Who is Julian Paul Assange? The news and political wold knows Julian Assange as an Australian publisher,
[4][5] journalist,
[6][7][8] computer programmer and
Internet activist. He is the
editor in chief of
WikiLeaks, a
whistleblower website and conduit for worldwide
news leaks, with the stated purpose of creating
open governments. Assange was a hacker in his youth, before becoming a computer programmer.
[9] He has lived in several countries and has made public appearances in many parts of the world to speak about
freedom of the press, censorship and investigative journalism.
Assange serves on the WikiLeaks advisory board.
[10][11] WikiLeaks has published material about
extrajudicial killings in Kenya,
toxic waste dumping in Côte d'Ivoire,
Church of Scientology manuals,
Guantanamo Bay procedures, and banks such as
Kaupthing and
Julius Baer.
[12] In 2010, WikiLeaks published
Iraq War documents and
Afghan War documents about American involvement in the wars, some of which was classified material. On 28 November 2010, WikiLeaks and its five international print media partners (
Der Spiegel,
The New York Times,
Le Monde,
The Guardian and
El País) began publishing
U.S. diplomatic cables.
[13]
Assange received a number of awards and nominations, including the 2009
Amnesty International Media Award for publishing material about
extrajudicial killings in
Kenya and Readers' Choice for
TIME magazine's 2010 Person of the Year.
[14]
Assange appealed a February 2011 decision by English courts to extradite him to Sweden for questioning in relation to a sexual assault investigation.
[15][16][17][18] He said the allegations of wrongdoing are "without basis".
[19] A two-day
High Court hearing is scheduled to start on 12 July; he remains on bail.
[20]
Early life
Assange was born 3 July 1971 in
Townsville,
Queensland, and spent much of his youth living on
Magnetic Island.
[21]
His biological father was John Shipton, and his mother Christine was the daughter of Scottish-born principal of
Northern Rivers College, Warren Hawkins.
[22][23] When Julian was one year old, Christine married theatre director Brett Assange, who gave him his surname.
[2][24][25] Brett and Christine Assange ran a
touring theatre company. His stepfather, Julian's first "real dad", described Julian as "a very sharp kid" with "a keen sense of right and wrong". "He always stood up for the underdog... he was always very angry about people ganging up on other people."
[25]
Assange has asserted: "Capable, generous men do not create victims; they nurture victims." He says he is a combative person and that perhaps he is not so good at nurturing, but that "there is another way of nurturing victims, which is to police perpetrators."
[26]
In 1979, his mother remarried; her new husband was a musician whom Julian Assange believed belonged to a
New Age group called
Santiniketan Park Association led by Yoga teacher Anne Hamilton-Byrne. The couple had a son, but broke up in 1982 and engaged in a
custody struggle for Assange's half-brother. His divorced mother fled her boyfriend across Australia, taking both children into hiding for the next five years. Assange moved 30 times before he turned 14, attending many schools, including Goolmangar Primary School from 1979 to 1983, sometimes being
home-schooled.
[2][27][28] In an interview conducted by
Hans Ulrich Obrist, Assange stated that he had lived in 50 different towns and attended 37 different schools.
[29]
Hacking and conviction
In 1987, after turning 16, Assange began
hacking under the name "Mendax" (derived from a phrase of
Horace: "splendide mendax", or "nobly untruthful").
[2] He and two other hackers joined to form a group they named the International Subversives. Assange wrote down the early rules of the subculture: "Don't damage computer systems you break into (including crashing them); don't change the information in those systems (except for altering logs to cover your tracks); and share information".
[2] The
Personal Democracy Forum said he was "Australia's most famous ethical computer hacker."
[30] The
Australian Federal Police became aware of this group and set up "Operation Weather" to investigate their hacking. In September 1991 Mendax was discovered in the act of hacking into the Melbourne master terminal of
Nortel, the Canadian telecommunications company.
[2] In response the
Australian Federal Police tapped Assanges' phoneline and subsequently raided his Melbourne home in 1991.
[31] He was also reported to have accessed computers belonging to an Australian university,
[2] the
USAF 7th Command Group in the
Pentagon[32] and other organisations, via
modem.
