — and were furious last week, when the White House announced Obama's budget plan will include cuts to entitlements that have once again activated progressive oppostion.

But none of the activists BuzzFeed talked to this week would admit to being upset about the management changes at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. One said it was "100% plus" to see Obama was directly dealing with Congress in his "charm offensives" and the like.

There's a feeling that Obama feels freer now among progressives — and that can only be a good thing, they say.

"There are always pitfalls with everything," the labor leader shrugged.

Obama has stumbled badly in the past when he's ignored advice and plowed forward under his own assumptions. The Denver presidential debate, when Obama fell flat on his face, followed debate prep sessions in which Obama went his own way. In the following debates, Obama listened to his handlers. It was a similar situation during the 2010 budget fight, when a confident Obama reportedly told cautious aides he knew how to handle John Boehner and set off trying to make a deal that blew up in his face when Boehner couldn't rally his House Republican caucus.

But Obama has steered the ship to great victories, too, as when he ignored the advice telling him not to pursue health-care reform or when some on his national security team said pursuing Osama bin Laden was too risky.

Obama is taking the risky path again, running things himself as Congress takes up the explosive issues of immigration reform, gun control, and returns to a budget fight. For the time being, the plan seems to be set: With his second term legacy at stake, it's Obama in charge.

Members Of Congress Want Answers About Beyoncé And Jay-Z's Cuban Vacation

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Two Republican members of the U.S. House of Representatives want to know who let Beyoncé and Jay-Z go to Cuba. Update: the Treasury Department says the letter is “under review.”

Beyoncé and Jay-Z went to Cuba for their fifth wedding anniversary last week, and two Republican members of Congress from Florida, Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen and Rep. Mario Diaz-Balart, had a problem with it. They wrote to the Office of Foreign Assets Control and this is what the letter said:

Image by ENRIQUE DE LA OSA / Reuters

Image by STR / Getty Images

Image by ENRIQUE DE LA OSA / Reuters


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WikiLeaks' New Project Highlights 1970s Diplomacy

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Julian Assange beams in from his exile to explain WikiLeaks' latest.

Image by Win McNamee / Getty Images

WASHINGTON — Embattled WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange beamed in to Washington from London on Monday to explain his organization's newest project: a searchable database of nearly 2 million diplomatic cables, most of them recently declassified.

The new initiative, called the Public Library of US Diplomacy, folds WikiLeaks' previous 2010 State Department dump of 250,000 diplomatic cables into a new batch of "Kissinger cables" from the 1970s and makes the files searchable. Unlike WikiLeaks' 2010 release, this is not a leak. Instead, the organization has taken millions of PDFs that have become declassified and entered the public domain and organized them in what Assange called the "single most significant geopolitical publication that has ever existed."

Assange and Icelandic journalist and WikiLeaks spokesperson Kristinn Hrafnsson appeared in a press conference physically helmed at the National Press Club by Hrafnsson. They said the cables from the Kissinger era show an explosion of US diplomatic strength in the 1970s accompanied with the growth of US diplomats teaming with foreign opposition movements. They feature some early descriptions of characters that became important later, including Margaret Thatcher, and Assange's bête noir, Swedish foreign minister Carl Bildt.

Skyping in from the Ecuadorian Embassy in London, where he has been taking asylum since June to avoid his prosecution for alleged sex crimes in Sweden, Assange appeared on a big screen. The feed intermittently cut out throughout the press conference. Wearing an embroidered shirt and sporting some facial hair, Assange looked slightly wan; if he leaves the embassy in London at all he risks extradition to Sweden. He began his speech to reporters by quoting George Orwell: "He who controls the present, controls the past. He who controls the past, controls the future."

He reeled off some of the highlights from the database, from the involvement of Gandhi scion Rajiv Gandhi in Swedish arms deals to a description of Margaret Thatcher in a 1975 cable: "Her voice, her dress, her manner all bear the unmistakeable stamp of the suburban Tory matron."

Assange emphasized the sheer size of the cables: "It's sometimes quite hard for journalists and people who work with words to understand the scale of things. It requires a sense of numeracy." And he took issue with skeptical questions implying that this latest project is little more than a slick repackaging of information that is available to anyone.

The Kissinger-era documents "are technically in the public domain," Assange acknowledged. But he called the cables, which have been uploaded as PDF files, "essentially unusable" in that form.

"The were practically not available to the public in a way that's efficient enough for people to be able to make sense of them," Assange said.

Their value, Assange said, is historical.

The Kissinger cables show how "diplomacy became the central ingredient to US power across the world," Assange said, referring to the period as the "big bang" of diplomacy.

"This is when the modern international order came to be," Assange said. "Back in the 1970s, US embassies were more important. Now, because of the speed of international flights, video conferences like we're having right now, email et cetera, means that the center, Washington, has more direct control of the periphery."

The cables, Assange said, also give a glimpse into the nuts and bolts of what embassies do abroad, including currying favor with opposition movements: "In my experience, after studying many thousands of cables, the US makes a priority of gaining influence and contacts within opposition movements."

Assange and Hrafnsson didn't say they expected retribution for the latest release, but didn't count it out, either.

"If the Department of Justice was to go after us for this release like they're attempting to prosecute us for previous releases involving US embassy documents, the approach would probably be along the lines of the approach that was taken with Aaron Swartz, which is the manner of acquisition as opposed to the nature of the material," Assange said.

"No, not to the degree where people have stopped doing such things," Assange said when asked if the prosecution of Bradley Manning had a chilling effect on new leaks of recent information. But he acknowledged that the Manning case had made some potential whistleblowers more cautious.

