Private First Class Bradley Manning, 25, is escorted out of court after the second day of deliberation in his military trial at Fort Meade, Maryland July 28, 2013. REUTERS/James Lawler Duggan

By Medina Roshan

(Reuters) - The verdict will be read on Tuesday at the court-martial of the soldier accused of the biggest leak of classified information in U.S. history, the judge said, with the biggest question whether he will be convicted of the most serious charge of aiding the enemy, carrying a life sentence.

Legal observers said it was highly likely that Army Private First Class Bradley Manning, who in March pleaded guilty to lesser charges related to sharing some 700,000 documents with the WikiLeaks anti-secrecy website in 2010, will be found guilty on at least some of the 21 criminal counts.

"The difficult part is did he know that the information was going to Al-Qaeda and the Taliban? To me, that is the linchpin of the case," said Richard Rosen, a professor of law at the Texas Tech University School of Law and a former military lawyer. "If he's not found guilty of that charge, the punishment is going to be a lot less severe in my opinion."

Judge Colonel Denise Lind said on Monday that she plans to issue her verdict in the case at 1 p.m. EDT (1700 GMT) on Tuesday in Fort Meade, Maryland.

Manning, originally from Crescent, Oklahoma, opted to have his case heard by Lind, rather than a panel of military jurors.

Military prosecutors have called the 25-year-old defendant a "traitor" for publicly posting information that the U.S. government said could jeopardize national security and intelligence operations.

Lawyers for the low-level intelligence analyst said Manning was well-intentioned but naive, hoping that his disclosures would provoke a more intense debate in the United States about diplomatic and military actions in Iraq and Afghanistan.

More than three years after Manning's arrest in May 2010, the U.S. intelligence community is reeling again from leaked secrets, this time exposed by former intelligence contractor Edward Snowden, who has been holed up in the transit area of a Moscow airport for more than a month despite U.S. calls for Russian authorities to turn him over.

WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange has surfaced again as a major player in the newest scandal, this time aiding Snowden in eluding authorities to seek asylum abroad.

The cases of Manning and Snowden, a former contractor for a U.S. spy agency, illustrate the difficulties of keeping secrets at a time the internet makes them very easy to share widely and quickly. In addition, more people are granted access to classified data.

"The bar has become very low for what the government has to prove in order to convict someone for disclosing classified information to the media," said Elizabeth Goitein, a security specialist at New York University's Brennan Center for Justice.

She said that military courts had made it easier to convict people on charges of aiding the enemy.

"There has been a heightened standard of intent that has been required," Goitein said. "We're really starting to see the court chip away at this."

(Writing by Scott Malone; Editing by Barbara Goldberg, Steve Orlofsky and Grant McCool)

Asia's seemingly unquenchable thirst for energy — lead by China's industrial expansion and Japan's quest to replace nuclear — has scientists constantly rooting around for new sources. Now, the region is zeroing in on methane hydrate, a crystalline form of natural gas buried in Arctic permafrost and at the bottom of the ocean.

In theory, there's enough methane hydrate to put all of Asia's energy worries to rest. An estimated 700,000 trillion cubic feet of the stuff is scattered around the Earth, whichconstitutes more energy than all the world's known gas and oil resources combined. But accessing it in a way that makes economic and environmental sense poses all kinds of challenges.

To start with, the cost of developing any new energy is sky-high. The current cost of methane hydrate is estimated to be $30 to $60 per million British thermal units, compared to $4 per million BTUs for natural gas in the U.S. But Japan claims it can bring the new energy mainstream in the next 10 years, under the assumption that as the cost of production comes down, methane hydrate could generate the kind of economic boom fracking has reaped in North America.

But environmentalists say the potential cost of methane development extends way beyond extraction. Methane traps heat up to 20 times more effectively than carbon dioxide, though it remains in the atmosphere for a shorter time. And it's highly volatile — oil companies, when installing rigs, usually try to avoid tapping methane hydrate deposits. Scientists warn a leak of methane could be catastrophic to the environment.

Methane hydrate is already a threat, regardless of whether energy companies begin drilling for it. A paper published earlier this month in the journal Nature said a release of a 50-gigatonne reservoir of methane under the East Siberian Sea could accelerate climate change and cost the global economy up to $60 trillion. And that could happen solely due to warming temperatures in the Arctic. Reuters reports:

Methane is a greenhouse gas usually trapped as methane hydrate in sediment beneath the seabed. As temperatures rise, the hydrate breaks down and methane is released from the seabed, mostly dissolving into the seawater.

But if trapped methane were to break the sea surface and escape into the atmosphere, it could "speed up sea-ice retreat, reduce the reflection of solar energy and accelerate the melting of the Greenland ice sheet," the study said.