[33] It took three years to bring the case to court, where he was charged with 31 counts of hacking and related crimes. Nortel said his incursions cost them more than $100,000. Despite representing hacking as a victimless crime, he nonetheless pleaded guilty to 25 charges of hacking. Six charges were dropped. He was released on bond for good conduct after being fined
A$2,100.
[2][34] The judge said "there is just no evidence that there was anything other than sort of intelligent inquisitiveness and the pleasure of being able to—what's the expression—surf through these various computers"
[2] and stated that Assange would have gone to jail for up to 10 years if he had not had such a disrupted childhood.
[32]
Assange later commented, "It's a bit annoying, actually. Because I co-wrote a book about [being a hacker], there are documentaries about that, people talk about that a lot. They can cut and paste. But that was 20 years ago. It's very annoying to see modern day articles calling me a computer hacker. I'm not ashamed of it, I'm quite proud of it. But I understand the reason they suggest I'm a computer hacker now. There's a very specific reason."
[4]
In 2011, court records revealed that in 1993, Assange helped the
Victoria Police Child Exploitation Unit by providing technical advice and assisted in prosecuting persons.
[35]
Child custody issues
In 1989, Assange started living with his girlfriend and they had a son, Daniel Assange.
[36] They split up during the period of Assange's arrest and conviction. They subsequently engaged in a lengthy custody struggle and did not agree on a custody arrangement until 1999.
[2][37]
The entire process prompted Assange and his mother to form Parent Inquiry Into Child Protection, an activist group centered on creating a "central databank" for otherwise inaccessible legal records related to child custody issues in Australia.
[37] In an interview with
ABC Radio, his mother explained their "most important" issue was demanding "that there be direct access to the children's court by any member of the public for an application for protection for any child that they believe is at serious risk from abuse, where the child protection agency has rejected that notification."
[38]
Computer programming and university studies
In 1993, Assange was involved in starting one of the first public
internet service providers in Australia, Suburbia Public Access Network.
[4][39] Starting in 1994, he lived in Melbourne as a programmer and a developer of
free software.
[34] In 1995, he wrote
Strobe, the first free and
open source port scanner.
[40][41] He contributed several
patches to the
PostgreSQL project in 1996.
[42][43] He helped to write the book
Underground: Tales of Hacking, Madness and Obsession on the Electronic Frontier (1997), which credits him as a researcher and reports his history with International Subversives.
[44][45] Starting around 1997, he co-invented the
Rubberhose deniable encryption system, a
cryptographic concept made into a software package for
Linux designed to provide
plausible deniability against
rubber-hose cryptanalysis;
[46] he originally intended the system to be used "as a tool for
human rights workers who needed to protect sensitive data in the field."
[47] Other
free software that he has authored or co-authored includes the
Usenet caching software NNTPCache
[48] and
Surfraw, a command-line interface for
web-based search engines. In 1999, he registered the domain leaks.org; "But", he says, "then I didn't do anything with it."
[49]
From 2003 to 2006, Assange attended the
University of Melbourne, mainly studying physics and mathematics and briefly studying philosophy and neuroscience.
[27][30][50] In most of his maths courses, he received the minimum "pass" grade. He did not graduate; the fact that his fellow students were doing research for Pentagon's
DARPA was reportedly a factor in motivating him to drop out and start WikiLeaks.
[2][27][50][51]
WikiLeaks
WikiLeaks was founded in 2006.
[2][52] That year, Assange wrote two essays setting out the philosophy behind WikiLeaks: "To radically shift regime behavior we must think clearly and boldly for if we have learned anything, it is that regimes do not want to be changed. We must think beyond those who have gone before us and discover technological changes that embolden us with ways to act in which our forebears could not."
[53][54][55] In his blog he wrote, "the more secretive or unjust an organisation is, the more leaks induce fear and paranoia in its leadership and planning coterie.... Since unjust systems, by their nature, induce opponents, and in many places barely have the upper hand, mass leaking leaves them exquisitely vulnerable to those who seek to replace them with more open forms of governance."
[53][56]
Assange is a prominent media spokesman on WikiLeaks' behalf. While newspapers have described him as a "director"
[57] or "founder"
[31] of WikiLeaks, Assange has said, "I don't call myself a founder";
[58] he does describe himself as the
editor in chief of WikiLeaks,
[59] and has stated that he has the final decision in the process of vetting documents submitted to the site.
