Public Service Announcement (5)
2 hours ago
Thursday 24 February 2011
DavidAllenGreen David Allen Green
#Assange judgment – Hurtig not only deliberately misled court but also defence witnesses. Devastating criticism.
estheraddley esther addley
Crown suggests 'nominal' costs of £5,000. Defence opposes. Judge: Are u sure? Cd end up costing u a lot more #Assange
ggreenwald Glenn Greenwald
2 key points about Assange that media reports should emphasize: (1) he's been charged with nothing: (2) trial in Sweden will occur in secret
London Court Grants Swedish Request to Extradite Assange
Stefan Wermuth/Reuters
The founder of WikiLeaks, Julian Assange, arriving at the court in London on Thursday.
Mr. Assange, dressed in the blue suit he has worn to previous hearings, sat impassively as the decision was read. He is currently free on bail and the court continued that, subject to conditions which were being discussed.
Judge Howard Riddle, in his ruling, said that allegations brought by two women qualified as extraditable offenses and that the warrant seeking Mr. Assange’s return to Sweden for questioning was valid.
The verdict marks a turning point in the three-month battle in the British courts and the media against what Mr. Assange, his legal team and his celebrity supporters say is a conspiracy to stop WikiLeaks and its campaign to expose government and corporate secrets.
The case has been fought against the backdrop of the group’s highest-profile operation yet — the release of a quarter of a million confidential American diplomatic cables that became the basis of articles by news organizations worldwide, including The New York Times.
WikiLeaks supporters, many of whom contend that the case against Mr. Assange is retribution for the cables’ release, have mobbed courthouses over the course of six acrimonious hearings, chanting, “We love you, Julian.” Mr. Assange was initially denied bail and briefly jailed after defying a judge’s request to provide an address.
Swedish prosecutors argued that Mr. Assange, a 39-year-old Australian, must return to Stockholm to face accusations by two women who say that he sexually abused them last August. Under Sweden’s strict sexual-crimes laws, he is accused of two counts of sexual molestation, one count of unlawful coercion and one count of rape. His accusers, both WikiLeaks volunteers, have said that their sexual encounters with Mr. Assange started out as consensual but turned nonconsensual.
Mr. Assange has said the accusations are “incredible lies,” and he has referred to Sweden as “the Saudi Arabia of feminism.”
He has also denied accusations by the Swedish authorities that he fled the country in September rather than surrender to the police; he says he left Sweden with permission. And he has denounced the leaks of two Swedish police documents that provided graphic details of the accusations.
Mr. Assange, and his lawyers have signaled their intent to take their fight to Britain’s highest courts, and even to the European Court of Human Rights. In adjourning a hearing earlier this month to make his decision, Judge Riddle said with a note of resignation that whatever he decided would “perhaps inevitably be appealed.”
The long and costly legal battle has left Mr. Assange isolated in the country house of a wealthy friend, and he is electronically monitored as a condition of his bail.
During the legal fight, many of his closest colleagues have defected from WikiLeaks, and a dozen of them formed a rival Web site, OpenLeaks. The United States Justice Department, meanwhile, has subpoenaed his Twitter account as part of an investigation that could lead to espionage charges.
In one of the frequent interviews from his friend’s house, Mr. Assange compared himself to the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. In a recorded speech played this month at a rally in Melbourne, Australia, his adopted hometown, he went further, comparing the struggles of WikiLeaks to those of African-Americans who fought for equal rights in the 1950s, of protesters who sought an end to the Vietnam War in the ‘60s and of the feminist and environmental movements. “For the Internet generation,” he said, “this is our challenge, and this is our time.”
Mr. Assange is also working on his autobiography, which he has said will be worth $1.7 million in publishing deals. “I don’t want to write this book, but I have to,” he said in a December interview with The Sunday Times of London, explaining that his legal costs had reached more than $300,000. “I need to defend myself and to keep WikiLeaks afloat.”