It said that could bring forward the date at which the global mean temperature rise exceeds 2 degrees Celsius by between 15 and 35 years — to 2035 if no action is taken to curb emissions and to 2040 if enough action is taken to have a 50 percent chance of keeping the rise below 2 degrees. [Reuters]

"All told it is clearly a climate disaster in the making, on top of, well, you know, the catastrophic climate disaster already proceeding full steam ahead," says Vice's Mat McDermott, after Japan successfully tapped a methane hydrate reserve for a test in March. "Regardless — and this point should be in all italics, bold, and with several exclamation points — if methane hydrates begin to get tapped en masse, our shrinking hopes of curbing climate change are gone."

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It's Not Whether Abortion Rights Activists Are Losing, It's Where

Public opinion about abortion is changing, but it's not as clear-cut as you might think. A Time cover story in January announced that abortion-rights activists have been "losing" the battle since Roe v. Wade for 40 years. But the Pew Research Center released a study on Monday that shows while national attitudes about abortion have stayed relatively the same since the 1990s, regional attitudes are shifting in opposite directions.

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Are abortion rights advocates losing? That depends on where you live. The Pew study shows that in the South Central part of the country, support for keeping abortion legal decreased from 50 percent in 1995-1996 to 42 percent in 2012-2013. South Central includes Texas, where Gov. Rick Perry just signed into law new restrictions on abortion. Conversely, over the same time period, that support has increased from 70 percent to 75 percent in New England. The South Central area and the Midwest were the only regions to experience significant drops in support. Support declined from 55 percent to 47 percent in the Midwest. The regional differences echo the 2012 electoral map.

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Unsurprisingly, where support has dropped, conservative lawmakers have been successful in passing abortion restrictions. In states with these bans on abortion at 22 weeks or earlier (including Texas, North Carolina, and North Dakota), 48 percent of people believe that abortion should be illegal in most or all cases. In states that don't, only 36 percent of people feel the same.

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It's Not Whether Abortion Rights Activists Are Losing, It's Where

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In her Time's January cover story, Kate Pickert claimed that "fewer and fewer [Americans] are identifying themselves as 'pro-choice' in public opinion surveys." That might have been a reference to Gallup, which found Americans call themselves pro-life by 48 percent to 45 percent in 2013, while in 2011, they said they were pro-choice by 49 percent to 45 percent. But if you look at Gallup's abortion polling since the 1970s, it's fairly steady.

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The Pew study shows it gets more complicated when you get beyond the national number. Fewer Texans are pro-choice, sure. But in every region but South Central and the Midwest, citizens' support for keeping abortion legal has increased or stayed about the same.

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It's Not Whether Abortion Rights Activists Are Losing, It's Where

Kirsten Powers echoed Pickert's claims in an article for The Daily Beast, published shortly after Wendy Davis attempted to filibuster a Texas bill that would ban abortions after 20 weeks (Perry signed a version of that bill into law in July). Powers wrote that "most of the civilized world" finds abortions after 20 weeks to be "barbaric and abhorrent." In America, at least, that depends on who you poll. According to Pew, 54 percent of Americans think abortion should be legal in all or most cases. That figure's stayed mostly the same since the 1990s. The sense that support for legal abortion is dwindling comes from a couple regions of the country.

One interesting place to watch is Virginia. We tend to think of the state as being in the socially conservative South, and though it's voted Democratic in the last two presidential elections, it has a conservative state government. (Pew categorizes Virginia as South Atlantic, where support for abortion has dropped slightly, from 53 percent to 50 percent.) In 2012, Gov. Bob McDonnell abandoned signing a bill requiring a "trans-vaginal ultrasound" before an abortion after bill last year after massive protests in the state and national scrutiny. On Monday, the abortion-rights group NARAL released a poll showing that abortion is the biggest issue driving women to the ballot box in Virginia, where staunchly pro-life candidate Ken Cuccinelli faces pro-choice Democrat Terry McAuliffe in the governor's race. (Obviously NARAL has an interest in the result of this poll.) However the Virginia governor's race pans out, America will continue to be divided on abortion. Now we know where some of those divisions are — regional lines.

At first glance, Pope Francis‘s statement on homosexuality, delivered today in an impromptu press conference aboard the papal plane, seemed to indicate a remarkable break with Church tradition. “If someone is gay and he searches for the Lord and has good will, who am I to judge?” Francis told journalists, as he flew from Rio de Janeiro to Rome. “The tendency [to homosexuality] is not the problem…They’re our brothers.”