[60] Assange says that WikiLeaks has released more classified documents than the rest of the world press combined: "That's not something I say as a way of saying how successful we are – rather, that shows you the parlous state of the rest of the media. How is it that a team of five people has managed to release to the public more suppressed information, at that level, than the rest of the world press combined? It's disgraceful."
[52] He advocates a "transparent" and "scientific" approach to journalism, saying that "you can't publish a paper on physics without the full experimental data and results; that should be the standard in journalism."
[61][62] In 2006,
CounterPunch called him "Australia's most infamous former computer hacker."
[63] The Age has called him "one of the most intriguing people in the world" and "internet's freedom fighter."
[49] Assange has called himself "extremely cynical".
[49] He has been described as being largely self-taught and widely read on science and mathematics,
[34] and as thriving on intellectual battle.
[64]
WikiLeaks has been involved in the publication of material documenting extrajudicial killings in Kenya, a report of toxic waste dumping on the coast of
Côte d'Ivoire,
Church of Scientology manuals,
Guantanamo Bay procedures, the
12 July 2007 Baghdad airstrike video, and material involving large banks such as
Kaupthing and
Julius Baer among other documents.
[12] In 2008, Assange published an article entitled "The Hidden Curse of Thomas Paine", in which he wrote "What does it mean when only those facts about the world with economic powers behind them can be heard, when the truth lays naked before the world and no one will be the first to speak without payment or subsidy?"
[65]
In late 2010, Assange was in the process of completing his memoirs for publication in 2011.
[66]
Public appearances
In addition to exercising great authority and editorial control within WikiLeaks, Assange acts as its public face. He has appeared at media conferences such as New Media Days '09 in Copenhagen,
[67] the 2010 Logan Symposium in Investigative Reporting at the
UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism,
[68] and at hacker conferences, notably the 25th and 26th
Chaos Communication Congress.
[69] In the first half of 2010, he appeared on
Al Jazeera English,
MSNBC,
Democracy Now!,
RT, and
The Colbert Report to discuss the release of the Baghdad airstrike video by WikiLeaks. On 3 June he appeared via videoconferencing at the
Personal Democracy Forum conference with
Daniel Ellsberg.
[70][71] Ellsberg told
MSNBC "the explanation he [Assange] used" for not appearing in person in the U.S. was that "it was not safe for him to come to this country."
[72] On 11 June he was to appear on a Showcase Panel at the
Investigative Reporters and Editors conference in Las Vegas,
[73] but there are reports that he cancelled several days prior.
[74]
On 10 June 2010, it was reported that Pentagon officials were trying to determine his whereabouts.
[75][76] Based on this, there were reports that U.S. officials wanted to apprehend Assange.
[77] Ellsberg said that the arrest of
Bradley Manning and subsequent speculation by U.S. officials about what Assange may be about to publish "puts his well-being, his physical life, in some danger now."
[72] In
The Atlantic,
Marc Ambinder called Ellsberg's concerns "ridiculous", and said that "Assange's tendency to believe that he is one step away from being thrown into a black hole hinders, and to some extent discredits, his work."
[78] In
Salon.com,
Glenn Greenwald questioned "screeching media reports" that there was a "manhunt" on Assange underway, arguing that they were only based on comments by "anonymous government officials" and might even serve a campaign by the U.S. government, by intimidating possible whistleblowers.
On 21 June 2010, he took part at a hearing in
Brussels, Belgium, appearing in public for the first time in nearly a month.
[79] He was a member on a panel that discussed
Internet censorship and expressed his worries over the recent
filtering in countries such as Australia. He also talked about secret
gag orders preventing newspapers from publishing information about specific subjects and even divulging the fact that they are being gagged. Using an example involving
The Guardian, he also explained how newspapers are altering their online archives sometimes by removing entire articles.
[80][81] He told
The Guardian that he does not fear for his safety but is on permanent alert and will avoid travel to America, saying "[U.S.] public statements have all been reasonable. But some statements made in private are a bit more questionable." He said "politically it would be a great error for them to act. I feel perfectly safe but I have been advised by my lawyers not to travel to the U.S. during this period."
