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Wikileaks founder and front-man Julian Assange, who has been holed up in Ecuador's embassy in London since June 19 despite police demands that he surrender to them and be extradited to Sweden, was granted political asylum by the Ecuadorian government on Aug. 16.

British officials say that he is beyond their reach while in the embassy, but Foreign Secretary William Hague said Aug. 16 that Assange will not be allowed out of the the country. The Foreign Office added that it was committed to a negotiated solution that would let it "carry out our obligations under the Extradition Act," and threatened to use a 1987 law to lift the embassy's diplomatic status. The Swedish government also summoned Ecuador's embassador in the wake of the decision.

WikiLeaks said July 5 that it was in the process of publishing material from 2.4 million Syrian emails — many of which it said came from official government accounts of events in Syria.

On July 2, the chairwoman of the U.S. Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, Dianne Feinstein, made fresh calls for Assange to be prosecuted for espionage. The U.S. Justice Department also confirmed it is conducting a criminal investigation into the Wikileaks case.

Pte. 1st Class Bradley Manning, the American soldier accused of turning over a slew of classified U.S. documents to WikiLeaks, appeared in a military courtroom in Maryland June 6-8 seeking dismissal of 10 of the 22 charges he faces, but the judge refused his request.

Col. Denise Lind rejected a defence argument that the government used unconstitutionally vague language in charging Manning with eight counts of unauthorized possession and disclosure of classified information, and refused to dismiss two counts alleging Manning exceeded his authority to access computers linked to the Secret Internet Protocol Router Network, or SIPRNet, a Defence Department intranet system. She also indicated she will postpone Manning's trial, initially set to start Sept. 21, to November this year or January 2013 because of procedural delays.

The 24-year-old intelligence analyst is charged with aiding the enemy by causing hundreds of thousands of classified war logs and diplomatic cables to be published on the secret-sharing website WikiLeaks in 2009 and 2010. Manning faces the possibility of life in prison if convicted of aiding the enemy. He has been in pretrial confinement since he was charged in May 2010, and has been held since April 2011 at Fort Leavenworth in Kansas.

Manning decided not to enter a plea at the beginning of his court martial on Feb. 23, 2012. The arraignment hearing was his first opportunity to state his case in person.

His purported motivation for the leaks, according to logs of his alleged online chats with a confidant-turned-government-informant, was that he wanted to expose the truth after becoming disillusioned about American military policies.

On May 30, 2012, Britain's Supreme Court endorsed the extradition of WikiLeaks chief Julian Assange to Sweden, bringing the secret-spilling internet activist a big step closer to prosecution in a Scandinavian court. A question mark hung over the decision after Assange's lawyer made the highly unusual suggestion that she would try to reopen the case, raising the prospect of more legal wrangling. Assange asked Britain's Supreme Court on June 8 to reopen his extradition case, an unusual legal manoeuvre aimed at blocking his removal to Sweden, but the court announced its refusal on June 15.

Assange lost an earlier appeal on Nov. 2, 2011, against extradition to answer for the allegations. The judges in the previous case said Assange should be sent to Sweden to be questioned about the allegations that he sexually assaulted two WikiLeaks volunteers in Stockholm in 2010.

The 40-year-old has denied wrongdoing, and insists the case is politically motivated by those opposed to the work of his secret-spilling organization. In his memoir, Julian Assange: The Unauthorized Autobiography, he says he did not sexually assault two women who have accused him of rape, and claims he was warned the U.S. government was trying to entrap him. The book, written by a ghostwriter who conducted 50 hours of interviews with the WikiLeaks chief, was released in September 2011 against Assange's wishes.

In December 2010, MasterCard, Visa, PayPal and Western Union stopped processing donations to WikiLeaks, starving the organization of cash. Assange said the restrictions had cut off some 95 per cent of the money he thinks his organization could have received. In 2010 the average total monthly donation to WikiLeaks was more than €100,000 euros ($140,000), and in 2011 the amount fell to between €6,000 and €7,000 euros.

Assange said that until now his group has relied on small-time donations — he put the average figure at $25. But with the financial embargo in place, he said he would pursue a "constellation of wealthy individuals" to help keep his organization going.

U.S. Army intelligence analyst Bradley Manning faces a court martial for his alleged role in supplying information to Wikileaks. Manning has been charged with a number of offences, including the capital crime of aiding the enemy, though prosecutors have indicated they won’t seek the death penalty.

Major events

WikiLeaks began releasing classified information believed to have come from Manning in April 2010, with the posting of a video showing U.S. soldiers gunning down civilians from a helicopter in 2007. Since then, the group has continued to release leaked military, intelligence and diplomatic information.

