WELLINGTON, New Zealand: He emerged on the information security scene in the 1990s as a “famous teenage hacker” following what he called an ” itinerant minstrel childhood” beginning in Townsville, Australia. But the story of Julian Assange, eccentric founder of secret-spilling website WikiLeaks, never became less strange — or less polarizing — after he jolted the United States and its allies by revealing secrets of how America conducted its wars.
Since Assange drew global attention in 2010 for his work with prominent news outlets to publish war logs and diplomatic cables that detailed US military wrongdoing in Iraq and Afghanistan, among other matters, he has provoked fervor among his admirers and loathing from his detractors with little in-between — seen either as a persecuted hero for open and transparent government, or a villain who put American lives at risk by aiding its enemies, and prompting fraught debates about state secrecy and freedom of the press.
Assange, 52, grew up attending “37 schools” before he was 14 years old, he wrote on his now-deleted blog. The details in it are not independently verifiable and some of Assange’s biographical details differ between accounts and interviews. A memoir published against his will in 2011, after he fell out with his ghostwriter, described him as the son of roving puppeteers, and he told The New Yorker in 2010 that his mother’s itinerant lifestyle barred him from a consistent or complete education. But by the age of 16, in 1987, he had his first modem, he told the magazine. Assange would burst forth as an accomplished hacker who with his friends broke into networks in North America and Europe.
In 1991, aged 20, Assange hacked a Melbourne terminal for a Canadian telecommunications company, leading to his arrest by the Australian Federal Police and 31 criminal charges. After pleading guilty to some counts, he avoided jail time after the presiding judge attributed his crimes to merely “intelligent inquisitiveness and the pleasure of being able to – what’s the expression? – surf through these various computers.”
He later studied mathematics and physics at university, but did not complete a degree. By 2006, when he founded WikiLeaks, Assange’s delight at being able to traverse locked computer systems seemingly for fun developed into a belief that, as he wrote on his blog, “only revealed injustice can be answered; for man to do anything intelligent he has to know what’s actually going on.”
In the year of WikiLeaks’ explosive 2010 release of half a million documents about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the non-profit organization’s website was registered in Sweden and its legal entity in Iceland. Assange was “living in airports,” he told The New Yorker; he claimed his media company, with no paid staff, had hundreds of volunteers.
He called his work a kind of “scientific journalism,” Assange wrote in a 2010 op-ed in The Australian newspaper, in which readers could check reporting against the original documents that had prompted a story. Among the most potent in the cache of files published by WikiLeaks was video of a 2007 Apache helicopter attack by American forces in Baghdad that killed 11 people, including two Reuters journalists.
Assange was not anti-war, he wrote in The Australian.
“But there is nothing more wrong than a government lying to its people about those wars, then asking these same citizens to put their lives and their taxes on the line for those lies,” he said. “If a war is justified, then tell the truth and the people will decide whether to support it.”
US prosecutors later said documents published by Assange included the names of Afghans and Iraqis who provided information to American and coalition forces, while the diplomatic cables he released exposed journalists, religious leaders, human rights advocates and dissidents in repressive countries.
Assange said in a 2010 interview that it was “regrettable” that sources disclosed by WikiLeaks could be harmed, prosecutors said. Later, after a State Department legal adviser informed him of the risk to “countless innocent individuals” compromised by the leaks, Assange said he would work with mainstream news organizations to redact the names of individuals. WikiLeaks did hide some names but then published 250,000 cables a year later without hiding the identities of people named in the papers.
Weeks after the release of the largest document cache in 2010, a Swedish prosecutor issued an arrest warrant for Assange based on one woman’s allegation of rape and another’s allegation of molestation.
Assange has always denied the accusations and, from Britain, fought efforts to extradite him to Sweden for questioning. He decried the allegations as a smear campaign and an effort to move him to a jurisdiction where he might be extradited to the US
When his appeal against the extradition to Sweden failed, he breached his bail imposed in Britain and presented himself to the Ecuadorian Embassy in London, where he claimed asylum on the grounds of political persecution. There followed seven years in self-exile inside the embassy — and one of the most unusual chapters in an already strange tale.
Refusing to go outside, where British police awaited him around the clock, Assange made occasional forays onto the embassy’s balcony to address supporters.
With a sunlamp and running machine helping to preserve his health, he told The Associated Press and other reporters in 2013, he remained in the news due to a stream of celebrity visitors, including Lady Gaga and the designer Vivienne Westwood. Even his cat became famous.