[79]
On 17 July,
Jacob Appelbaum spoke on behalf of WikiLeaks at the 2010
Hackers on Planet Earth (HOPE) conference in New York City, replacing Assange due to the presence of federal agents at the conference.
[82][83] He announced that the WikiLeaks submission system was again up and running, after it had been temporarily suspended.
[82][84] Assange was a surprise speaker at a
TED conference on 19 July 2010, in
Oxford, and confirmed that WikiLeaks was now accepting submissions again.
[85][86][87] On 26 July, after the release of the
Afghan War Diary, he appeared at the
Frontline Club for a press conference.
[88] On 15 March 2011, Assange gave a speech at the
Cambridge Union Society.
[89][90] After initially discouraging recording, a video of this has been made available by the Society.
[91]
Release of U.S. diplomatic cables
On 28 November 2010, WikiLeaks began releasing some of the 251,000 American
diplomatic cables in their possession, of which over 53 percent are listed as
unclassified, 40 percent are "
Confidential" and just over six percent are classified "
Secret". The following day, the Attorney-General of Australia,
Robert McClelland, told the press that Australia would inquire into Assange's activities and WikiLeaks.
[92] He said that "from Australia's point of view, we think there are potentially a number of criminal laws that could have been breached by the release of this information. The
Australian Federal Police are looking at that".
[93] McClelland would not rule out the possibility that Australian authorities will cancel Assange's passport, and warned him that he might face charges should he return to Australia.
[94] The Federal Police inquiry found that Assange had not committed any crime.
[95]
The
United States Department of Justice launched a criminal investigation related to the leak. U.S. prosecutors are reportedly
considering charges against Assange under several laws, but any prosecution would be difficult.
[96] In relation to its ongoing investigations of WikiLeaks, on 14 December 2010, the
U.S. Department of Justice issued a subpoena ordering Twitter to release information relating to Assange's account, amongst others.
[97][98]
Pentagon Papers whistleblower
Daniel Ellsberg said that Assange "is serving our democracy and serving our rule of law precisely by challenging the secrecy regulations, which are not laws in most cases, in this country." On the issue of national security considerations for the U.S., Ellsberg added, "He's obviously a very competent guy in many ways. I think his instincts are that most of this material deserves to be out. We are arguing over a very small fragment that doesn't. He has not yet put out anything that hurt anybody's national security."
[99] Assange told London reporters that the leaked cables showed U.S. ambassadors around the world were ordered "to engage in espionage behavior", which he said seemed to be "representative of a gradual shift to a lack of rule of law in U.S. institutions that needs to be exposed and that we have been exposing."
[100]
The WikiLeaks diplomatic cable revelations have been credited with sparking the
Tunisian Revolution.
[101][102]
Recognition as a journalist
Assange received the 2009 Media award from
Amnesty International for
Kenya: The Cry of Blood – Extra Judicial Killings and Disappearances,
[8] and he has been recognized as a journalist by the
Centre for Investigative Journalism.
[7] Assange has been a member of the Australian journalist union, the
Media, Entertainment and Arts Alliance, for several years, and in 2011, was made an honorary member.
[103][104] Alex Massie wrote an article in
The Spectator called "Yes, Julian Assange is a journalist", but acknowledged that "newsman" might be a better description of Assange.
[6] Alan Dershowitz said "Without a doubt. He is a journalist, a new kind of journalist".
[105] Assange has said that he has been publishing factual material since age 25, and that it is not necessary to debate whether or not he is a journalist. He has stated that his role is "primarily that of a publisher and editor-in-chief who organises and directs other journalists".
[106]
Financial developments
On 6 December, the Swiss bank,
PostFinance, announced that it had frozen assets of Assange's totalling 31,000 euros, because he had "provided false information regarding his place of residence" when opening the account.
[107] MasterCard,
[108] Visa Inc.,
[109] and
Bank of America[110] also halted dealings with WikiLeaks. Assange described these actions as "business McCarthyism".
[111] The English-language Swedish newspaper web-site "
Local" quoted Assange on 27 December 2010, as saying that legal costs for the whistleblowing website and his own defence had reached £500,000. The decisions to halt donations to WikiLeaks by Visa, MasterCard and
PayPal had cost it £425,000, the same amount it costs the website to publish for six months. Assange said WikiLeaks had been receiving as much as £85,000 a day at its peak.
