Who is Julian Assange, the polarizing founder of the secret-spilling website WikiLeaks?

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By CHARLOTTE GRAHAM-McLAY and JILL LAWLESS

WELLINGTON, New Zealand (AP) — 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 U.S. 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.”

U.S. 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 U.S.

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 U.K. 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 U.S. government unsealed an indictment against Assange and added further charges over WikiLeaks’ publication of classified documents. Prosecutors said he conspired with U.S. 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 U.S. 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.

Lawless reported from London.

Melania Trump won’t move back into the White House if Trump wins: report

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During Donald Trump’s four years as president, it was widely reported that he had his own bedroom in the White House residence, as wife Melania Trump occupied her own suite.

Now, it’s looks like Trump could have the entire residence to himself if he’s elected this year to return to the White House, with a report saying that his ever-elusive wife has no plans to move back to Washington, D.C., with him.

A handful of “Melania-ologists” have told Axios that the former first lady probably won’t take up full-time residence in the White House. She instead will divide her time between the couple’s Mar-a-Lago resort in Palm Beach, Florida, where she’s been living the past four years, and New York City, the location of Trump Tower and of New York University. There have been rumors that her son, Barron Trump, could be going to college at NYU.

Within this part-time first lady arrangement, the Slovenian-born former model would only turn up at the White House for a handful of ceremonial undertakings and special events, such as state dinners, Axios reported. The Axios report, however, didn’t specify whether these undertakings would include Melania’s always controversial approach to decorating the White House at Christmastime.

“Melania does what Melania wants,” said Mary Jordan, a Washington Post associate editor and the author of the book “The Art of Her Deal: The Untold Story of Melania Trump.” Jordan told Axios that Melania Trump always was a different kind of first lady and didn’t believe that this unelected position put any special obligation on her.

“She’s distancing herself even more from her husband and from the Washington social political scene,” author Kate Andersen Brower also told Axios. “I mean, she clearly hated being in Washington.”

A spokesperson for Melania Trump did not respond to Axios’ request for comment. But it wouldn’t be that surprising to anyone if she decided to distance herself from her husband’s possible second term.

It’s been pretty well established by multiple books and news articles that Melania Trump never enjoyed the messy work of politics. A book about first ladies published in March also suggested that Donald Trump’s wife may not have been the most industrious person to ever hold that job.

Melania Trump did not enjoy receiving requests to make appearances on behalf of her husband’s political agenda when he was president, according to “American Woman: The Transformation of the Modern First Lady, from Hillary Clinton to Jill Biden,” by Katie Rogers, a New York Times White House correspondent.

Melania also “avoided being overscheduled, and at times avoided being scheduled at all,” Rogers also said. Her staff could sometimes convince her to do multiple events on days when they knew she could be “camera ready, with a full designer ensemble, dewy makeup, and a pristine blowout.” But they only were successful about “half the time,” Rogers said.

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Melania Trump has made herself pretty scarce since her husband lost the election in 2020 and the couple left the White House in January 2021, in the wake of the Jan. 6 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol.

Melania Trump certainly hasn’t been a regular presence as he campaigns — and she totally avoided the Manhattan courtroom where he was tried and convicted of 34 felony counts related to hush money payments to porn star Stormy Daniels.

The Trump campaign continues to promise that Trump fans will get to see more of Melania Trump on the campaign trail in the coming months, Axios reported. Trump, meanwhile, acknowledged in February that his wife is a private person, but insisted that she’s invested in his campaign. “She wants to see this country really succeed. She loves the country,” he said.

Whether or not Melania Trump wants to return to serving as first lady, she may be interested in reviving her Be Best campaign, an initiative that was supposed to promote childhood well-being and curb bullying, Axios reported.

Critics have said that the initiative didn’t amount to much more than a few public appearances. Jordan told Axios that Melania Trump would ensure that she has a larger, “better,” and “more qualified” staff this time.

“Now having seen how this works, she would just be wiser and she would be more vocal and more demanding about what the first lady’s office should get,” Jordan said.

‘We are protesting both of them.’ Presidential debate draws activists’ ire

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Jozsef Papp | (TNS) The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

ATLANTA — With all eyes on Atlanta on Thursday as President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump meet for the first presidential debate of the campaign season, some activists plan to assemble in support of the cause they champion — and against both of the candidates.

