Washington — The US justice department unveiled 17 new criminal charges against WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange on Thursday, saying he unlawfully published the names of classified sources and conspired with and assisted ex-Army intelligence analyst Chelsea Manning in obtaining access to classified information. The superseding indictment comes a little more than a month after the justice department unsealed a narrower criminal case against Assange. Assange was initially charged with conspiring with Manning to gain access to a government computer as part of a 2010 leak by WikiLeaks of hundreds of thousands of US military reports about the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Wikileaks describes itself as specialising in the publication of "censored or otherwise restricted official materials involving war, spying and corruption". Assange is now fighting extradition to the US, after Ecuador in April revoked his seven-year asylum in the country's London embassy. He was arrested that day, April...
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