[112]
Autobiography
In December 2010, Assange sold the
publishing rights to his autobiography for over
£1
million. He told
The Sunday Times that he was forced to enter the deals for an autobiography due to the financial difficulties he and the site encountered, he told them "I don't want to write this book, but I have to. I have already spent £200,000 for legal costs and I need to defend myself and to keep WikiLeaks afloat".
[113] On 14 February 2011, Assange filed for the trademark JULIAN ASSANGE in Europe. The trademark is to be used for "public speaking services; news reporter services; journalism; publication of texts other than publicity texts; education services; entertainment services".
[114]
Criticism
A number of political and media commentators, as well as current and former U.S. government officials, have accused Assange of terrorism. U.S. Vice President
Joe Biden said "I would argue it is closer to being a high-tech terrorist than the Pentagon papers."
[115] In May 2010, Senate Minority Leader
Mitch McConnell had used the phrase, calling Assange "a high-tech terrorist", and saying "he has done enormous damage to our country. I think he needs to be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law".
[116] Also in May 2010, former House Speaker
Newt Gingrich said: "Information terrorism, which leads to people getting killed, is terrorism, and Julian Assange is engaged in terrorism. He should be treated as an enemy combatant."
[117]
In July 2010, after WikiLeaks released classified documents related to the
war in Afghanistan,
Chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff,
Mike Mullen, said at a Pentagon news conference, "Disagree with the war all you want, take issue with the policy, challenge me or our ground commanders on the decisions we make to accomplish the mission we've been given, but don't put those who willingly go into harm's way even further in harm's way just to satisfy your need to make a point. Mr. Assange can say whatever he likes about the greater good he thinks he and his source are doing, but the truth is, they might already have on their hands the blood of some young soldier or that of an Afghan family." Assange responded later in an interview by saying, "There is, as far as we can tell, no incident of that. So it is a speculative charge. Of course, we are treating any possible revelation of the names of innocents seriously. That is why we held back 15,000 of these documents, to review that".
[118]
Retractions of, or apologies for, criticism
The Australian government considered charging Assange for treason.
[119] It has retracted its previous comments that the actions of Julian Assange constituted a crime. They also found no grounds to withdraw his Australian passport after an investigation by the Australian Federal Police. Since then, government representatives and the
major opposition, including
Craig Emerson the Minister for Trade and
Helen Coonan the former minister for Communications, have made statements supportive of WikiLeaks and deprecated some threats. Emerson stated on ABC's Q&A program; "We condemn absolutely the threats that have been made by some people in the United States against Julian Assange and he deserves all of the rights of being an Australian citizen."
[120]
Support
Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, then
president of Brazil, expressed his "solidarity" with Assange following his 2010 arrest in the United Kingdom.
[121][122] He further criticised the arrest of Assange as "an attack on
freedom of expression".
[123]
Prime Minister of Russia,
Vladimir Putin condemned Assange's detention as "undemocratic".
[124] A source within the office of Russian President
Dmitry Medvedev suggested that Assange be nominated for a Nobel Prize, and said that "Public and non-governmental organisations should think of how to help him."
[125]
In December 2010, the United Nations' Special Rapporteur for Freedom of Opinion and Expression,
Frank LaRue, said Assange or other WikiLeaks staff should not face criminal charges for any information they disseminated, noting that "if there is a responsibility by leaking information it is of, exclusively of the person that made the leak and not of the media that publish it. And this is the way that transparency works and that corruption has been confronted in many cases."
[126]
Daniel Ellsberg, who was working in the
U.S. Department of Defense when he leaked the
Pentagon Papers in 1971, was a signatory to a statement by an international group of former intelligence officers and ex-government officials in support of Assange's work, which was released in late December 2010. Other signatories included
David MacMichael,
Ray McGovern, and five recipients of annual
Sam Adams Award:
Frank Grevil,
Katharine Gun,
Craig Murray,
Coleen Rowley and
Larry Wilkerson.
[127] Ellsberg has said, "If I released the Pentagon Papers today, the same rhetoric and the same calls would be made about me ... I would be called not only a traitor – which I was [called] then, which was false and slanderous – but I would be called a terrorist... Assange and
Bradley Manning are no more terrorists than I am."