The Pope’s words were warmly received by gay activists in Italy and abroad. “From now on, when I hear a bishop or a priest say something against me, I’m going to say, ‘Who are you to judge,’” says Franco Grillini, president of Gaynet Italia, the association of gay journalists in Italy.

(MORE: Pope Francis Says He Does Not Judge Gay Priests)

But like many of Francis’ more news-making statements, the real difference is less about the contents of his words, than in the direct, earthy style in which he delivers them, and the Church teachings he chooses to emphasize. “It’s the way he’s expressing himself, with great candor, that is surprising to people,” says John Wauck, a professor of communication at the Pontifical University of The Holy Cross. “Actually, the substance of it is nothing exceptional.”

Francis’s comment in May that some atheists might make it into heaven drew headlines. The Vatican’s subsequent explanation that his words were in line with a long tradition of Church teachings did not. Similarly, Francis’s statement on the plane was not far from the passage on homosexuality in the Catechism of theCatholic Church, published under Pope John Paul II in 1992. That text calls on Catholics to accept homosexuals “with respect, compassion and sensitivity,” avoiding “every sign of unjust discrimination in their regard.”

Where he differed is what he left out: the accompanying message in the Catechism that while a gay person is to be accepted, acting out on homosexual acts is to be deplored: “under no circumstances can they be approved … Homosexual persons are called to chastity.” Francis, who cited the Catechism in his answers to reporters, said nothing to contradict this. Asked for his position on gay marriage, he answered: “You know perfectly the position of the Church.”

But while Francis has put little doctrinal space between himself and his predecessors, comments like the one on the plane reflect a clear choice in the early months of his papacy to de-emphasize the issues of sexual morality that have made the Church a lightning rod in the culture wars. Even as France was consumed last spring in debate over the legalization of gay marriage, a battle that pitted the French Church against the government, Francis made no mention of the issue.

In Brazil, he told the reporters on the plane, he purposefully avoided talking about abortion or gay marriage, in order to stay focused on the positive. “His message is not ‘Don’t do that, don’t do this’,” says Wauck. “The moral scriptures are present, but they’re implicit. The attention of the Pope is on a much larger vision of the Church and what Christianity has to offer to the world.”

MORE: A Pope for the Poor

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Gays Bars' Ban on Russian Vodka Is Going Global

What started out as Dan Savage's pledge against consuming Russian vodka is now a movement that has gay bars all around the world, from Vancouver to London, dumping Russian vodka to show their displeasure with the country's treatment of gay people—even in the face of one of Russia's prominent LGBT activists saying the whole thing is pointless.

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When we last we checked in with Savage's plea for gay people to stop drinking Russian vodka to protest the Kremlin's aggressive anti-gay laws, a couple of gay bars in Chicago had joined in the boycott. Since then, more and more bars around the world have joined in: London's world-famous Heaven nightclub, along with several others venues in the British capital, aren't serving Russian booze; a bevy ofVancouver bars have followed suit, as have venues in Sydney, West Hollywood, New York City and San Francisco.

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The ban is part of a growing movement to check Russia's increasingly homophobic political milieu. In a sharply-worded editorial over the weekend title "Mr. Putin's War on Gays," The New Times editorial board wrote:

For some time, antigay sentiment has been spreading in Russia’s conservative society, encouraged by the Kremlin and the Russian Orthodox Church. But Mr. Putin and his government have taken that to a new level by legitimizing the hatemongering in legislation.

Clearly, there's momentum behind this push. But there's still a question of how much the boycott itself is doing to force Vladimir Putin's repressive hand. As I mentioned on Thursday, it's hard to imagine that gay bars boycotting vodka will result in enough economic pressure to change Russia's course. Nikolai Alekseev, a prominent Russian LGBT activist, counts himself among the skeptics. "To be honest, I don’t see the point in boycotting the Russian vodka," he said in an interview with Gay Star News. "It will impact anyone except the companies involved a little bit. The effect will die out very fast, it will not last forever."

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Alekseev goes on to add:

And what is the aim of this boycott? The producers, even if they become bankrupt because of the boycott (which is unlikely) will not be able to influence Russian politics and President Putin as well as the decisions of the State Duma.

But the aim of the boycott is not to, say, put Stoli out of business. Nobody has such delusions. Rather, it's about bringing awareness to Russia's aggressively anti-gay measures. It's not unlike other viral movements — #stopkony, for example — meant, foremost, to raise awareness among the general population.

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True, these viral movements often get branded as "slacktivism," a term that suggests people are notreally doing anything to help the cause at hand. But, then again, the vodka ban is not asking for your money — only your attention to the plight of gays and, perhaps, a moment of thought about whether you want to patronize companies that might be a little too friendly with the Kremlin.

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