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      in UK Politics

      Newspaper editor who ‘spectacularly’ fell out with Julian Assange says he should not be prosecuted for ‘doing what journalists do’

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      He is the newspaper editor who famously fell out with his source. A decade later, Alan Rusbridger’s personal feelings for Julian Assange, someone he described as “a narcissistic egomaniac”, have changed remarkably little. There is no indication Assange’s opinion of Rusbridger has altered much either.Yet, as the world awaits a court decision in London that will determine whether Assange, 49, is extradited to the US to face espionage charges that could land him in jail for 175 years, the former editor-in-chief of The Guardian has emerged as one of the most strident defenders of the WikiLeaks founder.He has said the US’s pursuit of Assange, aided by the British authorities, represents a threat to all journalists, and should alarm anyone concerned about defending free speech. “[The charges are] for things that were recognisably what journalists do. He had a great story, and he had a great source,” Rusbridger, 67, tells The Independent. “It is dangerous that they are trying to pick him off, and lock him up for a long time, on a story that leaps over any public interest hurdle.”He adds: “And it’s a shame people got hung up on whether he’s a real journalist, or the other things he does in his life which we may or may not like, and have sort of shrugged their shoulders at protesting the way they’re attacking him for things that journalists do, that will have big implications for journalists.”Assange’s relationship with The Guardian began in 2007, when Rusbridger says he started receiving documents and information from the Australian hacker. One of those documents allowed the newspaper to publish a story in August that year showing former Kenyan president Daniel Arap Moi had been siphoning off hundreds of millions of dollars and hiding them in foreign bank accounts. More

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      in UK Politics

      UN torture envoy calls for immediate release of Julian Assange on 10th anniversary of arrest: ‘He’s not a criminal and poses no threat to anyone’

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      The rights of Wikileaks’ founder Julian Assange have been “severely violated” for more than a decade, according to the UN’s top envoy on torture, and the British government should release him from detention immediately.Nils Melzer, the UN Special Rapporteur on torture, said Mr Assange had been convicted of no crime, and yet as he awaited for a court to decide whether to extradite him to the US to face espionage charges, he was at threat of contracting Covid-19.Mr Melzer repeated his assertion Mr Assange’s treatment amounted to torture, and called for the British authorities to either release him or put him under guarded house arrest.“The British authorities initially detained Mr Assange on the basis of an arrest warrant issued by Sweden in connection with allegations of sexual misconduct that have since been formally dropped due to lack of evidence,” he said in a statement released in Geneva.“Today, he is detained for exclusively preventative purposes, to ensure his presence during the ongoing US extradition trial, a proceeding which may well last several years.”He added: “Mr Assange is not a criminal convict and poses no threat to anyone, so his prolonged solitary confinement in a high security prison is neither necessary nor proportionate and clearly lacks any legal basis.”Mr Assange, 49, founded the whistleblower site Wikileaks in 2006, but generated headlines around the world in 2010, when he released material passed to him by then US army intelligence analyst Chelsea Manning.Assange: A timeline of the investigationMr Assange said the material showed the US and its allies were committing war crimes during its occupation of Iraq.Among the most disturbing of the material was video footage that showed two US AH-64 Apache helicopters attacking buildings in Baghdad in 2007, and then closing in a group of people. Among the people were children and journalists.“Oh, yeah, look at those dead bastards,” one US airman could be heard to say of the attack that killed at least a dozen people. Ms Manning served seven years for leaking the video, much of that time spent in solitary confinement. Mr Assange, who is being held in London’s Belmarsh Prison, which like many such facilities has seen an outbreak of Covid cases, was arrested 10 years ago over alleged sexual crimes in Sweden. Mr Assange has always denied the allegations and Mr Melzer said they were withdrawn because of lack of evidence.Mr Assange jumped bail in 2012 and sought and obtained political asylum at the Ecuadorian Embassy in London where he spent seven years. He was arrested from there in April 2019 by the British authorities, acting on an extradition request from the US where he faces 17 espionage charges and one charge of computer misuse over WikiLeaks’ publication of secret American military documents a decade ago. The charges carry a maximum sentence of 175 years in prison.The British government accused Mr Assange of skipping bail and he was sentenced to 50 weeks imprisonment. Judge Deborah Taylor told him he had exploited his position.  “Whilst you may have had fears as to what may happen to you, nonetheless you had a choice,” she told him. Mr Assange’s defence team argues he is a journalist and entitled to First Amendment protections for publishing such information. They have also said the conditions he would face in a US prison would breach his human rights. They also argued he had entered the Ecuadorian Embassy out of desperation to avoid being sent to the US.“Mr Assange’s rights have been severely violated for more than a decade. He must now be allowed to live a normal family, social and professional life, to recover his health and to adequately prepare his defence against the US extradition request pending against him,” said Mr Melzer.Last month, Stella Morris, Mr Assange’s partner and the mother of his two children, called on Donald Trump to pardon him.“I beg you, please bring him home for Christmas,” she tweeted.There was no immediate response to enquiries from the British Home Office. More