[128]
Prime Minister
Julia Gillard has come under widespread condemnation and a backlash within her own party for failing to support Assange after calling the leaks "an illegal act" and suggesting that his Australian passport should be cancelled. Hundreds of lawyers, academics and journalists came forward in his support with Attorney-General
Robert McClelland, unable to explain how Assange had broken Australian law. Opposition Legal Affairs spokesman, Senator
George Brandis, a
Queen's Counsel, accused Gillard of being "clumsy" with her language, stating, "As far as I can see, he (Assange) hasn't broken any Australian law, nor does it appear he has broken any American laws." Foreign Minister
Kevin Rudd, who supports Assange, stated that any decision to cancel the passport would be his, not Gillard's. Queen's Counsel
Peter Faris, who acted for Assange in a hacking case 15 years ago, said that the motives of Swedish authorities in seeking Assange's extradition for alleged sex offences are suspect: "You have to say: why are they [Sweden] pursuing it? It's pretty obvious that if it was
Bill Bloggs, they wouldn't be going to the trouble." Following the Swedish Embassy issuing of a "prepared and unconvincing reply" in response to letters of protest, Gillard was called on to send a message to Sweden "querying the way charges were laid, investigated and dropped, only to be picked up again by a different prosecutor."
[124][129][130][131][132]
On 10 December 2010, over five hundred people rallied outside
Sydney Town Hall and about three hundred and fifty people gathered in Brisbane
[133] where Assange's lawyer, Rob Stary, criticised Julia Gillard's position, telling the rally that the Australian government was a "sycophant" of the U.S. A petition circulated by
GetUp!, who have placed full page ads in support of Assange in
The New York Times and
The Washington Times, received more than 50,000 signatures.
[131]
Awards
He won the 2009
Amnesty International UK Media Award (New Media),
[134] for exposing extrajudicial assassinations in
Kenya by distributing and publicizing the
Kenya National Commission on Human Rights (KNCHR)'s investigation
The Cry of Blood – Extra Judicial Killings and Disappearances.
[135][136] Accepting the award, Assange said, "It is a reflection of the courage and strength of Kenyan civil society that this injustice was documented."
[137]
In 2010, Assange was awarded the
Sam Adams Award,
[138][139] Readers' Choice in
TIME magazine's
Person of the Year poll,
[14] and runner-up for Person of the Year.
[140] In April 2011 he was listed on the
Time 100 list of most influential people.
[141] An informal poll of editors at
Postmedia Network named him the top newsmaker for the year after six out of 10 felt Assange had "affected profoundly how information is seen and delivered".
[142]
Le Monde, one of the five publications to cooperate with WikiLeaks' publication of the recent document leaks, named him person of the year with fifty six percent of the votes in their online poll.
[143][144][145]
In February 2011, it was announced that Assange had been awarded the
Sydney Peace Foundation gold medal by the Sydney Peace Foundation of the
University of Sydney for his "exceptional courage and initiative in pursuit of human rights."
[146] There have only been four recipients of the award in the foundation's fourteen year history:
Nelson Mandela; the 14th Dalai Lama,
Tenzin Gyatso;
Daisaku Ikeda, a Japanese Buddhist leader; and Assange.
[146]
In June 2011, Assange was awarded the
Martha Gellhorn Prize for Journalism. The prize is awarded on an annual basis to journalists "whose work has penetrated the established version of events and told an unpalatable truth that exposes establishment propaganda, or 'official drivel'". The judges said, "WikiLeaks has been portrayed as a phenomenon of the hi-tech age, which it is. But it's much more. Its goal of justice through transparency is in the oldest and finest tradition of journalism."
[147]
Allegations of sexual misconduct
On 20 August 2010,
Swedish police began an investigation into two sexual encounters involving Assange.
[148][149] Assange has said allegations of wrongdoing are "without basis",
[19] describing all the sexual encounters as consensual.
[150][151] In December 2010, Assange, then in Britain, learned that the Swedish authorities had issued a European Arrest Warrant (EAW) to extradite him to Sweden for questioning. Assange appealed the EAW, and a District Judge (Magistrate's Court) in England
ruled that Assange should be extradited. Assange has appealed the extradition decision.