He also continued to run WikiLeaks and mounted an unsuccessful Australian senate campaign in 2013 with the newly founded WikiLeaks party. Before a constant British police presence around the embassy was removed in 2015, it cost UK taxpayers millions of dollars.
But relations with his host country soured, and the Ecuadorian Embassy severed his Internet access after posts Assange made on social media. In 2019, his hosts revoked his asylum, allowing British police to arrest him.
Ecuador’s President Lenin Moreno said he decided to evict Assange from the embassy after “repeated violations to international conventions and daily-life protocols.” He later lashed out at him during a speech in Quito, calling the Australian native a “spoiled brat” who treated his hosts with disrespect.
Assange was arrested and jailed on a charge of breaching bail conditions and spent the next five years in prison as he continued to fight his extradition to the United States.
In 2019, the US government unsealed an indictment against Assange and added further charges over WikiLeaks’ publication of classified documents. Prosecutors said he conspired with US Army intelligence analyst Chelsea Manning to hack into a Pentagon computer and release secret diplomatic cables and military files on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Manning had served seven years of a 35-year military sentence before receiving a commutation from then-President Barack Obama.
At the time, Australia’s then-Prime Minister Scott Morrison said he had no plans to intervene in Assange’s case, calling it a matter for the US The same year, Swedish prosecutors dropped the rape allegation against Assange because too much time had elapsed since the accusation was made over nine years earlier.
As the case over his extradition wound through the British courts over the following years, Assange remained in Belmarsh Prison, where, his wife told the BBC on Tuesday, he was in a “terrible state” of health.
Assange married his partner, Stella Moris, in jail in 2022, after a relationship that began during Assange’s years in the Ecuadorian Embassy. Assange and the South Africa-born lawyer have two sons, born in 2017 and 2019.
Who is Julian Assange, the polarizing founder of the secret-spilling website WikiLeaks?
https://arab.news/bwgv9
Who is Julian Assange, the polarizing founder of the secret-spilling website WikiLeaks?
- Assange drew global attention in 2010 publishing war logs and diplomatic cables detailing US military wrongdoing in Iraq and Afghanistan
- He is seen either as a persecuted hero for open and transparent government, or a villain who put American lives at risk
Monsoon frees Indian capital from heatwave, wreaks havoc at Delhi airport
- One dead after roof collapses in heavy rains at Indira Gandhi airport
- Aviation minister says safety checks to be conducted at airports across the country
NEW DELHI: The monsoon reached the Indian capital on Friday after two months of severe heatwaves, with heavy rains wreaking havoc at Delhi airport and grounding domestic flights.
Prolonged extreme heat roiled parts of South Asia, affecting some of the world’s most densely populated regions in May and June. In India it hit especially the country’s north — home to more than 400 million people — including Delhi, with its 30 million inhabitants.
Until last week, temperatures in the Indian capital still soared above 45 degrees Celsius, as it suffered a water crisis requiring tankers to be used for distribution when water taps ran dry in parts of the city.
The Indian Meteorological Department said on Friday morning that the monsoon had advanced into the entire Delhi region, as heavy rains lashed the city. killing one person whenr the roof of a domestic flight terminal building at Indira Gandhi International Airport collapsed under the downpour.
At least eight people were injured.
“As a result, all departures have been temporarily suspended and all check-in counters have been closed till further notice,” the Ministry of Civil Aviation said in a statement.
Aviation Minister Ram Mohan Naidu Kinjarapu, said he was “personally” monitoring the collapse and announced compensation of 2 million rupees ($24,000) to the family of the person who was killed in the accident, and 300,000 rupees for the injured.
“I will see that a thorough examination of the terminal structure is conducted by experts to ensure safety,” he said. “This is taken as a very serious incident, not just in this airport, but across the country.”
Friday’s downpour has pushed the city into chaos and several main roads were inundated.
Rains are forecast to continue for more than a week.
“The monsoon has arrived. (For) the next eight to 10 days, it’s going to be rainy. Possibly tomorrow or day after, it could be another deluge in Delhi,” G.P. Sharma, chief forecaster at Skymet, India’s leading weather and agriculture risk consultancy, told Arab News.
“We can say that the heatwave is over ... now the temperature is 37 and it will further drop.”
Sharma predicted that hot days will, however, return in July.
“Once the temperature reaches 40 degrees, and if it is 4.5 degrees above the normal, then it is called a heatwave. It does happen in July also, even in August,” he said.
“(But) you will not find the temperature exceeding 45 or 46 — what we saw in May and early June.”
