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• "Tomorrow, you're going to hear what truth sounds like," Coombs told supporters Thursday night after a lengthy and bruising final argument by the prosecution.
• Speaking for more than five hours Thursday, with several breaks through the day for people to use the bathrooms and eat lunch, Maj. Ashden Fein told the court Manning was a traitor with one mission as an intelligence analyst deployed in Iraq in 2009 and 2010: to find and reveal government secrets to a group of anarchists, then bask in the glory as a whistleblower.
• "The government has its job, but there is nobody who could believe what they said -- much less them," Coombs told a group of some 40 supporters after Thursday's session.
• ___

• NEW YORK (AP) -- Hedge funds were once the rock stars of the financial industry. The smartest people worked for them. The wealthiest gave them their money. They were an easy path to fortune.

• But if that get-rich-quick narrative was an exaggeration before the financial crisis, it's even less true since. The hedge fund industry's performance has been spotty in recent years; its public image, bruised. SAC Capital Advisors became the latest high-flyer brought low when the Justice Department on Thursday accused it of allowing insider trading and making hundreds of millions of dollars illegally.
• To critics, hedge funds are secretive, risky, loosely regulated playgrounds for the super wealthy. And while the industry keeps expanding, its performance does not. This year could be the fifth in a row that hedge funds underperform the Standard & Poor's 500 stock index, according to Hedge Fund Research, or HFR, which analyzes the industry. That's an unwelcome reversal: For the 20 years from 1990 to 2009, hedge fund returns beat or tied the S&P 500 15 times.
• "Everyone says, 'Oh a hedge fund,' and acts like that's some kind of mark of excellence," said Heath Abshure, president of the North American Securities Administrators Association, a group of state securities regulators. "A hedge fund is just an unregistered investment company."
• Hedge funds operate by convincing wealthy people to invest with them. They profit by trying to find opportunities that no one else has picked up on, wagering on everything from the price of copper to whether a company will cut its dividend. Some made fortunes predicting the downfall of the U.S. housing market.

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