[15][17][18] In February 2011, Australian ambassador
Paul Stevens wrote to the Swedish justice minister and asked her to ensure that the "case would proceed in accordance with due process and the provisions prescribed under Swedish law".
[152]
Residency
Though an Australian citizen, Assange has not had a permanent address for several years.
[5] He has lived for periods in Australia, Kenya and Tanzania, and began renting a house in Iceland on 30 March 2010, from which he and other activists, including
Birgitta Jónsdóttir, worked on the '
Collateral Murder' video.
[2]
For much of 2010, he was visiting the United Kingdom, Iceland, Sweden and other European countries. On 4 November 2010, Assange told Swiss public television
TSR that he was seriously considering seeking political asylum in neutral Switzerland and moving the operation of the WikiLeaks foundation there.
[153] In December 2010, it was reported that U.S. Ambassador to Switzerland
Donald S. Beyer had warned the Swiss government against offering asylum to Assange.
[154]
In late November 2010, Deputy Foreign Minister
Kintto Lucas of Ecuador spoke about giving Assange residency with "no conditions... so he can freely present the information he possesses and all the documentation, not just over the Internet but in a variety of public forums".
[155] Lucas believed that Ecuador may benefit from initiating a dialogue with Assange.
[156] Foreign Minister
Ricardo Patino stated on 30 November that the residency application would "have to be studied from the legal and diplomatic perspective".
[157] A few hours later, President
Rafael Correa stated that WikiLeaks "committed an error by breaking the laws of the United States and leaking this type of information... no official offer was [ever] made."
[158][159] Correa noted that Lucas was speaking "on his own behalf"; additionally, he will launch an investigation into possible ramifications Ecuador would suffer from the release of the cables.
[159]
In a hearing at the
City of Westminster Magistrates' Court on 7 December 2010, Assange identified a
post office box as his address. When told by the judge that this information was not acceptable, he submitted "
Parkville, Victoria, Australia" on a sheet of paper. His lack of permanent address and nomadic lifestyle were cited by the judge as factors in denying bail.
[160] He was ultimately released, in part because journalist
Vaughan Smith offered to provide Assange with an address for bail during the extradition proceedings, Smith's Norfolk mansion,
Ellingham Hall.
[161]
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Who is George Lopez? The entertainment and acting world knows George Lopez as an American comedian, actor, and talk show host. He is mostly known for starring in his self-produced ABC sitcom George Lopez. His stand-up comedy examines race and ethnic relations, including the Mexican American culture. He was the host of the late-night talk show Lopez Tonight on TBS until its cancellation on August 10, 2011.[2]
In 1999, Lopez hosted a major morning radio show for Clear Channel Communications in Los Angeles. He was the first Latino to have headlined the keystone morning radio slot on an English-language station in LA — the nation’s top radio market.
In 2000, after several years of performing stand-up comedy, Lopez was approached by actress Sandra Bullock for Lopez to produce and star in a comedy. Bullock was concerned about the lack of Hispanic-oriented sitcoms on American television and pushed to get a sitcom on television that starred Hispanics without being exclusively about the Hispanic American community. Long criticized by Hispanic American groups for lack of Latinos on their television shows, ABC quickly picked up the television series. In 2002, Lopez became one of the few Latinos to star in a television comedy series, following in the footsteps of Freddie Prinze, Desi Arnaz and John Leguizamo. George Lopez is an American situation comedy that originally aired on ABC from 2002–2007. Lopez is the co-creator, writer, producer, and star of the show.
Lopez was a cast member and commentator for HBO’s hit sports show Inside the NFL for the 2003–2004 football season.
Lopez earned praise for his performance in the HBO Films drama, Real Women Have Curves, which premiered at the Sundance Film Festival and received the 2002 Audience Award. Previously, Lopez was featured in the drama Bread and Roses. The film, directed by British filmmaker Ken Loach, received critical acclaim after its premiere at the Cannes Film Festival. He recently starred in the ABC Wonderful World of Disney Christmas film Naughty or Nice. Lopez also starred in the Robert Rodríguez-directed film The Adventures of Shark Boy & Lava Girl which opened in June 2005.
On December 21, 2010, Lopez announced on Good Day L.A. that he would run for Mayor of Los Angeles in about 8 years.[9]
Jay Leno