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      in UK Politics

      Trump urged to pardon Julian Assange by his partner and mother of two children: ‘Please bring him home for Christmas’

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      In an appeal to the president a day after Mr Trump announced he was pardoning disgraced former national security advisor Michael Flynn, Stella Morris posted a picture of their young children.“These are Julian’s sons Max and Gabriel. They need their father. Our family needs to be whole again,” she wrote.“I beg you, please bring him home for Christmas.”She tagged the message @RealDonald Trump and added the hashtag #PardonAssangeMr Assange, 49, remains held in a high-security British prison cell as he awaits a judge’s decision about whether he can be sent to the US to face espionage charges.Ms Morris has said he has been confined exclusively to his cell for over a week because of a coronavirus outbreak on his block at London’s Belmarsh Prison.Your daily US politics newsletterSign upAlready have an account? Log in hereMr Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks, attended four weeks of an extradition hearing at the Central Criminal Court in London in September and October. The judge overseeing the case said she would deliver her decision on 4 January.US prosecutors have indicted Mr Assange on 17 espionage charges and one charge of computer misuse over WikiLeaks’ publication of secret American military documents a decade ago. The charges carry a maximum sentence of 175 years in prison.Mr Assange’s defence team argues that he is a journalist and entitled to First Amendment protections for publishing leaked documents that exposed US military wrongdoing in Iraq and Afghanistan. They have also said the conditions he would face in a US prison would breach his human rights.Mr Assange jumped bail in 2012 and sought asylum at the Ecuadorian Embassy in London, which ended up becoming his home for seven years before he was evicted and subsequently arrested. He has been in a London prison since April 2019.Last week, Mr Morris said: is partner Stella Morris, the mother of their two young children, said: “Keeping Julian in the UK’s harshest prison, exposed to a deadly virus and away from his family is not only cruel, it offends British values and democracy itself.Additional reporting by Associated Press More

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      in UK Politics

      Joe Biden says ‘we must keep’ an open border between Ireland and Northern Ireland

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      Speaking to reporters in Wilmington, Delaware, on the day he formally introduced his nominations for top diplomatic and international security posts, the president-elect said he had spoken to British prime minister Boris Johnson, and Micheál Martin, the Irish Taoiseach, urging them to maintain an open crossing.One of the key stumbling blocks as Britain prepares to break ties with Europe at the end of the year, is what will become of the border between Northern Ireland, part of the United Kingdom, and Ireland, which will continue to part of the European Union.At the height of the conflict known as the Troubles, the border area was the location for many atrocities. Since the Good Friday Agreement of 1998, the border and the citizens on both sides have enjoyed both peace, and no fixed border posts.“We do not want a guarded border. We want to make sure — we’ve worked too long to get Ireland worked out, and I talked with the British prime minister, I talked with the Taoiseach, I talked with others, I talked to the French,” said Mr Biden.Your daily US politics newsletterSign upAlready have an account? Log in here“The idea of having a border north and south once again being closed is just not right, we’ve just got to keep the  border open.”In September, Mr Biden, who can trace his Irish ancestry to County Mayo, made a similar point on Twitter.Antony Blinken speaks after President-elect Joe Biden nominates him for secretary of state“We can’t allow the Good Friday Agreement that brought peace to Northern Ireland to become a casualty of Brexit,” Mr Biden wrote. “Any trade deal between the US and UK must be contingent upon respect for the Agreement and preventing the return of a hard border. Period.” More

