Benzema, Ronaldo hat-tricks in Real win

Madrid: Karim Benzema cemented his return to form with his second hat-trick of the month and Cristiano Ronaldo also netted three goals as Real Madrid crushed lowly Levante 8-0 in their King's Cup last-16 first leg on Wednesday.

France striker Benzema is profiting from the absence through injury of first-choice centre forward Gonzalo Higuain and followed up on his Champions League triple against Auxerre on Dec. 8 with another impressive performance.

He opened the scoring against Levante in the sixth minute at the Bernabeu when he robbed Miquel Robuste, bamboozled Xavi Torres with a couple of stepovers and lashed a low shot past Gustavo Munua.

Ronaldo set up Mesut Ozil for the home side's second in the 10th minute and Benzema made the most of another defensive error to make it 3-0 in the 31st.

The former Olympique Lyon forward, who has struggled to settle in Spain, bagged an assist moments before halftime when he played in Ronaldo for Real's fourth.

Tempers flared briefly at the start of the second half. Benzema clashed with Robuste off the ball and ended up with a bloodied lip. Both players were booked by the referee.

The Frenchman, who turned 23 on Sunday, completed his hat-trick in the 69th and Ronaldo added two more in the 72nd and 74th as Levante, who held Real to a 0-0 draw in La Liga in September, were overwhelmed.

Substitute Pedro Leon added the eighth in the 90th.

Assange's right hand man launches rival site

History

Domscheit-Berg said the intention of OpenLeaks was to be more transparent than WikiLeaks as "In these last months, the organisation has not been open any more. It lost its open-source promise." It planned to start in early 2011.^openleaks


Instead of publishing the documents, OpenLeaks will send the leaked documents to various news entities.
At the time of its announcement, WikiLeaks was facing a number of threats: founder Julian Assange had been arrested in connection with sexual assault charges; the site had issues finding safe DNS and web hosting; and many companies had blocked payment to the site. According to Domscheit-Berg's initial statements, he expected OpenLeaks to bypass WikiLeaks problems by serving only as a safe conduit for whistleblowers to leak information, which would then be passed on to the press, instead of acting as a publisher itself. The organization also intends to be democratically governed, rather than being run by one person or a small group. "Our long term goal is to build a strong, transparent platform to support whistleblowers—both in terms of technology and politics—while at the same time encouraging others to start similar projects," says a colleague wishing to remain anonymous.

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