Russian missile strike damages residential building in Ukraine’s Dnipro
- Dnipro has been regularly targeted by missile and drone strikes since Russia
KYIV: A Russian missile strike damaged a nine-story residential building in the central Ukrainian city of Dnipro on Friday, causing a number of casualties, the regional governor said.
A photograph published by Governor Serhiy Lysak on the Telegram messaging app and other images circulated on social media showed a badly damaged building that had smoke rising from a gaping hole in its upper four storys.
Dnipro, which had a pre-war population of almost one million people, is a major Ukrainian city that lies on the road to the east of the country where the most intense fighting with Russian forces is raging.
It has been regularly targeted by missile and drone strikes since Russia launched its February 2022 invasion. Russia denies targeting civilians and civilian infrastructure, but thousands of people have been killed.
Arab analysts pan US presidential debate for ‘lack of substance’ on Middle East issues
- Commentators say there was ‘little actual debate on the big issues around US foreign policy’
- Believe event was notable for a lack of vision, personal attacks, and lackluster performances
ATLANTA, GEORGIA: Prominent US-based Arab commentators have reacted to Thursday night’s debate between President Joe Biden and challenger Donald Trump with a mixture of disapproval and disappointment, saying that the first head to head of the election campaign “lacked substance.”
Biden and Trump took part in a debate hosted by CNN at the network’s Atlanta headquarters without a studio audience present and in a format that cut microphones when candidates exceeded their speaking time or interrupted one another.
Amal Mudallali, a former Lebanese journalist and diplomat serving as the permanent representative of Lebanon to the UN, was disappointed by the performance of both candidates, calling it “the saddest debate I’ve ever seen in my life in America.
“It was not really a debate,” Mudallali told Arab News. “It was just name calling, and it was personal attacks.”
She added: “Even when you had questions about very important issues, the answers were either the candidate stumbling or the other one changing the subject or not answering the question.”
Indeed, many of the few exchanges on Middle East issues appeared to be personal attacks, lacking in depth and genuine policy discussion.
During the debate, Trump criticized Biden’s border policy, claiming it allowed terrorists into the US. “We have the largest number of terrorists coming into our country right now,” he said.
“All terrorists all over the world, not just in South America, all over the world. They come from the Middle East, everywhere, all over the world. They’re pouring in. And this guy just left it open.”
Trump also highlighted the people his administration had killed while he was president, including Daesh leader Abu Bakr Al-Baghdadi and Iran’s Quds Force commander Qasem Soleimani.
Biden fired back at Trump, saying: “Iran attacked American troops, and he didn’t do a thing.”
Trump also claimed Hamas would never have mounted the Oct. 7 attack on Israel had he been president because the Palestinian militant group’s Iranian backers would not have had the means under his strict sanctions regime.
“Israel would have never been invaded in a million years by Hamas. You know why? Because Iran was broke with me,” he said. “I wouldn’t let anybody do business with them. They ran out of money. They were broke. They had no money for Hamas. They had no money for anything. No money for terror.”
The approach to US policy on Iran does appear to be an area in which Biden and Trump differ, with the former preferring to try and contain Tehran’s nuclear ambitions through the Obama-era deal he helped broker and the latter favoring a “maximum pressure” campaign.
“The point of greatest difference between a President Trump versus a President Biden is certainly Iran,” Firas Maksad, a senior fellow at the Middle East Institute, told Arab News.
“One favors more pressure and containment, while the other prefers diplomacy and attempting to accommodate Tehran’s regional ambitions.”
Given the tone of the debate, Mudallali felt that neither contender won.
“There is no winner in this debate,” she said. “There’s only one loser, and it’s the United States of America that does not have a better candidate or better candidates that rise to its role in the world, to its importance, to its capability.”
Mudallali said that what “little was discussed” about the conflict in Ukraine and violence in the Middle East, including the war in Gaza and the armed exchanges between Israel and Hezbollah along the Lebanese border, was “the most disappointing part” of the debate.
“At a time when you have two major conflicts in the world, in Europe and in the Middle East, where you have thousands of people dying in Gaza, 37,000, and thousands and thousands of people in Ukraine, you see that a foreign policy debate in this debate was shallow. It was nonexistent,” she said.
“There was no debate, no vision for America’s role for peace, for how we’re going to end these wars, how we’re going to finish this tragedy that’s going on. It was really, very, very sad to see that, to see that there is no real foreign policy debate.
“There is no attempt to present a vision for the day after or the next day in the world, and how America and its role can contribute to ending these two conflicts.”
