The Breathing Earth: Interactive Map Tracks Global Emissions in Real Time
Wednesday 25 August 2010
Bob Dylan announces release of 'The Bootleg Series Volume 9 - The Witmark Demos'
Bob Dylan has announced the release details of the latest in his 'Bootleg Series' collections.
The songwriter releases 'The Bootleg Series Volume 9 - The Witmark Demos' on October 18. Featuring two-discs, the 47-tracks were recorded by Dylan for his first music publisher Leeds Music, in January 1962, and his second publisher, M. Witmark & Sons, from 1962 to 1964.
The tracklisting for 'The Bootleg Series Volume 9 - The Witmark Demos' is:
Disc 1
'Man On The Street (Fragment)'
'Hard Times In New York Town'
'Poor Boy Blues
'Ballad For A Friend'
'Rambling, Gambling Willie'
'Talking Bear Mountain Picnic Massacre Blues'
'Standing On The Highway'
'Man On The Street'
'Blowin’ In The Wind'
'Long Ago, Far Away'
'A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall'
'Tomorrow Is A Long Time'
'The Death of Emmett Till'
'Let Me Die In My Footsteps'
'Ballad Of Hollis Brown'
'Quit Your Low Down Ways'
'Baby, I’m In The Mood For You'
'Bound To Lose, Bound To Win'
'All Over You'
'I’d Hate To Be You On That Dreadful Day'
'Long Time Gone'
'Talkin’ John Birch Paranoid Blues'
'Masters Of War'
'Oxford Town'
'Farewell'
Disc 2
'Don't Think Twice, It’s All Right'
'Walkin’ Down The Line'
'I Shall Be Free'
'Bob Dylan’s Blues'
'Bob Dylan’s Dream'
'Boots Of Spanish Leather'
'Walls of Red Wing'
'Girl From The North Country'
'Seven Curses'
'Hero Blues'
'Whatcha Gonna Do?'
'Gypsy Lou'
'Ain’t Gonna Grieve'
'John Brown'
'Only A Hobo'
'When The Ship Comes In'
'The Times They Are A-Changin''
'Paths Of Victory'
'Guess I’m Doing Fine'
'Baby Let Me Follow You Down'
'Mama, You Been On My Mind'
'Mr. Tambourine Man'
'I’ll Keep It With Mine'
The songwriter releases 'The Bootleg Series Volume 9 - The Witmark Demos' on October 18. Featuring two-discs, the 47-tracks were recorded by Dylan for his first music publisher Leeds Music, in January 1962, and his second publisher, M. Witmark & Sons, from 1962 to 1964.
The tracklisting for 'The Bootleg Series Volume 9 - The Witmark Demos' is:
Disc 1
'Man On The Street (Fragment)'
'Hard Times In New York Town'
'Poor Boy Blues
'Ballad For A Friend'
'Rambling, Gambling Willie'
'Talking Bear Mountain Picnic Massacre Blues'
'Standing On The Highway'
'Man On The Street'
'Blowin’ In The Wind'
'Long Ago, Far Away'
'A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall'
'Tomorrow Is A Long Time'
'The Death of Emmett Till'
'Let Me Die In My Footsteps'
'Ballad Of Hollis Brown'
'Quit Your Low Down Ways'
'Baby, I’m In The Mood For You'
'Bound To Lose, Bound To Win'
'All Over You'
'I’d Hate To Be You On That Dreadful Day'
'Long Time Gone'
'Talkin’ John Birch Paranoid Blues'
'Masters Of War'
'Oxford Town'
'Farewell'
Disc 2
'Don't Think Twice, It’s All Right'
'Walkin’ Down The Line'
'I Shall Be Free'
'Bob Dylan’s Blues'
'Bob Dylan’s Dream'
'Boots Of Spanish Leather'
'Walls of Red Wing'
'Girl From The North Country'
'Seven Curses'
'Hero Blues'
'Whatcha Gonna Do?'
