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• FORT MEADE, Md. (AP) -- The fight to free Pfc. Bradley Manning takes a new turn as he returns to prison to serve a 35-year sentence for leaking classified information and his lawyer says he will ask the Army for leniency -- and the White House for a pardon.
• Even Manning's supporters have pivoted. During the sentencing hearing Wednesday, they wore T-shirts reading, "truth," as they had for the entire court-martial. Hours later, they had changed into shirts saying, "President Obama: Pardon Bradley Manning."
• "The time to end Brad's suffering is now," defense attorney David Coombs told a news conference after Manning's sentence was handed down. "The time for our president to focus on protecting whistleblowers instead of punishing them is now."
• Just a few miles away on an Army base outside Baltimore, Col. Denise Lind announced the stiffest punishment ever handed out in the U.S. for leaking information to the media. With good behavior and credit for the more than three years he has been held, Manning could be out in as little as seven years, Coombs said. Still, the lawyer decried the government's pursuit of Manning for what the soldier said was only an effort to expose wrongdoing and prompt debate of government policies among the American public.
• The sentencing fired up the long-running debate over whether Manning was a whistleblower or a traitor for giving more than 700,000 classified military and diplomatic documents, plus battlefield footage, to the anti-secrecy website WikiLeaks. By volume alone, it was the biggest leak of classified material in U.S. history, bigger even than the Pentagon Papers a generation ago.
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• JINAN, China (AP) -- Standing trial Thursday in China's biggest scandal in decades, ousted Chinese politician Bo Xilai defended himself against allegations that he took bribes, saying he was coerced into making a confession and hoped that the

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