Julian Assange joins U.S. President Barack Obama, actor Colin Firth and designer Tom Ford on a list of the 20 best dressed men in the world from the French magazine Le Figaro Madame, as reported by CNN Mexico. Placement on the list is something of a coup for Assange, whose look was described derisively by New York Times executive editor Bill Keller in his tell-all account of working with WikiLeaks. Assange, when he first met with Times men in London, was "lanky, with pale skin, gray eyes and a shock of white hair that seizes your attention... alert but disheveled, like a bag lady walking in off the street, wearing a dingy, light-colored sport coat and cargo pants, dirty white shirt, beat-up sneakers and filthy white socks that collapsed around his ankles. He smelled as if he hadn't bathed in days." As he became a "cult figure" with "his hair dyed and styled" he began wearing "fashionably skinny suits and ties." Now the transformation has paid off in magazine love. Additionally, Assange is included in "The 2011 Time 100" as one of "the most influential people in the world."

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The Army private charged with supplying government secrets to Julian Assange's WikiLeaks organization will be transported away from the Quantico, Virginia Marine Corps base, where he's been held for about a year, after repeated insistence from clear-thinking people with the law on their side that he was being tortured or, at the very least, unfairly detained. Manning, who is charged with "aiding the enemy" and 21 other counts, has been made to strip naked every night in addition to other "clearly punitive" holding tactics with "no mental health justification" and "no basis in logic," according to his attorney. After personal pleas and public protests, the U.N. torture investigator attempted about a week ago to visit Manning, but was denied his request. Now it's announced that Manning will be moved to Fort Leavenworth in Kanses. Hm, is that so?

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Assange, happier times

The battle between Julian Assange and New York Times executive editor Bill Keller took place in person -- well, almost -- over the weekend, for the first time since Keller escalated the beef in a New York Times Magazine tell-all. (There, he called Assange "arrogant, thin-skinned, conspiratorial and oddly credulous," and said he smelled bad.) At U.C. Berkeley's Investigative Reporting Symposium, though, Assange made his presence known via Skype, while Keller too participated in the discussion moderated by Slate's Jack Shafer. SF Weekly's Matt Smith was there and has a run-down of the media drama, including an accusation from Assange that the Times buckled to please Pentagon's in a seemingly unethical way.

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A new video interview with WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange is available today from Australia's ABC1, in which the troubled transparency advocate, who is in the U.K. awaiting an extradition hearing this summer, speaks on the current status of his anti-secrecy organization. "Even when I was in prison for 10 days we continued publishing," he says, insisting that WikiLeaks was "structured that way quite deliberately to avoid interruption to our publishing, although certainly there has been very aggressive efforts to do so, but also to provide disincentive for decapitation attacks on the organization." As would be expected of the man, Assange totally takes issue with his interviewer if he disagrees with the premise of a question. He thinks he is, in fact, very well liked, thank you very much.

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WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, currently held by the British court in a "country manor" as he awaits extradition hearings this summer, spoke on April 4 to PBS Frontline's Martin Smith, insisting that "WikiLeaks is accelerating its activities with new releases soon to come." Smiths says he and Assange talked "for several hours," but the richest teaser tidbit Frontline is offering ahead of their WikiSecrets documentary, airing May 24, is about Assange's beef with Sweden, where he could be extradited to in order to face allegations of rape and sexual assault. "Crowns of Sweden," Assange explained of his "bright blue socks" with yellow crowns. "I walk on them every day." Sassy and slightly pompous, as expected! [PBS]

On Thursday, April 7 at City Hall in New York City, a coalition of groups, organized in part by journalist Barrett Brown, something of a spokesperson for the recently ubiquitous hacker group Anonymous, will gather in support of WikiLeaks, its founder Julian Assange and U.S. soldier Bradley Manning, who has been held in torturous conditions for nearly a year on allegations that he leaked government secrets to Assange's pro-transparency group. This afternoon, Brown told Runnin' Scared that in the months since the rally was planned, the HBGary saga, in which a computer security firm worked with the government to identify members of Anonymous, only to get hacked themselves, made more urgent the need to recognize the "widespread practice of governments and companies collecting data" on its citizens. The rally, Brown said, hopes to "counter the forces against WikiLeaks" and other anti-secrecy individuals and organizations.

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The relationship between the New York Times and WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange soured amid a power struggle, resulting in a detailed account of their break-up from the newspaper in which Assange is described as "a bag lady," as well as "arrogant, thin-skinned, conspiratorial and oddly credulous." The organizations have stopped working together directly, and in an April essay from the News Statesmen, Assange takes aim at the institution that spurned him, all while preaching for his own cause (something he does almost as well as he dances). More on Assange's latest written provocations inside our daily media column Press Clips, as well as stats on The Daily's struggling social media strategy, the successes of Vice Media and a video that explains why Arianna Huffington isn't wearing any shoes.

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This is the moment we've all been waiting for. First we got the description in words, then we got the photograph and now we have the video, thanks to Forbes. WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange's moves have been described as "almost like a tribesman performing some kind of ritual. He'd spread his arms and gallop across the dance floor, taking huge steps. He didn't look very rhythmic or coordinated, and he didn't seem to have that much feeling for the music, but he did possess a certain cool. He didn't care what other people thought of him. You need space, he once told me, for your ego to flow." See for yourself.

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The man suspected of leaking government information to WikiLeaks, and held in arguably torturous conditions for nearly a year now, was a troubled teenager, according to a PBS Frontline segment airing on Tuesday night. Bradley Manning threatened his stepmother with a knife and was subsequently removed from his father's home in 2006, at the age of 18, a 911 tape reveals. Manning's father tells PBS that his son was "yelling and, you know, kind of tossin' some stuff around and ... it just reached a point where my wife felt vulnerable. And she just was, you know, was scared. And so she called 911...." Manning's father fell to the floor during the commotion, fresh from surgery, and so the woman called the police. But is the clip too sensationalist?

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Oh boy, now the internet's really gone and done it. We've heard chatter for months now that Julian Assange is a pretty difficult dude, with charges ranging from sexual abuse and anti-Semitism down to hating cats and dancing in a selfish manner. Former WikiLeaks spokesperson Daniel Domscheit-Berg wrote a whole book filled with the stuff, called Inside WikiLeaks: My Time With Julian Assange at the World's Most Dangerous Website, but he was far from the only one with a story about Assange being an inconsiderate ass.

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