'Gypsy Lou'
'Ain’t Gonna Grieve'
'John Brown'
'Only A Hobo'
'When The Ship Comes In'
'The Times They Are A-Changin''
'Paths Of Victory'
'Guess I’m Doing Fine'
'Baby Let Me Follow You Down'
'Mama, You Been On My Mind'
'Mr. Tambourine Man'
'I’ll Keep It With Mine'
Murdoch published Imam Rauf's book on Islam and America
The book closes with an appendix containing a fatwa issued by five Muslim clerics on September 27, 2001, at the request of the most senior Muslim chaplain in the American armed forces. Ending his book with a fatwa! Yes! Cunningly, it’s a “Fatwa Permitting U. S. Muslim Military Personnel to Participate in Afghanistan War Effort.”So not only is the second-largest shareholder of Rupert Murdoch's News Corp. funding Imam Rauf's initiatives in the U.S., but Murdoch himself is responsible for publishing Rauf's theological and political writings.
What’s Right with Islam, by the way, was published by HarperSanFrancisco, which last I looked is owned by Rupert Murdoch.
The fact that conservatives haven't blasted Murdoch's links to Imam Rauf demonstrates the insincerity of their attacks on Imam Rauf and American Muslims. As Gitlin argues (and should be obvious from the book's title), Imam Rauf's book is in fact a celebration of the U.S. Constitution, an embrace of religious freedom and pluralism, and an outright rejection of radical fundamentalism.
Imam Rauf's critics -- like Rick Santorum who last night called him a jihadist -- attack him as being outside of the ideological mainstream of American political and religious thinking, but their claims are without merit. Indeed, the Bush and Obama administrations asked Imam Rauf to represent the United States to the Islamic world precisely because he believes that the United States form of government should be a model for Muslims across the world -- not the other way around.
Indeed, in many respects, Rauf's critics have more in common with the fundamentalist Muslims they claim to be fighting than they do with mainstream Americans -- including Imam Rauf. The critics are the problem. Not Imam Rauf.
Jed Lewison @'Daily Kos'
Billionaire Funder and Fox News Collude in Glenn Beck’s Affront to Martin Luther King’s “I Have A Dream” Speech
Tim Phillips, president of the Americans for Prosperity Foundation, flatly denies that his organization has any partnership with Rupert Murdoch, CEO of Fox News’ parent company, News Corporation. Still, the coincidental evidence keeps piling up.
Take, for instance, the cheapy-cheap deals available through the AFPF Web site for those wishing to travel to Washington, D.C., for the big Glenn Beck event, Restoring Honor — which happens to take place at the Lincoln Memorial on the 47th anniversary of Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech, which took place in the same hallowed location.
Okay, so AFPF doesn’t advertise the deals as being for the Beck event; they just happen to be wrapping their own annual D.C. conference around the Beck event, and will be ferrying attendees to their Defending the American Dream confab to the Beck event. And the buses will conveniently not leave D.C. until the Beck event concludes. (Coincidentally, FreedomWorks, which is using Glenn Beck’s image and endorsement to peddle membership in its Take America Back election campaign, is also hosting a conference the same weekend.)
Just how good are the deals? Well, check this out. (Bear in mind that the Beck event is on Saturday, Aug. 28, and the conference begins on Friday, Aug. 27.) Let’s say you want to travel from Orlando, Florida, and you insist on single occupancy in your hotel. A package that includes the conference registration fee ($99 if purchased separately), transportation, two nights in a good Washington, D.C., hotel, two meals, and transportation back and forth to the Beck event will run you $450. (One of those meals is a dinner banquet staged in honor of the late President Ronald Reagan.) If you choose double occupancy in the hotel, you still get all that (plus a roommate) for $300.
Why don’t we progressives, you ask, get deals like this? Why are we always couch-surfing, carpooling and brown-bagging our meals to get to our events? Well, we don’t have David Koch, the billionaire oil-and-gas-and-financial-derivatives magnate bankrolling our movement. Koch, you’ll recall, chairs the board of the Americans For Prosperity Foundation.
Now, back to Glenn Beck and Rupert Murdoch. Fox will likely tell you that Beck’s event is a Beck, not a Fox, extravaganza. Sure, but what is the source of Beck’s fame? Where does he promote his event? Fox News, of course. Do you really think he’d be doing that without Rupert’s blessing?
One more time: Glenn Beck is Rupert Murdoch’s community organizer.
