It has been a while since we heard from the chief editor of Wikileaks and profoundly bizarre Australian “hacktivist” Julian Assange, currently on house arrest in the UK. As it turns out, he is working on a gig in 24-hour news– at the network formerly known as Russia Today, RT Television. He will be “hosting a series of in-depth conversations with key political players, thinkers and revolutionaries” starting this March. A talk show hosted by Julian Assange? What could possibly go wrong?

Today is a landmark day in the Occupy Wall Street movement– organizers have called for similar rallies across the world in solidarity with their cause, and images from Rome to Vienna to, yes, back to Wall Street are hitting the web in real time. But it was in London where the crowds received a special celebrity greeting– from Wikileaks founder Julian Assange, who took a respite from his house arrest to express solidarity with the movement.

If Wikileaks began as a mission to enter history for releasing the largest number of sensitive federal documents in history, it may have achieved that this week, at the cost of their own reputations and, potentially, a number of lives. The group released the entirety of its U.S. dispatch archive suspected to have been delivered to them by current military prisoner Bradley Manning– a release that was prompted by a Guardian editor publishing the password to an encrypted file holding some of the documents in his book, and threatens to put many lives across the world in danger.

The epic Julian Assange-penned Wikileaks memoir scheduled to be released last April seems to have run into a bit of trouble. According to a new report from The Guardian, the book deal may have fallen through due to Assange’s fears that publishing his story would strengthen a potential case against him in the United States. While the publishers, Canongate and Knopf, have refuted claims that the deal has fallen through, they have also refused to discuss the book.

Well, this explains that parody commercial. Subversive online group Wikileaks is threatening to sue Visa, Mastercard, and Paypal, among others, for preventing the group from collecting donations. This week, the group announced that they are waiting another five days to sue the companies for blocking their money flows.

Known as an iconoclastic Congressman and serial presidential candidate, Rep. Ron Paul also has a lesser-known career as a prolific author. To understand more about the candidate, the Daily Beast‘s David Graham went through the 2012 hopeful’s latest tome, Liberty Defined, and came away concluding, perhaps unfairly, that Rep. Paul is not a “disciplined candidate” and, given his affinity for conspiracy, is a long way from the nomination.

Wikileaks is an organization that may not exactly be lacking in publicity but, nonetheless, the group has put together quite a neat little promotional video for itself.

Wikileaks, the secretive international organization that took 2010 by storm with its thousand-page document dumps and the erratic behavior of its leader, Julian Assange, seems to be strapped for cash again. And, as they have many times before, they are trotting out Assange out to sell his charm to the highest bidder. The Washington Post is reporting that Wikileaks is auctioning off lunch Assange in London before a speaking engagement, now going for about €600.

Julian Assange, WikiLeaks editor-in-chief recently gave an interview to the Huffington Post that was remarkably critical of the media coverage of Pfc. Bradley Manning’s imprisonment. Manning is accused of leaking thousands of classified documents on the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, the prisoners being held at Guantanamo Bay and the State Department to WikiLeaks.

The parallels between right-wing undercover dance-pop sensation James O’Keefe and left-wing (?) hacker/fashion icon Julian Assange have been long drawn out, but with every new interview the similarities become starker. O’Keefe visited John Stossel on his eponymous FBN program to defend his tactics and asserted that, since “the public has a right to know… you simply don’t have an expectation of privacy when you’re discussing business matters.”

Shepard Smith is sick of the government lying to us. “The list is so long, we don’t have room for it on the screen any more!” he exclaimed today during Studio B. Smith was covering the latest WikiLeaks release in the Washington Post that details the United States’ secret backing of Syrian opposition forces and he made it abundantly clear just who he thought was fighting the good fight. “Man, we’ve learned a lot from the WikiLeaks people, haven’t we?” Smith asked with a smile.

Many things have been said about WikiLeaks’ enigmatic front man Julian Assange. He’s been called a “terrorist,” a possible Nobel Prize candidate, “man of the year,” rapist, sex symbol, and “disco king.” But, did you know that he’s also…DUH DUH DUUUUUH…a kind of crappy houseguest? Allison Silverman, the former head writer and executive producer of The Colbert Report heard the story from a couple of friends who actually hosted the international lightning rod. So, what else was she going to do than buy a white wig, get a camera, and film a reenactment.

Charlie Sheen. John Galliano. Julian Assange. Muammar Gaddafi. What do all these names have in common in the week that was? Somehow, in one way or another and to varying degrees, they ended up saying something totally offensive about Jewish people. To Bill Maher, it appeared that there was no facet of the news cycle this week in which Jewish people were not maligned, and he put it to his panel to figure out whether there was something in the air.