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      in US Politics

      'What a spectacle!': US adversaries revel in post-election chaos

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      Rivals and enemies of the United States have come together to revel in the messiest US election in a generation, mocking the delay in vote processing and Donald Trump’s claims of electoral fraud in barely veiled criticisms of Washington’s political activism abroad.“What a spectacle!” crowed Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. “One says this is the most fraudulent election in US history. Who says that? The president who is currently in office.”With a large dose of schadenfreude, Washington’s fiercest critics declared deep concern about the US elections and the state of the country’s democracy.Russia’s foreign ministry spokeswoman on Thursday panned the “obvious shortcomings of the American electoral system”, calling the framework “archaic”.“It’s a show, you can’t call it anything but that,” Vyacheslav Volodin, the chairman of Russia’s Duma, said earlier this week. “They say it should be seen as a standard for democracy. I don’t think it’s the standard.”In China, state media savaged the delayed results, with one daily writing that the process looked a “bit like a developing country”.Venezuela’s president, Nicolás Maduro, could not resist baiting the US over what he called its “surprising electoral process”, and seemed so amused that at one point he broke into song with a rendition of the theme tune to the Miss Venezuela beauty pageant: “On a night as beautiful as this, either of them could win,” he crooned, before adding with a chuckle: “The United States. I don’t stick my nose in.” In two recent local elections, he noted, all the votes had been counted by 11pm.As a parliamentary campaign kicked off in Venezuela this week, Maduro claimed there were important lessons the US could learn from its elections rather than lecturing the world about democracy. Venezuela was a showcase of “civilised and peaceful” voting using “proven and transparent technology” and biometric voting machines that provided same day results, he said.Trump has spent the last two years unsuccessfully trying to topple the Venezuelan president and in a Wednesday night broadcast Maduro delighted in the electoral confusion gripping his northern neighbour.“The state department puts out statements that say: ‘In this country we don’t recognise the election. In that country we don’t like the election. In the other country we don’t like this or that,’” Maduro said, adding that the US would be better off focusing on its own problems.As Trump demanded states stop counting mail-in ballots, the US embassy in Abidjan issued a poorly timed statement urging Côte d’Ivoire’s leaders to “show commitment to the democratic process and the rule of law”. “We also need a Côte d’Ivoire statement on US elections,” quipped one BBC editor on Twitter.For many, it was a chance to give the US a taste of its own medicine. “Neither free nor fair,” wrote Margarita Simonyan, the head of Russian state-backed RT, parroting the language of a UN or Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) statement.And the OSCE itself did weigh in, with mission leader Michael Georg Link attacking Trump for making “baseless allegations of systematic deficiencies” and “[harming] public trust in democratic institutions”.The irony was not lost on many at home. A cartoon by the Russian critic Sergei Elkin made the rounds on Thursday, featuring an elderly babushka lugging buckets of water past a man in a rundown village somewhere in Russia. “They still haven’t finished counting in Pennsylvania and in Michigan,” the man says. A stray dog walks along an unpaved street behind him. More

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      in World Politics

      The US Election 2020: The facts, the figures and the legends

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      The president’s official residence in Washington – 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue – has a history scarcely less colourful than that of the presidency. Work began on it in 1792. John Adams was the first to occupy it (before it was finished) in 1800 and Dolley Madison famously did it up, with the help of a grant from Congress, only for the British to burn it to a shell in 1814. James Monroe spent $50,000 – controversially – doing it up again, in extravagant Parisian style. Martin Van Buren was attacked for turning it into “a palace as splendid as that of the Caesars”. Chester A Arthur auctioned off wagon-loads of priceless presidential memorabilia in order to pay for another makeover in the 1880s. There have been numerous refurbishments and additions since, including extensive restorations under Theodore Roosevelt (who added the West Wing), William Howard Taft (who added the Oval Office) and Harry S Truman (after the house was declared to be in imminent danger of collapse in 1948). The most extravagant recent redecoration was instigated by Jacqueline Kennedy, with the help of the French designer Stéphane Boudin.Your daily US politics newsletterSign upAlready have an account? Log in here More