Last year, at the Americans For Prosperity Foundation’s RightOnline conference in Pittsburgh, I noticed that one-third of the speakers on the roster at the conference plenary were paid commentators or full-time employees of Murdoch’s News Corp. So I asked AFPF President Tim Phillips if he had a partnership with Murdoch. He seemed a bit thrown by the question.
“We have someone from Fox News?” he asked.
“Well, Fox News Channel contributors,” I replied.
“OK. So, they’re not on the payroll of Fox News. Do any of those guys get money from Fox News?”
Actually two of the five News Corp.-affiliated speakers were paid contributors to Fox at the time (Michelle Malkin and Jim Pinkerton), while two (Stephen Moore and John Fund) were — and still are — full-time employees of the Wall Street Journal, which is also owned by News Corp.
What Koch and Murdoch share in common is a brutally anti-regulatory agenda for big business, one that subjects the well-being of the everyday person to the whims of shareholders and CEOs. If what it takes to maintain the loyalty of Tea Party ground troops is a subsidized trip to D.C. to attend a fun-filled event designed as an act of race-baiting, well, then, that’s a small price to pay to further the enactment of an agenda that could reap billions for the men who are advancing it.
Adele Stan @'AlterNet'
RIAA: The DMCA Isn’t Working
This is true, and is one of the reasons why the Online Copyright Infringement Liability Limitation Act was passed, creating a safe harbor for online service providers. One cannot reasonably expect Google to monitor all searches, Facebook to monitor all photos, or Rapidshare to monitor all uploads, but all of these online service providers must remove infringing material should they receive a notification claiming infringement from a copyright holder.
For some time now, the RIAA has been pushing ISPs to start policing their users. “We’re working on [discussions with broadband providers], and we’d like to extend that kind of relationship–not just to ISPs, but [also to] search engines, payment processors, advertisers,” Sherman says.
Of course, YouTube disagrees with the RIAA. “It’s our view that the DMCA is functioning exactly the way Congress intended it to (…) Congress was prescient. They struck the right balance,” says Lance Kavanaugh, product counsel for YouTube.
As it is, the DMCA protects online service providers — especially smaller ones — from living in fear of lawsuits and having to spend money and resources to patrol for infringing material. The most important question, however, is whether private corporations such as ISPs (which can monitor all of your online communication) should really be responsible for figuring out who’s breaking the law.
Stan Schroeder @'Mashable'
exilestreet @ggreenwald Julian Assange, the founder of Wikileaks, should be nominated for Australian Of The Year http://bit.ly/9L8IjP #WikiLeaks
Tuesday 24 August 2010
Shed - RA Podcast
Tracklist:
Low Density Matter – Blue Steel [Keysound]
Becoming Real – Fast Motion (DVA’s Hi Emotions Remix) [Ramp]
Cosmin TRG – See Other People (Falty DL Remix) [Rushhour]
Delphic – Doubt (Kyle Hall Remix)
Duncan Powell – Pushin’ (Falty DL Remix) [2nd Drop]
Andrea – Got To Forget [Daphne]
T++ – Cropped [Honest Jon's]
Cosmin TRG – Béton Brut [Hemlock]
Screed – Side [Synthetic Catalogue]
Robert Hood – Towns That Disappeared Completely [M Plant]
Jason Fine – Many To Many (Ben Klock Remix) [Kontra]
Rok & Jonzon – Sequential Polka [International Gigolo]
Silent Phase – Fire (Rewired Mix) [R&S]
Eliphino – Let Me Love You Forever [Brownswood]
Sepalcure – Love Pressure [Hotflush]
downkoad link
(left click to play, right click to save)
Shed - Second Skin
Monday 23 August 2010
The string bag and the octopus: a political parable
So who, in this crap-shoot, is likely to side with whom?
Certain points of tension made themselves apparent immediately yesterday.
Bob Katter feels that Warren Truss has been mean to him on television, as recently as election night.
Tony Windsor said he would work with anyone apart from Barnaby Joyce, whom he considers to be a "fool".
Rob Oakeshott, while restraining himself from open expressions of hostility, has ominously declared the election result to be a "stimulus package for democracy".
To assume that these men - conservative regional MPs - would automatically show a tendency to flock with their own kind is to miss something very central to human behaviour.
Did you ever wonder why it is that, of all the MPs who could have defended the right-winger Kevin Rudd against the ambitions of Julia Gillard, his staunchest allies - at the end - were members of the party's hard Left?