The book, he said, will detail his “global struggle to force a new relationship between the people and their governments.” He said he hoped the book, due out in April, “will become one of the unifying documents of our generation.”
This month, in another fund-raising effort, he organized what he called a “dinner for free speech,” encouraging online supporters to donate to his defense and dine with friends while watching a video message he had recorded. On a Web site to promote the idea, where he was pictured holding a wine glass aloft, he was quoted as declaring, “There are four things that cannot be concealed for long, the sun, the moon, the truth — and dessert!”
WikiLeaks, though unable to process and release new material, has continued to post classified United States diplomatic cables from the cache of the more than 250,000 it has obtained. Recent examples have included documents concerning the opulent lifestyle of the family of former President Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali of Tunisia. The documents were widely disseminated during the revolution that ousted Mr. Ben Ali and started a wave of protests in the Arab world.
In recent weeks, some of Mr. Assange’s supporters, eager to see WikiLeaks operating with its founder’s full attention, have been echoing a question asked by a judge at one of the initial hearings in the case. “If he is so keen to clear his name,” the judge, Justice Duncan Ouseley, asked in December, “what stops a voluntary return to Sweden?”
Mr. Assange told friends in Britain he feared that if he returned to Sweden he would be extradited to the United States and perhaps be detained at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, or executed. But one of his former WikiLeaks colleagues said in an interview that he thought Mr. Assange’s reason was more mundane.
The colleague, Daniel Domscheit-Berg, who is one of the OpenLeaks founders, told reporters last week that when Mr. Assange first heard about the sexual abuse allegations in late August, “he was not concerned about the United States.”
“He was very scared of going to prison in Sweden,” Mr. Domscheit-Berg said, “which he thought might happen.” Such charges carry a maximum sentence of four years and no minimum sentence.
Ravi Somaiya @'NY Times'
ravisomaiya Ravi Somaiya
Situation on fair trials in Sweden "more subtle and less dark" than #Assange team argued, says judge. No evidence of breach of human rights
Mark Zuckerberg Comic Book Out Now
"Mark Zuckerberg: Creator of Facebook," a 48-page giant-sized issue written by freelance journalist Jerome Maida and illustrated by Sal Field, is scheduled to hit newsstands, comic book stores and online venues on Wednesday.
"This is a fascinating story," says Maida. "I enjoyed researching it because it's extremely compelling. Think about it. Mark Zuckerberg is the youngest billionaire on the planet and created something that has already had a profound impact on the world. Yet hardly anyone knows much about him. It's amazing."
According to Maida, the script doesn’t shy away from the harsh reputation Zuckerberg earned as a result of his business practices and aloof public persona, but tries to give context to a complex figure.
"Rightly or wrongly, Mark dealt harshly with some people on his way to where he is today", says Maida. "As we see, he left many people feeling betrayed. I try my best to be fair here. No one is totally innocent in this story. I try to represent each of the major players' point of view."
This take on Zuckerberg’s life and career prompted production company Hayden 5 Media to option the script and create an animated film based on the comic book.
According to Todd Wiseman, President of Hayden 5, the proposed film will apply an interpolated rotoscoping technique to give the project a unique comic book aesthetic. This cross between real characters and animated surrounding was used in the movie A Scanner Darkly.
The special edition title retails for $6.99 and is available through comic book shops. To find a comic book store near you go to www.comicshoplocator.com
@Bluewater Productions'
Digital Sampling and Remix Culture: Creativity or Criminality? (w/ Hank Shocklee)
Straight from the archives of NPR’s Science Friday with Ira Flatow, check out Hank Shocklee Discuss Sampling & Remix Culture along with Kembrew McLeod, Associate Professor, University of Iowa & Producer of the Film Copyright Criminals; Flora Lichtman, Multimedia Editor, NPR’s Science Friday; Dean Garfield, President and CEO, Information Technology Industry Council.
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