“What a week this has been for bigotry,” remarked Judith Timson in The Globe and Mail. Dior designer John Galliano lost his job after video came out of him making anti-Semitic comments. Then there was Julian Assange’s claim that a group of Jewish journalists was out to get him. And Glenn Beck compared Reform Judaism to “radicalized Islam.” But the highest-profile case of it came amid revelations that Charlie Sheen called his manager a “stoopid Jew pig” and referred publicly to his boss Chuck Lorre as “Chaim Levine.” Lots of reporters noted what appeared to be a rise in these incidents in recent days, leaving some concerned about a changing attitude toward Jews. Is this a legitimate worry? Writers for Jewish publications weigh in:

Paul Craig Roberts, the former Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for the Reagan Administration and an outspoken journalist and author since, appeared on RT America this past weekend to discuss the legal struggles of Wikileaks founder Julian Assange. While there, he had some pretty unsettling things to say, casually dropping his belief that the CIA would kill Assange and that this would be a “common practice” event.

WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange says the uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt got a boost from WikiLeaks. In an interview with the Australian program Dateline, Assange says “material that we published through a Lebanese newspaper was significantly influential to what happened in Tunisia,” and Tunisia led directly to Egypt. “Then there’s no doubt that Tunisia was THE example for Egypt, and Yemen and Jordan and all the protests that have happened there.”

A few months ago, popular conservative blogger Robert Stacy McCain earned the ire of a broad cross-section of the blogosphere (including this commentator) with his assertion that withdrawal of consent was “unadulterated nonsense,” saying, “You buy the ticket, you take the ride.”

The legend of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange is that of a man without a permanent address who travels the world, flopping on couches at the homes of friends. It’s also, a new book suggests, the story of a man who often wears two pairs of pants, rarely carries cash, engages in power battles with cats and who’s left a flock of love children in his wake.

Former Wikileaks spokesman Daniel Domscheit-Berg has broken with Assange and written a tell-all book, Inside WikiLeaks: My Time With Julian Assange At the World’s Most Dangerous Website, a portion of which has–fittingly–been leaked. According to the UK Daily Mail, Assange suggested he was a father several times over:

The hits just keep on coming for affable paranoid mad scientist Julian Assange. He’s been accused of putting countless informants’ lives on the line by releasing the Afghan War Diaries. He’s been accused of an act fitting the Swedish legal definition of the crime of rape. And now, a former employee is accusing him of abusing his cat in a “battle for dominance.”

On Monday night’s Last Word, host Lawrence O’Donnell tried to make sense of a recent Sarah Palin interview with Pat Robertson‘s Christian Broadcasting Network, calling in a little backup in the form of “Sarah Palin translator” Alex Wagner. It’s a tough job, to be sure, but in deciphering Palin’s baffling assessment of the crisis in Egypt, I don’t think they quite nailed it. I’m getting pretty good at this, though, so I’ll happily take a stab at it.

Call it a tale of two media break-ups. Shortly after the New York Times’ Bill Keller penned a scathing (and shockingly personal) account of what it was like to work with Julian Assange, UK collaborator The Guardian has done the same. While their rendition of experience does not fail to leave out the requisite depiction of Assange as overbearing and paranoid, the overall tone of the story, rather than vengeful, is surprisingly self-effacing.

Screw Time’s “Person of the Year,” it looks like WikiLeaks could be going after a much bigger award. A Norwegian lawmaker named Snorre Valen has apparently nominated the website for the Nobel Peace Prize. And, while nominees are officially kept secret for 50 years, Valen has taken to the Internet (perhaps in an homage to WikiLeaks’ transparency ideals) to write a blog post entitled “Why I have nominated Wikileaks for the Nobel Peace Prize,” thus ensuring that a bunch of American newscasters are now going to have to learn how to pronounce the name “Snorre Valen”.

Most people following the case against Wikileaks editor-in-chief Julian Assange would probably argue that he and his legal team are in no position to be thinking about prosecuting anyone else, but that hasn’t precluded Assange’s attorney from threatening to do just that. In an interview with NPR, attorney Robert Stary threatened legal action against, of all people, Sarah Palin for “incit[ing] others to commit violence” against Assange, a crime, he says, that could result in “private prosecution.”

The Hollywood Reporter is reporting that Hollywood has begun the quest to get Julian Assange into our theaters. No, he won’t be fulfilling his destiny and starring as the villain in the next James Bond movie. Instead, they’re planning on making a biopic of his life. Many are now questioning who should get the plum lead role. Over here, though, the only thing we want to know is whether or not this tale of cyber-intrigue and political transparence will be coming at us in MIND-BLOWING 3D!

Here’s a pretty big get for WikiLeaks, Julian Assange‘s polarizing document-leaking database: A former banker in Switzerland named Rudolf Elmer has handed the organization information concerning several offshore bank account holders. His motive? Apparently, he “wanted to draw attention to financial abuses.”