The answer is that no-one despises a left-winger like another left-winger.
Internecine hatred has a purity and intensity which far outstrips the limp-wristed attempts at hostility essayed by those whom Fate has ignorantly decreed to be adversaries.
Just as the geo-political rule in Europe dictates that countries should reserve their loftiest contempt for states with whom they share a direct border, Australian politicians tend viscerally to despise their ideological helpmeets.
Granted - this can be very confusing.
An uninitiated person might expect, for example, the newly-elected Independent National Party MP Tony Crook to be naturally sympathetic to the Coalition.
But Mr Crook has just displaced Wilson Tuckey.
And if you think that there is any more poisonous hatred than that which exists between a regional sitting Liberal and a National Party type sniffing round his electorate, then you haven't been paying attention.
Of all the cross-chamber hostilities occasioned by the Rudd government's first term, the only point at which one MP actually established a physical chokehold on another came in a Coalition joint party room meeting last year, in which the Liberal MP Alby Schultz succumbed to teasing about being stalked by the National Party and lunged at Chris Pearce, a talented concert pianist who was at that time the Member for Aston.
Bob Katter, who once upon a time was a National Party MP, now cannot stand his former National colleagues.
He views them as cats' paws to the Liberal Party.
Mr Katter's contempt is heartily reciprocated, and the strongest resistance within the Coalition to the prospect of constructing a formal alliance with him will doubtless come from within the ranks of the junior Coalition partner.
The three conservative independents have announced their determination to stick together.
Labor hopes to pick at least one of them off, and has already reportedly offered Mr Oakeshott a ministry.
Like accomplices under intense police interrogation, the three may prove vulnerable to suspicion and paranoia in the days and weeks ahead, Labor hopes.
Mr Crook, the ink still drying on his ballot papers, has hastened to associate himself with the independent crossbenchers, letting it be known that he would offer substantial cooperation in return for about $850 million in regional spending.
This brings us to the matter of demands.
All three of the "conservative" independents have nominated broadband and regional telecommunications services as a major issue.
Mr Oakeshott has indicated that he would like to see a legislated emissions trading scheme.
Mr Katter would like to see more made of ethanol.
Of the three, there is no doubt that Mr Katter's shopping list is likely to be the most baroque.
He is extremely concerned about Filipino bananas, and yesterday signalled his frustration with the excessive behavioural regulation of regional Australia.
"We're not allowed to fish much at all. We're not allowed to go camping or shooting - or even boiling the billy. We've got a terrible problem with deadly flying foxes. They're going to kill many more people than taipan snakes do in Australia. Rural Australia is closing down."
Mr Katter has never been more potent than he is right now.
Both major parties knew this election result would be close, but who among them would seriously have thought that by Monday this week they'd be hunkered down nutting out lateral-minded ways of bringing the deadly flying fox problem under control, possibly by means of issuing hunting licences to the Katter clan, or distributing baits concealed in discontinued Filipino bananas?
In 2002, South Australia's Mike Rann - inches from minority government - found himself negotiating with the former Liberal Party MP Peter Lewis, and anxiously addressing all of the concerns dear to Mr Lewis' heart, including the spread of a noxious plant called branched broomrape.
Despite the fact that half of the Labor caucus had never heard of it ("I thought it was some sort of complicated naval disciplinary technique", confessed one MP), branched broomrape eradication became a top priority very quickly.
The lone Greens MP Adam Bandt has indicated that he is more likely to side with Labor.
Of Andrew Wilkie, the former spy and former Greens candidate who seems a good chance to whip the Tasmanian seat of Denison from the clutches of the ALP, not too much is yet known; he says he is prepared to talk to anyone, but the long war he fought against the former Howard government over Iraq would suggest that - in the absence of other factors - his sympathies might lie elsewhere.
If the ABC's Antony Green (an election junkie who must be the only person in Australia who is actually pleased to learn that Election 2010 is poised to go on forever) is correct and the seat score ends up with the Coalition holding 73 seats and the Labor Party 72, what happens next?
If Labor can secure the Greens MP and Andrew Wilkie and chisel off two of the rural independents, it could construct a minority government.
