Yoo, of course, is the author of the infamous “torture memos” that justified the abuse and torture of terror suspects held abroad in U.S. custody, and authorized the suspension of the Bill of Rights on U.S. soil.

The Associated Press reports that campus police arrested at least four people who refused to leave the university’s law school building.

Yoo reportedly ignored the demonstrators and. after police removed them from his classroom, began teaching.

Yoo returned to UC Berkeley yesterday after spending the spring semester at Chapman University School of Law in Orange County, where his friend John Eastman is the dean.

According to the AP, Berkeley law students are divided over Yoo: while some think he’s a war criminal who should be fired, his classes are still among the most popular at the law school.

The Department of Justice’s Office of Professional Responsibility is expected to release a report any day now analyzing the conduct of Yoo and his colleagues at the Office of Legal Counsel under the Bush administration, and determining whether he violated ethical rules.  The report has been delayed for months while its subjects and the Department of Justice review and amend its contents.

The AP’s examination of the remaining challenges found:

- Fewer than half of the challenges left-about 1,640-are in genuine doubt. Still, that’s eight times more than the current margin between the two men.

- In ballots that could easily be assigned, Franken netted 200 more votes than Coleman. But that number was essentially meaningless because Coleman has withdrawn significantly fewer challenges than Franken-that is, the pool of challenges that can be awarded to Franken at this stage is notably larger.

- Nearly 300 challenges wouldn’t benefit either man because the voter clearly favored a third-party candidate or skipped the race.

- Of the challenges that can’t be reliably awarded to either candidate now, more than 400 possible Franken votes are being held up because on grounds that those voters identified their ballots through write-ins, initials, signatures, phone numbers or some other distinctive marking. At least 300 possible Coleman votes are in limbo for the same reasons.

- The next biggest class of ballot that can’t easily be awarded falls in the category of unclear voter intent. Nearly 600 involve cases where a voter filled in two ovals but crossed out one, put an X above or below their darkened oval or put differently sized partial marks in more than one. There are slightly more potential Franken ballots in that pile as well.

Now, as the AP explained, these numbers are subject to significant change and mean little on their own. This analysis included over 5,000 challenged ballots, but the Franken and Norm Coleman campaigns have withdrawn thousands of frivolous challenges, and the number of challenged ballots now stands at 3,497, down from its peak of 6,655. Over the weekend, the Franken campaign announced that it would reduce its challenges to fewer than 500 by Tuesday, and the Coleman camp followed suit and pledged to bring its number under 1,000. The state will begin reviewing these ballots on Tuesday.

So what’s the significance here? On December 3, the Franken campaign claimed the lead (by 22 votes, later revised to four) in the recount, while the official tally favored Coleman by a margin of 295 votes. The difference was in the methodology: while the official number excluded all challenged ballots, the Franken team’s number included the predicted outcome of the challenges, based on the election officials’ initial judgment.

As far as I’ve seen, the AP report is the first extensive third-party study of the challenged ballots, and even if the numbers change, it lends credence to the Franken camp’s expectation of significant gain when the challenges are resolved.

The Minnesota Secretary of State website now shows Coleman with a 188-vote lead. If the AP’s 200-vote-swing prediction is at all accurate, the challenged ballots could easily be the difference-maker in the race. And then of course there are all those absentee ballots that were improperly rejected but now seem likely to be counted. The Franken campaign is confident that it stands to gain from these ballots; that’s why it pushed so hard to have them included. In other words, everything that happens between now and the end of this process is likely to chip away at — and quite possibly reverse — Coleman’s small lead.

Let me put this whole jumble in more concrete terms: I just bet on Franken with the CEO of TWI’s publisher and gave him 2-1 odds. Donuts are on the line.

As Josh Micah Marshall at Talking Points Memo reported Saturday, Rep John Conyers (D-Mich), chairman of the House Judiciary Committee wrote an angry letter to Michael Chertoff, secretary of the Dept. of Homeland Security, saying the disclosure, by at least one “federal law enforcement official,” according to The AP, was “very disturbing” and warrants an investigation.

In fact, the disclosure wasn’t just disturbing –- it was either illegal, or it was approved directly by the U.S. attorney general. And, it endangered Onyango and any of her family that continue to live in Kenya.

According to the U.S. Code of Federal Regulations, 8 CFR 208.6, it is illegal to disclose that a noncitizen has applied for political asylum, without her explicit consent “or at the discretion of the attorney general.”

The Supreme Court, in United States v. Ray, explained the reason: because the applicant or her family could be subject to retaliation in their home country.

As an immigration authority fact sheet, cited by the court, explains: “Public disclosure of asylum-related information may subject the claimant to retaliatory measures by government authorities or non-state actors in the event that the claimant is repatriated, or endanger the security of the claimant’s family members who may still be residing in the country of origin.”

According to Amnesty International, the last year in Kenya has seen a crisis of deadly political violence and grave human rights violations.

In other words, this leak wasn’t just a typical ugly attack against the Democratic presidential nominee — it may have been an unusually dangerous one.

Palin, however, tried to claim this is not a new stand for her. She insisted: “Show me where I have ever said that there’s absolute proof that nothing that man has ever conducted or engaged in has had any effect or no effect on climate change.”

The Associated Press is on it. Here we go:

She has told the Internet news site Newsmax, “A changing environment will affect Alaska more than any other state, because of our location. … I’m not one, though, who would attribute it to being man-made.”

And again, here:

In an interview with a Fairbanks newspaper within the last year, Palin said: “I’m not an Al Gore, doom-and-gloom environmentalist blaming the changes in our climate on human activity.”

Clearly the GOP memo hadn’t made it all the way up to Alaska on this. Even President George W. Bush has given up questioning the science on this one. Though, the head of the Environmental Protection Agency is doing everything he can to drag his feet on the issue.