Opponents of Atlanta’s planned public safety training center and the ongoing Israel-Hamas war have announced plans to protest ahead of the debate at CNN. The network once located in downtown Atlanta is now housed at the Techwood campus in Midtown, and there will be no live audience during the debate.

The Atlanta chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America plans to gather ahead of time to call for a cease fire in Gaza.

“Many of us have been in Atlanta and no matter how many people come out and say that they want this war to stop, they want a permanent cease fire in Palestine, the president is not really budging on it,” said Kelsea Bond, co-chair of the group’s Atlanta chapter. “We don’t think Trump would be any better so we are protesting both of them.”

Activists opposed to the training center also plan to gather before Biden and Trump take the stage at 9 p.m Thursday.

“From our perspective, these represent an important moral litmus tests, and both candidates fail both of them,” said Sam Beard, an organizer of the group “Stop Cop City,” which has protested the training center. “The debate between them is a farce, a media spectacle designed to confuse voters about the direction our society is heading in. However, we the people have the power to determine that direction, and we aim to do just that.”

The Atlanta Police Department is aware of the plans but wouldn’t discuss enforcement strategies due to “safety and security reasons.”

The debate is happening just over two months after 28 people were detained, 23 arrested after activists set up an encampment on the campus of Emory University on April 25 to protest the Israel-Hamas war. Charges remain pending as the DeKalb County Solicitor’s Office reviews the case.

At the University of Georgia, 16 people, including nine students, were arrested on April 29. Each student went through a code of conduct process; at least one graduating student was not allowed to attend commencement.

A graduate wears a keffiyeh and faces away from President Joe Biden in protest of the war in Gaza at the commencement ceremony at Morehouse College in Atlanta on Sunday, May 19, 2024. (Arvin Temkar/The Atlanta Journal-Constitution/TNS)

Protests at SCAD, Georgia State University and Kennesaw State University resulted in no arrests.

Last year, 61 people were indicted last year by the Attorney General’s Office, accused of violating the state’s RICO act while protesting the training center. Trials are expected to start in coming months.

Biden’s May 19 visit to Atlanta, to deliver the Morehouse College commencement address, drew a muted turnout of protesters. A lone demonstrator held a handwritten sign that read “Genocide Joe” as the presidential motorcade arrived at the campus.

During Biden’s remarks that day, demonstrators marched for about 10 minutes as Atlanta police followed along, asking them to stay on the sidewalk.

“Long live Palestine,” the group chanted. “Come November, we’ll remember.”

——-

©2024 The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. Visit at ajc.com. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.

Twins place starting pitcher Chris Paddack on injured list with shoulder fatigue

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PHOENIX — After pitcher Chris Paddack missed nearly all of the past two seasons recovering from his second Tommy John surgery, the Twins knew they were going to need to manage his workload carefully.

The time has now come for the starting pitcher to take a break after he has mentioned multiple times publicly that he has been experiencing some dead arm. The Twins placed Paddack on the injured list Tuesday with right shoulder fatigue, calling up reliever Ronny Henriquez from Triple-A St. Paul to take his spot on the roster for the time being.

Days earlier, manager Rocco Baldelli said the Twins would take a day or two to assess how Paddack was feeling before making any decisions, but he noted that there was nothing acute going on.

“There are going to be ups and downs in everyone’s season, especially his, coming back from what he’s coming back from,” Baldelli said.

Paddack described the ball as feeling like a dumbbell during his last start and said his body has felt “just a little heavy” since the beginning of June.

His pitch velocity took a big dip in his last start, with the four-seam fastball two miles per hour slower than his season average. Since the beginning of the month, Paddack has a 7.79 earned-run average, giving up 15 runs in 17 1/3 innings.

“I’ve had a rough four weeks,” he said. “You can prepare all offseason, all spring training, but a man that hasn’t bene able to throw this many innings in three years now due to injury, you can’t do enough to prepare for this. We knew coming in that there was going to be a rollercoaster of events — up, down — with the body and the mind.”

Paddack was listed as Thursday’s scheduled starter against the Arizona Diamondbacks. Henriquez is a reliever, meaning the Twins are likely to call someone else up on Thursday to fill his spot in the starting rotation. Top pitching prospect David Festa, who is off to a strong start at Triple-A, is an option.

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