If the Coalition can bump up its broadband offer, declare a foreign banana crusade and promise to keep Barnaby Joyce in a cupboard, it might be able to corral Windsor, Oakeshott and Katter and thus ensure an Abbott in the Lodge.
And if neither is able to construct a durable agreement, then it's back to the polls we go.
Anabbel Crabb @'The Drum'
Mexican Police To Patrol NY?
In a series of events which has caused wide notice and a storm of protests, the government of Mexico, through its consulate in New York in the United Nations, has announced it will begin patrolling the New York City borough of Staten Island to “safeguard” its nationals there.
The actions of Mexico come after a series of incidents the Mexican government terms “bias attacks.”
Ironically, these so-called “hate crimes” have been perpetrated by blacks and Asians, indicative of rising tensions between various ethnic groups in the U.S. The Catholic Examiner and NBC New York both reported the Mexican government’s intention to mount surveillance, patrol and police in and around the Staten Island community of Port Richmond, which in recent years has seen a large influx of Mexican illegal immigrants.
Since the Examiner’s coverage, however, councilor officials, city hall and the local press have begun to carefully de-emphasize any possible role of Mexican law enforcement or military in efforts to secure the neighborhood.
Mexican officials have set up a neighborhood office and a local phone hot line for their nationals to report “bias incidents”—regardless as to whether they are in the United States legally.
New York City police had been monitoring the situation and investigating the reported assaults as local crimes. The actions of the Mexican government have caused Mayor Michael Bloomberg and Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly to order what many observers say is the most concentrated police mobilization since the World Trade Center disaster.
The main street of Port Richmond was swiftly transformed into what the New York Times described as a war zone like atmosphere with over 120 newly assigned officers, high-intensity night lighting, two huge “sky tower” police observation posts, frequent helicopter overflights and 20 police cars to watch the center of the relatively small neighborhood. Several long-term residents described it as a constant hornet’s nest of activity.
Both published reports and residents say that reports of fights between Mexicans and other groups began years ago, in the late 1990s or early 2000s. Many charge the present round of incidents started in 2003 with one loss of life in 2006, which might not even be connected to the present series of events.
At a major community gathering held at the historic St. Phillips Baptist Church, speakers addressed the current situation in the neighborhood and the borough, while Mexican councilor officials looked on.
But while the Richmond anti-violence organization and assorted left-leaning journalists who attended may have been expecting a mea culpa from local residents, what they got instead was a blast of community push-back. Speaker after speaker from the black community told of horrendous conditions the largely illegal immigrants had brought to their community. Speakers described the pattern in communities affected by an influx of illegals.
Community residents, many of whom are black first-time homeowners, told of constant disputes, alcohol and drug sales, late night disruptions, trespassing and public urination.
Others in the audience, who declined to testify, spoke of men wearing clothes bearing symbols of La Raza, Aztlan and other militant pro-Mexican groups.
They also spoke of repeated attempts to summon the state liquor authority’s enforcement agency to deal with the surging illegal liquor sales in the area, with little in the way of a response.
Jeff Smith @'American Free Press'
Proms 2010: Cornelius Cardew interview - what does a bun sound like?
This year’s Proms season offers plenty of interesting premieres. But none has aroused such puzzled curiosity as Bun No 1, which is being performed by the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra next Friday. Titles normally offer some clue, but what on earth would a musical bun be like? Sweet and sticky, perhaps, or circular? Its composer Cornelius Cardew offered a few clues. “It’s filling but not substantial … it’s a stone bun soaked in milk … I thought of it as a nice present to an orchestra, the way one gives a bun to an elephant.”
This might suggest Cardew was one of those amiable musical jokers like Gerard Hoffnung, but far from it. Cardew had a sharp sense of humour, but it’s hard to think of any composer more serious and piercingly self-critical. He was a kind of Wittgenstein of music, constantly setting out reasons in his diary for acting in a certain way, testing his convictions against reality, and then adjusting or even rejecting them outright.