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      in US Politics

      A Trump win or a disputed result are Canadians' worst fears

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      Before every US presidential election, a few disgruntled Americans can be relied on to promise that they’ll move to Canada if the results don’t go their way.
      Canadians watch US elections with close attention – and occasional horror – but they rarely expect many voters to make good on that vow. A few do make the move; most do not.
      However, in recent weeks the political temperature in the US has mounted: senior Republicans have called for supporters to“guard” polling stations, and right-wing militias have openly called for armed revolt in the event that Donald Trump loses.
      In Canada, fears are growing that the fallout from a contested vote could spill across the border.
      The spectre of unrest, trade disruption, and even violence is likely to have prompted frantic strategising among senior government officials, said Thomas Juneau, a professor of international relations and security studies at the University of Ottawa.
      “We are absolutely at the point where we have to think about scenarios that … start raising really difficult questions for Canada,” said Juneau.
      A contested election, or a second term of Trump where he begins making decisions that are bad for Canada, are both looking like plausible outcomes, he said.
      As one of the United States’ largest trading partners, Canada cannot afford to be caught off-guard. The two nations share the world’s longest undefended border and have highly integrated economies.
      “There are few things that Canada does better than understanding the United States,” he said. “There is not a single department in the Canadian government, that doesn’t devote a considerable proportion of its resources and time to managing relations with the US. Folks in the Canadian government think about the relationship every day.”
      The prime minister, Justin Trudeau, who has spent much of his tenure restraining any urge to overtly criticise Trump, has expressed cautious optimism about the upcoming election and downplayed fears of violence or disruption.
      “I think we’re certainly all hoping for a smooth transition or a clear result from the election, like many people are around the world,” he said earlier this month. “If it is less clear, there may be some disruptions and we need to be ready for any outcomes, and I think that’s what Canadians would expect of their government, and we’re certainly reflecting on that.”
      Hundreds of billions of dollars cross the border each year in trade networks that thrive not least because of mutual co-operation and the predictability of the bilateral relationship.
      Any disruption could prove catastrophic to Canada.
      “I’ve made no bones about saying that the greatest damage to the US-Canada relationship is Donald Trump,” said Bruce Heyman, former US ambassador to Canada. “[Trump] has never admitted failure. So when you get down to an election where you either win or lose, he has a hard time accepting the fact that he can lose. He has never used the words ‘defeat’ or ‘loss’ in terms of the election.”
      In office, Trump has frequently challenged the norms of the relationship with his country’s closest ally.
      He has feuded with Trudeau, calling the prime minister “two-faced”. He has slapped tariffs on aluminium and steel and forced a redrafting of the continent’s free trade agreement. He has called into question Canada’s critical alliances such as Nato, and the missile defence system Norad.
      Trump’s administration has also failed to stand up for Canada during diplomatic rows with China, Russia and Saudi Arabia, leaving the country to fend for itself.
      “And I think a second term of Donald Trump will be an extreme version of what we have seen in the first,” said Heyman.
      While the Trump era may mark a historic low in the relationship, he is not the first US president to oversee strained relations with Canada.
      Prime ministers and presidents have often sparred in past, most recently when Canada decided not to join the US in its invasion of Iraq.
      Trudeau’s father, Pierre Trudeau, who was prime minister for 15 years from the 1960s to the 1980s, likened the relationship to that of a mouse beside a snoring elephant. His clash with President Richard Nixon led to a period of chilled relations.
      “It is time for us to recognise … that we have very separate identities; that we have significant differences; and that nobody’s interests are furthered when these realities are obscured,” Nixon told the Canadian parliament in 1972.
      But the current damage is clear: a recent poll found that Canadian sentiment towards the US had reached its lowest point in 40 years. Only 29% of residents have a favourable view of their southern neighbour.
      And many blame Trump: nearly 66% want Joe Biden to win the election.
      But whatever happens on 3 November, tussles over trade and tariffs are likely to persist. A Biden administration would still face domestic pressure to bring manufacturing jobs home and to maintain hardline US positions on commodities such as softwood lumber.
      “Because Trump is so unpopular in Canada, people naturally tend to idealise what a Biden presidency would look like,” said Juneau. “But the idea Biden would just erase all of the bilateral trade irritants between the two countries is not true. And I think the Canadian government understands that very well.” More

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      in UK Politics

      ‘A very good guy’: What Trump has said about key UK leaders since becoming president

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      Donald Trump has often made his feelings about other world leaders well known, whether that be on Twitter or by speaking to reporters.Here is some of what he has had to say about British politicians and other figures since he won his place in the White House.After the president shared a number of videos from far-right group Britain First on social media in November 2017, the then-prime minister’s spokesman said it was “wrong for the president to have done this”.The president responded by tweeting about Ms May: “Don’t focus on me, focus on the destructive Radical Islamic Terrorism that is taking place within the United Kingdom. We are doing just fine!”Mr Trump was highly critical of Ms May’s handling of Brexit negotiations, and more sour words were exchanged when British ambassador to the US Sir Kim Darroch resigned over leaked diplomatic messages critical of the White House in July 2019.Your daily US politics newsletterSign upAlready have an account? Log in hereHe tweeted: “I have been very critical about the way the UK and Theresa May handled Brexit. What a mess she and her representatives have created.“I told her how it should be done, but she decided to go another way. I do not know the Ambassador, but he is not liked or well thought of within the US. We will no longer deal with him.“The good news for the wonderful United Kingdom is that they will soon have a new prime minister.”He added the next day: “I told theresa-may how to do that deal, but she went her own foolish way-was unable to get it done. A disaster!”However, when Ms May was forced to set out a timetable to exit No 10, Mr Trump called her “a good woman, she worked very hard, she’s very strong”. More