In the end, the man who reportedly smeared feces on the walls of his lodgings, mistreated his kitten, and variously blamed the ills of the world on feminists and bespectacled Jewish writers was pulled from the Ecuadorian embassy looking every inch like a powdered-sugar Saddam Hussein plucked straight from his spider hole. The only camera crew to record this pivotal event belonged to Ruptly, a Berlin-based streaming-online-video service, which is a wholly owned subsidiary of RT...

Using cryptography and virtual drop boxes, Julian Assange's WikiLeaks created a revolutionary new model for media to lure massive digitized leaks from whistleblowers, exposing everything from US military secrets to wealthy tax-dodgers' illicit offshore accounts. Assange's arrest in London Thursday on a US extradition request to face charges of computer crimes could spell the end of 13-year-old WikiLeaks.

Julian Assange, who had been living at the Ecuadorian embassy in London for seven years, was arrested Thursday morning after the country’s president rescinded the WikiLeaks founder’s asylum status. Assange’s eviction has caused an uproar across the globe. WikiLeaks editor-in-chief Kristinn Hrafnsson and Edward Snowden both said the arrest marks a “dark day” for press freedom.

He took refuge in Ecuador's London embassy in 2012 to avoid extradition to Sweden over an alleged sexual assault. The Met Police said he was arrested for failing to surrender to the court.

Mr. Assange took refuge in the Ecuadorean Embassy in 2012. He faces a British charge of skipping bail and is wanted in the United States on charges of releasing secret documents.

Chelsea Manning, the former Army intelligence analyst who shared military and diplomatic secrets with WikiLeaks in 2010, has been taken into custody today for refusing to testify before a grand jury, according to The Washington Post. Manning was subpoenaed to present information on WikiLeaks as part of an ongoing investigation in the Eastern District of Virginia. Manning refused to testify, citing her constitutional right to remain silent.

Former Army intelligence analyst Chelsea Manning has been sent to jail for refusing to testify to a grand jury investigating Wikileaks. U.S. District Judge Claude Hilton ordered Manning to jail for contempt of court on Friday after a brief hearing in which Manning confirmed she has no intention of testifying. She told the judge she “will accept whatever you bring upon me.”

Former Army intelligence analyst Chelsea Manning said Thursday that a judge rejected her effort to quash a grand jury subpoena to testify in an apparent investigation of WikiLeaks. But Manning said after the hearing in federal court in Alexandria, Virginia, that she’ll continue her legal efforts to avoid testifying to the grand jury. Tuesday’s hearing before U.S. District Judge Claude Hilton was closed to the public, and prosecutors declined comment after the hearing.

Chelsea Manning isn’t alone. Late Thursday, Manning revealed that she’s fighting a subpoena to testify before a grand jury that’s been investigating Julian Assange for nearly nine years. But Manning isn’t the only one being dragged into the aging probe of Wikileaks’ first big haul. A former Wikileaks volunteer who was also personal friends with Manning was subpoenaed last May. But unlike Manning, he did not fight the subpoena. He accepted an immunity deal offered by prosecutors.

WikiLeaks, the tell-anything anti-secrecy organization, on Wednesday took aim at one of the world’s most secretive institutions, the Vatican, releasing a small collection of documents about a power struggle involving Pope Francis, a leading traditionalist cardinal and a medieval Catholic order of knights. The documents offered little new about a fight that two years ago was widely covered in the media.

Hours after Donald Trump associate Roger Stone was indicted for lying to congress about his communications with the transparency organization Wikileaks, the organization disavowed its ties to the longtime Republican political operative and argued that the indictment was proof that there was no “back channel” between it and the Trump campaign.

The Socialist Equality Party announced at a public meeting last Sunday that it will organise demonstrations in defence of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange next March in Sydney and Melbourne. Delivering the main report at the Sydney meeting, which was livestreamed internationally on Facebook, SEP national secretary James Cogan stated that the protests, on March 3 in Sydney and March 10 in Melbourne, would be aimed at mobilising the widespread support for Assange among workers and young people.

In mid-May 2017, Paul Manafort, facing intensifying pressure to settle debts and pay mounting legal bills, flew to Ecuador to offer his services to a potentially lucrative new client — the country’s incoming president, Lenín Moreno. Mr. Manafort made the trip mainly to see if he could broker a deal under which China would invest in Ecuador’s power system, possibly yielding a fat commission for Mr. Manafort.

For the first few hours after any new “bombshell” Russiagate story comes out, my social media notifications always light up with poorly written posts by liberal establishment loyalists saying things like “HAHAHA @caitoz this proves you wrong now will you FINALLY stop denying Russian collusion???” Then, when people start actually analyzing that story and noting that it comes nowhere remotely close to proving that Donald Trump colluded...

It is welcome that finally there has been a little pushback, including from leading journalists, to the Guardian’s long-running vilification of Julian Assange, the founder of Wikileaks. By Jonathan Cook.

They are destroying him slowly. They are doing it through an indefinite detention which has been going on for the last eight years with no end in sight. Julian Assange has become one of the most widely known icons of freedom of the press and the struggle against state secrecy. Recently, his detention in the Ecuadorian embassy in London has been joined by isolation, strict rules and various forms of pressure which seem to have no other purpose than to break him down.

Donald Trump’s former campaign manager Paul Manafort held secret talks with Julian Assange inside the Ecuadorian embassy in London, and visited around the time he joined Trump’s campaign, the Guardian has been told. Sources have said Manafort went to see Assange in 2013, 2015 and in spring 2016 – during the period when he was made a key figure in Trump’s push for the White House.

"I love WikiLeaks!” candidate Trump proclaimed in 2016. Now Julian Assange has learned what Donald’s love is worth: a sealed criminal indictment. If the consequences for the First Amendment weren’t so sobering, it would be a savage cosmic joke. First, Assange—convinced the Obama administration would snatch him up if given half a chance—sentences himself to indefinite confinement in the Ecuadorean embassy in London. Then, believing Hillary Rodham Clinton is a “sadistic sociopath,”...

Rather than federal indictment, Assange deserves a tweaked version of one of Washington’s hottest honors — a Medal of Freedom with a steam whistle. By James Bovard.

The Trump DOJ’s prosecution of Assange will be cheered by Democrats, as they unite to criminalize the core of investigative journalism. By Glenn Greenwald.