STATEHOOD OR INDEPENDENCE

Puerto Rico sues former officials accused of corruption to recover more than $30M in public funds

 A Puerto Rican national flag flies in front of the Capitol building in San Juan, Puerto Rico, July 29, 2015. The island’s two biggest political parties hold gubernatorial primaries on Sunday, June 2, 2024. 

(AP Photo/Ricardo Arduengo, File)

BY CORAL MURPHY MARCOS
June 25, 2024Share

SAN JUAN, Puerto Rico (AP) — Puerto Rico’s Justice Department announced Tuesday it is suing at least 30 former government officials accused of corruption to recover more than $30 million in public funds.

Among those sued are three former legislators, including María Milagros Charbonier, who was sentenced in May to eight years in federal prison after being found guilty of theft, bribery and a kickback scheme.

“We are going to recover the Puerto Rican people’s money and claim an amount that totals three times the damage caused by those who have illegally appropriated public funds,” said Domingo Emanuelli, the U.S. territory’s justice secretary.

Also sued are eight former mayors including Félix Delgado of Cataño and Ángel Pérez of Guaynabo. Delgado was sentenced to one year in federal prison in March after pleading guilty to accepting bribes in exchange for awarding millions of dollars’ worth of municipal contracts. Pérez was sentenced to more than five years in federal prison in February after being found guilty of bribery and extorsion.

Their attorneys could not be immediately reached for comment.

Puerto Rico’s Justice Department had long been accused of not cracking down sufficiently on widespread government corruption on the island, with federal authorities taking the reins in recent years.

“For the first time on the island, the Puerto Rican Justice Department sued more than 30 convicts for corruption with the purpose of recovering public funds and demanding reparation for the damages they caused to the Puerto Rican people,” Emanuelli said.

The department also sued two companies, J.R. Asphalt Inc. and Waste Collection Corp. Federal authorities have previously accused them of being linked to government corruption cases.

The Department of Justice stated that according to the civil procedural rules of the U.S. territory, it could implement provisional measures to recover assets and restrict the defendants’ ability to sell property.

The largest lawsuit involves a group of seven people accused of wire fraud and money laundering in Mayaguez, totaling $21.6 million, according to the breakdown of lawsuits by the Department of Justice. Radamés Benítez, former executive assistant to the former mayor of Trujillo Alto, is facing a lawsuit seeking just under $3.1 million, while Delgado has been sued for nearly $1.2 million.

Several mayors have been arrested by the FBI over alleged corruption since the 2020 elections, with other facing local charges. Other high-profile arrests, unrelated to Tuesday’s lawsuits include former Puerto Rico Gov. Wanda Vazquez Garced, who was arrested in 2022 for allegedly bribing several people to finance her 2020 gubernatorial election campaign.

Last year, the former mayor of Trujillo Alto, José Luis Cruz Cruz, and Abel Nazario, former senator and former mayor of Yauco, were sentenced to prison after engaging in a bribery scheme and misappropriating municipal funds, respectively. In 2022, former mayors of Aguas Buenas and Humacao, Javier García and Reinaldo Vargas, were arrested on charges of conspiracy, soliciting bribes and extortion.

In 2021, a day after Delgado pleaded guilty to bribery, businessman Mario Villegas was indicted for allegedly paying kickbacks to Delgado, collecting over $9.9 million in municipal contracts for his asphalt and paving company. Villegas was sentenced to over three years in prison.

UPDATED

Plea hearing for WikiLeaks’ Julian Assange gets underway; part of deal with US to secure his freedom

A plane believed to be carrying WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange arrived in Bangkok on Tuesday. Assange will plead guilty to a felony charge in a deal with the U.S. Justice Department that will allow him to walk free and resolve a long-running legal saga that spanned multiple continents and centered on the publication of a trove of classified documents. Assange left a British prison on Monday and will appear later this week in the U.S. federal court in the Northern Mariana Islands, a U.S. commonwealth in the Western Pacific. He’s expected to plead guilty to an Espionage Act charge of conspiring to unlawfully obtain and disseminate classified national defense information, the Justice Department said in a letter filed in court.

                                ASSANGE AT AIRPORT IN SAIPAN

BY MARI YAMAGUCHI, ALANNA DURKIN RICHER, KIMBERLY ESMORES AND ERIC TUCKER
June 25, 2024

SAIPAN, Northern Mariana Islands (AP) — A plea hearing for WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange expected to result in his freedom has gotten underway in federal court in Saipan with a judge asking him preliminary questions about his education and background.

As part of a deal with the U.S. Justice Department, Assange is set to admit to a felony for publishing U.S. military secrets under a deal that spares him prison time in America after years spent jailed in the United Kingdom while fighting extradition. He is expected to return home to his native Australia.

He arrived in a white vehicle, wearing a dark suit with a tie loosened at the collar, and was briskly escorted into the courthouse while ignoring questions from reporters.

The hearing, taking place in the Northern Mariana Islands, a U.S. commonwealth in the Pacific, is the stunning culmination of the U.S. government’s yearslong pursuit of the publisher who has been painted both as a hero and a reckless criminal for exposing hundreds of thousands of sensitive military documents.