Rana Abtar, a Washington D.C.-based talk show host for Asharq News, echoed the view of many commentators, saying that the debate had, above all, shone a spotlight on Biden’s limitations as a candidate.
“It was obvious during this debate that President Biden was struggling with his speech and his performance,” Abtar told Arab News. “This will definitely not help him with the voters who have serious doubts and questions about his age.”
However, Abtar said that Trump’s performance also had its shortcomings. “Trump, as usual, had a better performance. But he misstated a lot of facts,” she said. “This will not help him with independent voters. He needs their votes in order to win this election cycle.”
Abtar said that the debate was heavily focused on domestic issues. “As expected, we heard a lot about the economy,” she said. “This is the number one topic that the American voter cares about.
“We heard a lot of talk about immigration, a lot of attacks from President Trump on Biden, on the Biden administration’s performance when it comes to immigration, and we heard a lot of talk about abortion. This is mainly to attract the female vote. Both Trump and Biden are trying to win the female vote in order to also win the election in November.
“What was interesting also was a focus on the vote of African Americans, and this is also a very important vote for both candidates to win the election in November.”
As a result of the focus on domestic issues, Abtar said that neither candidate delved substantively into foreign affairs.
“Both candidates were asked a lot of questions regarding foreign policy,” she said. “We heard a lot of talk about Russia and Ukraine.
“Trump, as expected, attacked President Biden when it comes to his policy toward Russia. He claimed the war in Ukraine wouldn’t have happened on his watch. In return, Biden attacked back, and he talked about the threats of Trump leaving NATO during his presidency.
“But the main issue that was presented was obviously the Gaza war, and Trump wasn’t very clear on his stance regarding a Palestinian state.”
Abtar said that Biden was likewise vague on his Middle East stance, leaving regional watchers none the wiser about the likely direction the administration will take should the incumbent be returned to office.
“When it comes to Biden, he talked about his plan of a ceasefire, of the release of the hostages, but also his plan wasn’t clear in his statements,” said Abtar.
“So, in reality, we heard two very vague statements from the candidates, from the current president and the ex-president, without having anything substantial, any policy.”
Referring to the Biden administration’s Gaza peace plan, first presented in May but yet to be accepted by Israel and Hamas, Abtar said that little clue was given about potential next steps.
“Although Biden presented this plan, and this proposal, it seems that it has reached a dead end,” she said. “The answers were not clear in that regard.”
Highlighting his peace plan during the debate, Biden said “the first stage is to treat the hostages for a ceasefire” and the “second phase is a ceasefire with additional conditions.”
He went on to say that he was supplying Israel with everything they needed, minus a 2000-pound bomb, because “they don’t work very well in populated areas. They kill a lot of innocent people. We are providing Israel with all the weapons they need and when they need them.”
Joyce Karam, a veteran journalist and senior news editor at Al-Monitor, was likewise struck by the lackluster performance from Biden.
“This was a very bad debate for President Joe Biden,” she told Arab News. “I can tell you as someone who had interviewed Biden when he was vice president and covered him in previous races, and had seen him in multiple debates, this was definitely his worst.
“The decline in his performance was just obvious — the voice, the style, the delivery. The American president, he looked frail and he just looked weak.”
Karam believes that Trump came out on top in part due to the weakness of Biden’s performance.
“There is a consensus among observers that Donald Trump won this debate, and won it handily, not because he offered popular policies or visionary ideas, but because Biden was incoherent,” she said.
“You just couldn’t understand sometimes what he (Biden) was saying, and he just couldn’t finish a sentence.”
The question among many commentators now is whether the Democratic Party will rally behind Biden’s candidacy or seek a last-minute change to their nominee to run for the presidency in November.
“I’m not sure that these two men (Biden and Trump) will debate again, or that Biden will ultimately be the Democratic nominee,” said Karam.
“The chatter has already started on Biden perhaps forgoing a second term and announcing that he has changed his mind and will not run for reelection. And then we may see an open Democratic convention in Chicago.”
Returning to the theme of Thursday night’s clash, Karam said that the 90-minute debate lacked “much substance” on many issues, including the Middle East and the conflict in Gaza.
“Most of the discussion was around the economy, social issues, healthcare, Medicare, the deficit, which is typical on these occasions,” she said. “What we saw, however, especially from Trump, was plenty of cliche statements, and from both candidates we didn’t see much, actually, of substance, when it came to the Middle East.
In one of the more memorable moments of the debate, Trump said Biden “has become like a Palestinian. But they don’t like him because he is a very bad Palestinian. He is a weak one.”