Assange himself is in stasis, now in his ninth month holed up at the Ecuadorian Embassy. As of February, his police protection there had cost British taxpayers nearly 3 million pounds. He deflected When BuzzFeed asked how long he plans to stay there, he deflected the question to Hrafnnson, who called the situation in Sweden "very worrying" but had no new information about the progress of the investigation.


Margaret Thatcher's Best TV Moments

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The icon of modern British politics could always be counted on to give the chaps in the media scrum a good soundbite.

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Treasury Department Looking Into Beyoncé And Jay-Z's Trip To Cuba

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Two members of the House asked for information about the couple's trip to Cuba because U.S. law prohibits tourism there. The Treasury Department said they're looking into it.

Image by Ramon Espinosa / AP

Beyoncé and Jay-Z's trip to Cuba for their fifth wedding anniversary prompted Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen and Rep. Mario Diaz-Balart, Republicans from Florida, to write to the Office of Foreign Assets Control for information about who approved their travel.

The letter requested information about the trip because U.S. law prohibits "the licensing of financial transactions for tourist activities in Cuba," according to the letter.

At the White House Monday, Press Secretary Jay Carney told reporters that the details of the Cuba trip were "not a White House matter."

"Decisions made about cultural travel and academic travel are made by the Treasury Dept. And I would defer your specific cases to the Treasury Dept," he said. "It is certainly the case that under this administration we have eased the ability to travel to Cuba for those purposes. But the decisions at the individual level are made at the Treasury Dept. not here."

The Treasury Department said it's looking into the matter.

"We have received it, it is under review and OFAC will respond accordingly," said John Sullivan, a Treasury Department spokesman.

When asked if the couple was granted a license to travel for cultural purposes, Sullivan said, "I cannot comment on specific licenses."

Meanwhile, Sen. Jeff Flake (R-AZ), said Beyoncé and Jay-Z's trip didn't bother him.

"Angela Merkel Nude Photo" May Not Be Of Angela Merkel

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The German Embassy won't comment on photos alleged to show a young German Chancellor Angela Merkel . But the man who posted them says he doesn't think it's her.

The German Embassy in Washington declined to comment Monday on a nude photograph that some online have claimed depict a younger Chancellor Angela Merkel, while the nudist blogger who first posted the image said he does not believe it is Merkel.

The black-and-white image depicts three young women at a beach; a series of European news outlets have suggested that Merkel is the woman on the far left.

The image appears to have been posted online in 2009 on a nudist lifestyle blog called "Nudiarist," although the picture it circulated in recent days on Reddit and in various publications, including Digital Journal and the Spanish Vanity Fair. "Nudiarist" is protected, but the man who runs the blog, Chet Kresiak, confirmed in an email that the photo appeared on his website in a November 11, 2009 post.

Kresiak said he believes the photograph appeared originally in a Swedish nudist magazine called HELIOS that published in the 1950s and 1960s. Although he was unable to identify the issue that published the picture, it's his opinion that the woman it depicts is not Angela Merkel.

"She was born in 1954," he wrote in an email to BuzzFeed. "This appears to be an April Fool's joke."

(Images from the post in question appear to have been archived on a Romanian blog called "Good Naked.")

People who believe the photograph does depict Merkel point to the "Freikörperkultur" or "Free Body Culture" movement, which encouraged public nudity as a way to embrace nature and was a popular form of rebellion among her generation of East Germans.

Karl-Matthias Klause, the spokesman for the German Embassy in Washington, D.C. responded to an inquiry about the image: "I am sorry but we do not have any comments."

Some allege that Merkel is the woman on the left.

Some allege that Merkel is the woman on the left.

You can see the unedited photo here.

When Britain Banned "Promoting Homosexuality"

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“Children who need to be taught to respect traditional moral values are being taught that they have an inalienable right to be gay,” Thatcher said. The “prohibition on promoting homosexuality by teaching or by publishing material” was in place from 1988 until 2003.

Then-British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and husband, Denis, outside their residence, 10 Downing Street in London.

Image by Staff / Reuters

Although Baroness Margaret Thatcher had been one of the few conservative members of parliament to support the decriminalization of homosexuality in 1967, she took a far less progressive position 20 years later as prime minister.

At the height of the AIDS crisis, Thatcher's government took up the cause of those concerned about discussion of gay issues around children. At the Conservative Party Conference in October 1987, in a portion of her speech discussing education, Thatcher said, "Children who need to be taught to respect traditional moral values are being taught that they have an inalienable right to be gay."

Within the year, her government made an effort to stop that law, with the passage of Section 28, as it became known, of the Local Government Act of 1988.

The provision declared:

Prohibition on promoting homosexuality by teaching or by publishing material.

(1) A local authority shall not—

(a)intentionally promote homosexuality or publish material with the intention of promoting homosexuality;

(b)promote the teaching in any maintained school of the acceptability of homosexuality as a pretended family relationship.

Although it contained no criminal penalty, the law often was cited to as chilling discussion of gay rights issues within schools.

Section 28 was not repealed in Scotland until 2000 or in Great Britain and Wales until 2003.

Six years later, Conservative Party leader David Cameron, now the prime minister and a supporter of marriage equality, addressed the party's passage of the provision, saying, "I'm sorry for Section 28. We got it wrong. It was an emotional issue. We have got to move on and we have moved on. ... Yes, we may have sometimes been slow and yes, we may have made mistakes, including Section 28, but the change has happened."

The passage of the law, however, inspired a generation of activism in the country and was seen by some as the British equivalent of America's Stonewall riots.

As the actor Ian McKellen, who came out as gay in order to express his opposition to the provision in personal terms, put it in 2000 when repeal of the law was being debated, "The only good thing I can think to say about Section 28 is that it finally encouraged me to come out. A bit late in the day, but it remains the best thing I ever did."

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