By Lindsey Bever
April 12 at 7:59 AM

The moderator wondered whether Hillary Clinton might have thoughts on Julian Assange’s arrest — noting that Clinton has “some familiarity” with the WikiLeaks founder’s work ...

... “I do think it’s a little ironic that he may be the only foreigner that this administration would welcome to the United States.”

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2019/04/12/assange-is-only-foreigner-trump-administration-would-welcome-us-clinton-jokes/?utm_term=.c9c79596cacf

... relations between him and Ecuador's government worsened under President Lenín Moreno, who took office in 2017. This became evident last year when Assange was given a set of house rules, including paying for internet use, food and laundry, taking better care of his cat and keeping the bathroom clean.

Patience was already running thin and, explaining the withdrawal of Assange's protection on Twitter, President Moreno accused him of "repeated violations to international conventions and daily-life protocols". He said Ecuador had "reached its limit" on Assange's "discourteous and aggressive behaviour".

More details emerged later, when Foreign Minister José Valencia told Congress that Assange had been using a mobile phone not registered with the embassy, repeatedly insulted the mission's workers, reportedly calling them US spies, and damaged the facilities by riding his skateboard and playing football, despite being told not to do so.

Cleaning staff, Mr Valencia said, had described "improper hygienic conduct" throughout Assange's stay, an issue that a lawyer had attributed to "stomach problems". One unnamed senior Ecuadorean official told AP news agency that other issues included "weeks without a shower" and a "dental problem born of poor hygiene" ...

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-latin-america-47907600

Henry Mance in London 3 HOURS AGO

Jeremy Corbyn, the leader of the UK Labour party, has called on the British government to block the extradition of Julian Assange to the US on a computer hacking charge ...

Diane Abbott, the shadow home secretary, likened the case to that of computer hacker Gary McKinnon, whose extradition was blocked by the then home secretary Theresa May in 2012 ...

UK law was changed in 2013, after Mr McKinnon’s case, so that the power to consider human rights grounds now lies with the courts, not the home secretary.

However, Labour does not appear to be opposing Mr Assange’s potential extradition to Sweden for sexual offences. Some charges against Mr Assange have expired but at least one could be reactivated ...

https://www.ft.com/content/9a6546a0-5d03-11e9-939a-341f5ada9d40

Alexandra Ma

Julian Assange's arrest at the Ecuadorean embassy in London was carried out in a specific way, to make sure he could not press a mysterious panic button that he said could bring dire consequences for Ecuador, its foreign minister said ...

During this stay, Assange allegedly threatened Jaime Merchan, the country's ambassador to the UK, with activating some kind of panic button that would bring down the embassy if he were arrested or felt in danger.

Assange had said that the button would bring "devastating consequences," the AP reported, in a summary of Valencia's remarks.

It is not clear exactly what form the "panic button" took: whether it was a physical device or a metaphor for some other easily-activated insurance measure ...

https://www.businessinsider.com/assange-arrest-ecuador-prevent-alleged-panic-button-2019-4

6:00 AM ET
Michael Weiss

... Vidal had the American national-security establishment in mind when he wrote that polemic, although I doubt even he would have contrived to portray the CIA being in league with a Latin American socialist named for the founder of the Bolshevik Party. Ecuador’s President Lenin Moreno announced Thursday that he had taken the singular decision to expel his country’s long-term foreign guest and revoke his asylum owing to Assange’s “discourteous and aggressive behaviour.”

... It also involved interfering in the “internal political matters in Ecuador,” as Romo told reporters in Quito. Assange and his organization WikiLeaks, Romo said, have maintained ties to two Russian hackers living in Ecuador who worked with the country’s former foreign minister, Ricardo Patino, to destabilize the Moreno administration.

We don’t yet know if Romo’s allegation is true (Patino denied it) or simply a pretext for booting a nuisance from state property. But Assange’s ties to Russian hackers and Russian intelligence organs are now beyond dispute.

Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s indictment of 12 GRU cyber-operatives suggests that Assange was, at best, an unwitting accomplice to the GRU’s campaign to sway the U.S. presidential election in 2016 and allegedly even solicited the stolen Democratic correspondence from Russia’s military intelligence agency, which was masquerading as Guccifer 2.0. Assange repeatedly and viciously trafficked, on Twitter and on Fox News, in the thoroughly debunked claim that the correspondence may have been passed to him by the DNC staffer Seth Rich, who, Assange darkly suggested, was subsequently murdered by the Clintonistas as revenge for the presumed betrayal ...

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/04/julian-assange-got-what-he-deserved/587008/

Matt Kwong · CBC News · Posted: Apr 11, 2019 11:36 PM ET | Last Updated: 2 hours ago

... Assange "proselytized about radical transparency," she said, only to be used by other forces for their own interests — like Russian hackers seeking to meddle in a U.S. election.

According to an indictment by the U.S. special counsel last summer, Russian government hackers stole tens of thousands of emails from the campaign of Trump's presidential Democratic opponent Hillary Clinton before passing them on to WikiLeaks for publication.

Trump made it clear he was game.

"I love WikiLeaks," he proclaimed during a campaign in which he would go on to cite the website more than 160 times ...

https://www.cbc.ca/news/world/julian-assange-arrested-london-hero-or-villain-reputation-1.5095027

A COLLABORATOR OF WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange was arrested in Ecuador while trying to flee to Japan, the South American country’s interior minister said ...

Channel Teleamazonas identified him as Ola Bini, a software developer focused on privacy, security and cryptography, but did not name its source.

Earlier yesterday, the minister had linked the collaborator with alleged attempts to destabilise the government of President Lenin Moreno.

He “has been detained simply for investigation purposes,” she said, adding he had taken foreign trips with former Ecuadorian foreign minister Ricardo Patino, who gave political asylum to Assange in 2012 ...

https://www.thejournal.ie/assange-aide-arrested-4588542-Apr2019/

in 2017. Sweden's then-chief prosecutor, Marianne Ny, said in 2017 that the Swedish probe could be reopened should the situation change ..."

https://www.smh.com.au/world/europe/julian-assange-what-happens-next-20190412-p51dp0.html