Reacting to the comment, Karam said: “Trump accusing Biden of being a ‘bad Palestinian’ is just another level, and Biden did not exactly have convincing responses when he was asked about ending the war in Gaza and supporting Israel. It was the same talking points from the candidates that we heard in the last few months on the campaign trail.”
Karam said there was “little actual debate on the big issues around US foreign policy” and on issues like how Trump would achieve his stated aim of ending the war in Ukraine. Instead there was a lot of “lofty talk, a lot of cliche statements, very little substance.”
There was also “little on the global power competition between the US and China. There was almost nothing on the future of the US presence and influence in the Middle East, and absolutely nothing that I heard on Iran’s nuclear program.”
No matter who ultimately secures the keys to the White House in November, Maksad of the Middle East Institute believes some kind of normalization deal between Israel and Saudi Arabia will be a priority for any incoming administration.
“There are few things that enjoy bipartisan consensus in America these days, but for the importance of encouraging greater regional integration in the Middle East, with potential Saudi-Israeli normalization as its centerpiece,” he said.
UK police arrest 27 climate activists over airport protest plans
- Police took “swift” action in a nationwide operation, the Metropolitan Police said
- The 27 climate activists were arrested on suspicion of conspiring to disrupt national infrastructure
LONDON: UK police on Friday said that they had arrested 27 climate activists from the Just Stop Oil group on suspicion of planning to disrupt airports in the coming months.
Police took “swift” action in a nationwide operation, the Metropolitan Police said in a statement.
The 27 climate activists were arrested on suspicion of conspiring to disrupt national infrastructure.
Four people were detained at Gatwick Airport on Tuesday, and have been released on bail.
Six more people, whom the police said included “key organizers” of the Just Stop Oil group, were arrested in an east London community center on Thursday.
Met officers, working with other police forces around the country, arrested 17 more people at their homes on Friday.
“We know Just Stop Oil are planning to disrupt airports across the country this summer which is why we have taken swift and robust action now,” said Met Chief Superintendent Ian Howells, who led the operation.
“Anyone who compromises the safety and security of airports in London can expect a strong response from officers or security staff,” he added.
Those released on bail are not to travel within one kilometer of any UK airport unless passing through by vehicle or public transport.
Just Stop Oil wants the UK government to end all new oil and gas exploration and has promised not to let up in its protests until it does so.
Its activists have targeted numerous high-profile events with stunts over the past year, including the Wimbledon tennis tournament and British Open golf tournament, as well as art galleries and museums.
Teenager jailed for German Christmas market attack plot
- The teenager wanted to rent a truck and “kill as many people as possible” by ramming it into the traditional market, the court in Cologne said
- The boy had started to become “radicalized” in autumn 2023
BERLIN: A German court on Friday sentenced a 15-year-old boy to four years in jail for planning an Islamist attack on a Christmas market in the western city of Leverkusen.
The teenager wanted to rent a truck and “kill as many people as possible” by ramming it into the traditional market, the court in Cologne said in a statement.
The boy had started to become “radicalized” in autumn 2023, the court said.
The evidence against him included a video in a chat group announcing his plans for an attack on “infidels” with a recognizable Islamist symbol in the background.
The boy had planned the attack along with another teenager who was supposed to film it and share the video, the court said.
The 16-year-old from Brandenburg, the state that surrounds Berlin, will stand trial in a different court from July.
The 15-year-old made a “comprehensive confession” during his trial, a court spokesman told AFP.
Islamist extremists have carried out several attacks in Germany in recent years, the deadliest being a truck rampage at a Berlin Christmas market in December 2016 that killed 12 people.
More recently, an Islamist motive is suspected in the killing of a police officer in a knife attack on the market square in the city of Mannheim in late May.
The number of people considered Islamist extremists in Germany fell slightly from 27,480 in 2022 to 27,200 last year, according to a report from the federal domestic intelligence agency.
However, in presenting the report, Interior Minister Nancy Faeser said Germany would be “continuing to step up the fight against Islamist terrorism.”
In another case involving teenagers, two boys and two girls aged 15 to 16 were arrested at Easter this year on suspicion of planning an Islamist attack in the same region of western Germany.
Herbert Reul, interior minister of North Rhine-Westphalia state, said the young age of the suspects left him “speechless,” adding that it posed a “huge challenge for society as a whole.”
Germany’s biggest-selling daily Bild reported that the four youths were allegedly planning to carry out Molotov cocktail and knife attacks in the name of the Daesh group.