That intimidating poise and total self-possession showed itself young. By the mid-Fifties, when he was a student at the Royal College of Music, Cardew was already alarming his professors with his passion for European avant-garde composers such as Stockhausen. He was phenomenally gifted musically, and once learnt the guitar from scratch in two weeks so he could take part in the UK premiere of Pierre Boulez’s Le Marteau san Maître, which has one of the hardest guitar parts ever written. Then an encounter with the more freewheeling avant-gardism of American composers sent him off in a new direction. He spent much of the early Sixties working on a vast graphic score entitled Treatise, as beautiful to look at as it is puzzling to hear (graphic art was another of Cardew’s talents, which provided him with a living for several years).
But even before he finished Treatise, Cardew was chaffing at the self-enclosed, airless quality of modernism, and hankering for a form of music-making that would be more communal and democratic. With a few comrades-in-arms he founded the Scratch Orchestra, a determinedly amateur group dedicated to creating its own repertoire and ethos, often through improvisation. Cardew’s biggest piece for the group was The Great Learning, a large-scale setting for chorus and players of writings by Confucius.
It was The Great Learning that led to Cardew’s first encounter with the Proms. It was not a happy one. In 1972 he and the Scratch Orchestra were invited by William Glock, a great champion of the avant-garde, to perform part of The Great Learning in that year’s Prom season.
Glock naturally imagined he was going to get the original version, but Cardew had moved on yet again. He was now a convinced Maoist, with a scorn for anything that smacked of bourgeois individualism. He’d drastically revised The Great Learning, spicing the Confucian sentiments of the original with new slogans, such as “Revolution is the Great Learning of the present. A revolution is not a dinner party; it is an insurrection, an act of violence by which one class overthrows another”.
Glock politely declined the new version and asked for the original, but Cardew refused point-bank. Eventually a compromise was reached. But the episode was a turning point for Cardew. From then until his untimely death (caused by a hit-and-run driver in 1981) he turned his back on the “normal” musical world and devoted himself to writing revolutionary songs and organising political rallies.
So which Cardew will we hear in Bun No 1? The free-form graphic composer or the advocate of democratic improvisation? Bun No 1 dates from 1965, a period when Cardew was still in thrall to European modernism. According to Cardew’s biographer John Tilbury, it’s well worth reviving. “The piece was written in Rome when Cardew was studying orchestration,” he says, “and there’s never a dull moment. It’s like a series of very strong, vivid images, not connected to each other, and it has a strong granitic quality, with piercing woodwind lines somewhat like Varese.” So not sweet and sticky, but not insubstantial either.
Cornelius Cardew’s Bun No 1 will be performed by the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra conducted by Ilan Volkov, with music by John Cage, Howard Skempton and Morton Feldman, at the BBC Proms on August 20 at the Royal Albert Hall and on BBC Radio 3
Don Letts - This much I know
The evolution of the Notting Hill Carnival traces the evolution of multiculturalism – it's a cultural barometer. But it's also in danger of losing its conscience. I want to remind people that it was something born of struggle.
For my parents Carnival was a reminder of home, and somewhere they perhaps wanted to return to.
The black British youth was confused when I was growing up. We'd try to emulate American blacks or our Jamaican brothers, but we were somewhere in between.
Everything I learned about my culture came through reggae. The first time I heard about [political activist] Marcus Garvey was through music, not school.
I met Malcolm McLaren in 1972. He dressed as a teddy boy then. He connected the counter-cultural dots for me – made me aware that I could be part of it, too.
There were two shops on the King's Road in the 70s that attracted disaffected youth: my shop, Acme Attractions, and Vivienne Westwood and Malcolm's shop, Sex. Friendships were made by people who were attracted by their differences.
When punk came along, everyone picked up guitars. I wanted to pick something up too, so I picked up a camera and reinvented myself as a film-maker.
The downside of affordable technology is mediocrity. Back in the 70s every three minutes of film cost £20. Now you can get a 90-minute digital tape for a fiver. The price used to weed out people who were just fucking about.
Youth culture in the west is increasingly conservative. Music has become a soundtrack for consumerism. It feels like punk never happened.
Racial problems are more complicated now. I've got mates who moan about Polish people stealing their work. I'm like, "You can't say that. That's what people said about our parents."
I gave a lecture last week and the kids in the audience said, "Don, you sound like an angry old man." I said, "It's because you kids aren't bloody angry enough."
I was never a herd person: I was always a freak. I just refused to be defined by my colour.
