Down Under: Police in Sydney have locked down the central business district of Australia’s largest city as they negotiate with a gunman who’s taken hostages in a café. Five people are reported to have escaped but more are inside. The gunman has hung a black flag that says in Arabic, “There is no god but Allah; Muhammad is the Messenger of Allah.”

The Uber Angle: The Uber ride service is offering free rides and refunds today in Sydney after tastelessly jacking up rates during the hostage crisis. Uber will be banned in France as of Jan. 1 according to the country’s interior minister.

Torture: Former vice-president Dick Cheney has been campaigning to defend the CIA against accusations that the agency tortured terror suspects.

Appearing on NBC’s “Meet the Press,” Cheney denied that waterboarding and other “enhanced” interrogation techniques used by the CIA qualified as torture. “I would do it again in a minute,” Cheney said

Nearly alone among Republicans outraged at what the CIA did is Sen. John McCain, who was tortured by the North Vietnamese as a captive during the Vietnam War. “What we need to do is come clean, we move forward and we vow never to do it again,” McCain said. “I urge everyone to just read the report — these are the communications within the C.I.A. as to what happened. You can’t claim that tying someone to the floor and having them freeze to death is not torture.”

The Sports Page: Playing with what appears to be the flu, Denver quarterback Peyton Manning led the Broncos to a 22-10 win over San Diego and his team’s fourth straight AFC West championship. Manning took four bags of intravenous fluids Saturday night and Sunday before the game.

>Johnny Manziel, AKA “Johnny Football” took a 30-0 shellacking in his first afternoon as starting quarterback for the Cleveland Browns. Manziel completed just 10 of 18 passes for only 80 yards and was intercepted twice, one of them right on the end line for what could have been a touchdown. The rookie Heisman winner from Texas A&M is playing with the big boys now.

The Obit Page: Sy Berger, the father of Topps baseball cards that came with a slab of pink bubble gum, died at age 91 on Long Island. In the 1950s and 60s little boys walked around with stacks of Topps cards they traded or used to play “flip” and “pitch’ with. “No leansies!” If you can believe this, Berger paid baseball players $125 for exclusive rights to put them on cards. Today there’s a Topps 1952 Mickey Mantle offered on eBay for $26,000

The Big Picture: Sony Pictures sent a warning to news agencies demanding that they stop using the emails and corporate information released in a massive computer hack attack by a group calling itself Guardians of Peace.

Attorney David Boies, a veteran of high profile cases, sent a letter to news organizations saying Sony “does not consent to your possession, review, copying, dissemination, publication, uploading, downloading or making any use” of the information derived from the hacking. It’s unlikely news organizations will just roll over because they’re having too much fun with a story that makes Hollywood look bad.

Producer and writer Aaron Sorkin, who has only run a fake newsroom on HBO, wrote in the NY Times “every news outlet that did the bidding of the Guardians of Peace is morally treasonous and spectacularly dishonorable.”

The hackers, who are believed to be working for North Korea, are demanding that Sony can the “The Interview,” a spoof about two reporters contracted to kill North Korean leader Kim Jong-un. North Korea is not known for a sense of humor.

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