Its major "data dumps" include they Syria files made public July 5, 2012; the Guantanamo files, made public on April 25, 2011; the U.S. diplomatic cables in November 2010; the Iraq war logs in October 2010; and the Afghanistan war logs in July 2010.

For the diplomatic cable dump, WikiLeaks worked closely with several media partners, including the New York Times, the Guardian and Der Spiegel, whose reporters combed the material for relevant information for months and prepped it for publication. But relations between Assange and the papers deteriorated over Assange's very specific demands regarding how and when the information would be released and which details would be redacted.

On April 25, 2011, the New York Times and the Guardian published extensive reports about the U.S. military prison in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, based on more than 700 military documents leaked to WikiLeaks. The documents give the most complete picture to date of the controversial prison and the people who have been and continue to be held there. They reveal that far from being dangerous terrorists, many of the inmates, including an 89-year-old Afghan villager and a 14-year-old kidnap victim, proved to be harmless and were at times brought to Guantanamo for the sole purpose of extracting intelligence from them.

Assange's court case

Assange, 40, an Australian citizen, was arrested in Britain on Dec. 7, 2010, on a warrant issued by Swedish authorities in connection with accusations that he had unwanted, unprotected sex with two female WikiLeaks volunteers during a trip to Stockholm in August 2010.

A U.K. judge ruled on Feb. 24, 2011, that Assange could be extradited to Sweden to face the allegations. Assange lost his first appeal ruling on Nov. 2, 2011, when judges John Thomas and Duncan Ousely said he should be sent to Sweden to be questioned over the allegations.

In mid-December, 2011, Britain’s Supreme Court agreed to hear Assange’s appeal. On May 30, 2012, it endorsed the extradition of the WikiLeaks chief to Sweden, bringing the secret-spilling internet activist a big step closer to prosecution in a Scandinavian court. But a question mark hung over the decision after Assange's lawyer made the highly unusual suggestion that she would try to reopen the case, raising the prospect of more legal wrangling.

He took refuge in the Ecuadorian embassy in London on June 19, 2012. Ecuadore granted him political asylum on Aug. 16.

The 41-year-old has denied wrongdoing, and insists the case is politically motivated by those opposed to the work of his secret-spilling organization.

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Canadian connections

On Nov. 28, 2010, WikiLeaks and its media partners began releasing some of the more than 250,000 classified diplomatic cables obtained by the group. The cables, sent from 274 U.S. embassies around the world, reveal frank and sometimes unflattering assessments of several world leaders and allies, including Canada. Cables have continued to be published, with the latest batch released on April 28, 2011.

Many of the leaked diplomatice cables have referenced Canada, including one sent by the U.S. Embassy in Ottawa to the U.S. government in 2008. It reported former CSIS director Jim Judd saying Canadians and their courts had an "Alice in Wonderland" world view.

Other Canadian references in the cables include:

• Cables released on April 28, 2011, reveal that the U.S. had kept an eye on Canada's debate about the prorogation of Parliament in 2008 and that it was frustrated with the delay in implementing copyright legislation. They also quoted the U.S. ambassador to Canada as criticizing the Conservatives' tough-on-crime agenda as lacking substance. A leaked cable from December 2008 suggests that U.S. Embassy officials in Ottawa saw Stephen Harper's appointment of senators as "a major about-face for a PM and a party that long campaigned for an elected upper chamber. The cost of the eighteen new senators also conflicts with political messaging about the need for official belt tightening."
• A leaked diplomatic note reported on in February 2011 said Libya threatened to nationalize Petro-Canada's operations. It also said Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi cancelled a late September 2009 stopover in Newfoundland because he was reportedly angry with Canada's disapproval of the hero's welcome shown to a man convicted in the Lockerbie bombing.
• U.S. diplomats in Ottawa writing to Washington that the CBC pushes "insidious negative popular stereotyping " with "anti-American melodrama" in its entertainment TV programs.
• An American diplomat saying that a French government official indicated that Prime Minister Stephen Harper was invited to the D-Day commemoration in France last year because his government was facing political instability.

Canada was also referenced in the Guantanamo files released in April 2011. Those documents mentioned a mosque in Montreal as one of nine houses of prayer or Islamic institutes worldwide considered by the U.S. military to be places where "known al-Qaeda members were recruited, facilitated or trained."

Other notable WikiLeaks material:

• April 5, 2010: WikiLeaks releases classified U.S. military video from a series of attacks on July 12, 2007, in Baghdad by a U.S. helicopter. Twelve civilians were killed, including two Reuters news staff.
• Nov. 7, 2007: A copy of standard operating procedures for Camp Delta — the U.S. Army detention camp at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba — dated March 2003 reveals some of the restrictions placed over detainees at the camp, including the designation of some prisoners as off-limits to the International Committee of the Red Cross, something that the U.S. military had previously denied.

With files from The Associated Press, The Canadian Press