Gareth Grundy @'The Guardian'
Sunday 22 August 2010
the buzz feeling by OG kush
01 the jam- start!
02 the specials - nite klub
03 the selecter - too much pressure
04 the beat - whine & grine/stand down margaret
05 the bodysnatchers - easy life
06 the specials - too much too young
07 the selecter - my collie (not a dog)
08 the specials - a message to you rudy
09 the beat - ranking full stop
10 the police - voices inside my head
11 aswad - drum & bass line
12 ub40 - the buzz feeling
13 strictly rockers - blacka black dub
nice 2Tone mix
@ subnav
Julian Assange: WikiLeaks founder hits out at rape smears as Swedish warrant for his arrest is withdrawn
Julian Assange, the secretive founder of WikiLeaks, the website behind the biggest leak of US military documents in history, was the subject of conspiracy theories last night after prosecutors withdrew a warrant for his arrest in connection with rape and molestation allegations.
On Friday a spokeswoman for the Swedish prosecutors' office in Stockholm confirmed an arrest warrant for Assange had been issued in absentia and urged him to "contact police so that he can be confronted with the suspicions".
According to Expressen, a Swedish newspaper, the 39-year-old Australian had been wanted in connection with two separate incidents. The first involved a woman from Stockholm who reportedly accused him of "molestation". The second involved a woman from Enköping, about an hour's drive west from Stockholm, who had apparently accused Assange of rape. The warrant was withdrawn yesterday afternoon.
Assange claimed he was the victim of a smear campaign. He denied the charges on WikiLeaks's Twitter page, saying they were "without basis and their issue at this moment is deeply disturbing".
It is believed that Assange, who has no known address and spends much of his time travelling to ensure a low profile, knew both women well. The pair had been reluctant to go to the police with their complaints, according to sources in Sweden. But the news that Swedish police were investigating the affair was leaked to Expressen, prompting further claims that a smear campaign had been orchestrated by foreign interests keen to discredit him.
Gavin MacFadyen, director of the Centre for Investigative Journalism, and a friend of Assange, said: "A lot of us who had any notion of what he was doing expected this sort of thing to happen at least a week ago. I'm amazed it has taken them this long to get it together. This is how smears work. The charges are made and then withdrawn and the damage is done."
WikiLeaks has courted controversy since July when it posted 77,000 Afghan War documents online, leading to claims it had put the lives of troops and security sources at risk.
Assange had been in Sweden, home to some of WikiLeaks's internet servers, to oversee the release of thousands more classified documents relating to US military operations.
Last week he announced at a press conference in Stockholm that his website was set to publish a final batch of 15,000 documents on the war in Afghanistan in "a couple of weeks".
"It seems an unusual time to embark on a career of multiple rape," said Guardian journalist David Leigh, who has worked closely with Assange over the recent WikiLeaks Afghanistan documents. "He certainly didn't come across as a violent man, not in the least. Julian was clearly preparing to release more sensitive documents."
There had been speculation that Assange's arrest would prompt WikiLeaks to post a secret code that would decrypt a massive "insurance file" on its site, the contents of which are the subject of frenzied speculation. The file dwarfs the size of all the other files on the WikiLeaks Afghanistan page combined, prompting claims that it contains a huge amount of top-secret material. But sceptics believe the file is simply an elaborate bluff and contains nothing revelatory.
Kristinn Hrafnsson, a colleague, of Assange's, said he had not known of the charges "until he read them in the rightwing tabloid Expressen". Hrafnsson said: "There are powerful organisations who want to do harm to WikiLeaks."
Last week Assange claimed the Pentagon was ready to talk to WikiLeaks about its unreleased documents. "We received contact through our lawyers that the General Counsel [of the Pentagon] says now they want to discuss the issue," he said.
A Pentagon spokesman said a phone call had been arranged with the WikiLeaks lawyer but no conversation had taken place. He denied the Pentagon was willing to co-operate with WikiLeaks. "These documents are property of the United States government," he said. "The unauthorised release of them threatens the lives of coalition forces as well as Afghan nationals."
Yesterday the Wall Street Journal claimed both the US Defence and Justice departments were exploring legal options for prosecuting Assange and others on grounds that they encouraged the theft of government property.
Jamie Doward and Tracy McVeigh@'The Guardian'
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