The U.S. Justice Department agreed to hold the hearing on the remote island because Assange opposed coming to the continental U.S. and because it’s near Australia, where he will return after he enters his plea.

The deal — disclosed Monday night in court papers — represents the final chapter in a more than decade-long legal odyssey over the fate of Assange, whose hugely popular secret-sharing website made him a cause célèbre among press freedom advocates who said he acted as a journalist to expose U.S. military wrongdoing. U.S. prosecutors have said his actions recklessly put the country’s national security at risk.

Though the deal with prosecutors requires Assange to admit guilt to a single felony count, it also allows him to avoid spending any time in an American prison. He will get credit for the five years he has already spent in a high-security British prison while fighting extradition to the U.S. to face charges. Before being locked up in London, Assange spent years hiding out in the Ecuadorian Embassy in London to avoid extradition to Sweden to face allegations of rape and sexual assault, which he has denied.

The abrupt conclusion enables both sides to claim a degree of success, with the Justice Department able to resolve without trial a case that raised thorny legal issues and that might never have reached a jury at all given the plodding pace of the extradition process.

Last month, Assange won the right to appeal an extradition order after his lawyers argued that the U.S. government provided “blatantly inadequate” assurances that he would have the same free speech protections as an American citizen if extradited from Britain.

His wife, Stella Assange, told the BBC from Australia that it had been “touch and go” over 72 hours whether the deal would go ahead but she felt “elated” at the news. A lawyer who married the WikiLeaks founder in prison in 2022, she said details of the agreement would be made public once the judge had signed off on it.

“He will be a free man once it is signed off by a judge,” she said, adding that she still didn’t think it was real.

Assange on Monday left the London prison, where he has spent the last five years, after being granted bail during a secret hearing last week. He boarded a plane that landed hours later in Bangkok to refuel before taking off again toward Saipan. A video posted by WikiLeaks on X, showed Assange staring intently out the window at the blue sky as the plane headed toward the island.

“Imagine. From over 5 years in a small cell in a maximum security prison. Nearly 14 years detained in the U.K. To this,” WikiLeaks wrote. The top Australian diplomat in the United Kingdom accompanied Assange on the flight.

The guilty plea resolves a criminal case brought by Republican President Donald Trump’s administration over the receipt and publication of war logs and diplomatic cables that detailed U.S. military action in Iraq and Afghanistan. Prosecutors alleged that Assange conspired with former Army intelligence analyst Chelsea Manning to obtain the records and published them without regard to American national security, including by releasing the names of human sources who provided information to U.S. forces.

Former Vice President Mike Pence called the new arrangement a “miscarriage of justice,” writing on X that Assange “endangered the lives of our troops in a time of war and should have been prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law.”

But Assange’s activities drew an outpouring of support from press freedom advocates, who heralded his role in bringing to light military conduct that might otherwise have been concealed from view. Among the files published by WikiLeaks was a video of a 2007 Apache helicopter attack by American forces in Baghdad that killed 11 people, including two Reuters journalists.

Australia for years has been calling on the U.S. government to drop the case against Assange, arguing there’s a disconnect between the treatment of Assange and Manning. Then-U.S. President Barack Obama commuted Manning’s 35-year sentence to seven years, which allowed her release in 2017.

“Regardless of the views that people have about Mr. Assange’s activities, the case has dragged on for too long,” said Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese. “There’s nothing to be gained by his continued incarceration and we want him brought home to Australia.”

Assange took refuge in the Ecuadorian Embassy in London in 2012 and was granted political asylum after courts in England ruled he should be extradited to Sweden as part of a rape investigation in the Scandinavian country. He was arrested by British police after Ecuador’s government withdrew his asylum status in 2019 and then jailed for skipping bail when he first took shelter inside the embassy.

Although Sweden eventually dropped its sex crimes investigation because so much time had elapsed, Assange had remained in London’s high-security Belmarsh Prison during the extradition fight with the U.S.

Assange made headlines again in 2016 after his website published Democratic emails that prosecutors say were stolen by Russian intelligence operatives. He was never charged in special counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia investigation, but the inquiry laid bare in stark detail the role that the hacking operation played in interfering in that year’s election on behalf of Trump.
___

Tucker reported from Fort Pierce, Florida, and Durkin Richer from Washington. Associated Press writers Colleen Long in Washington, Napat Kongsawad and David Rising in Bangkok, Jill Lawless and Brian Melley in London and Rod McGuirk in Melbourne, Australia, contributed to this report.

Unseen diplomatic manoeuvres helped unlock Assange deal


By AFP
June 25, 2024

Wikileaks founder Julian Assange walking to board a plane from London, released from a high-security prison where he was held for five years — © WikiLeaks/AFP
Laura CHUNG

Behind closed doors, an Australia-US-UK diplomatic dance opened the way for a plea deal to free WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, analysts and a diplomat previously involved in the case told AFP.

The 52-year-old Australian citizen walked out of his five-year visit to London’s high-security Belmarsh prison on Monday after agreeing to plead guilty to a single count of revealing US national defence secrets.

Assange’s release had been under discussion “for a little while now”, said Jared Mondschein, director of research at the University of Sydney’s United States Studies Centre.

“It’s been a few months in the making,” he told AFP on Tuesday.

US Ambassador to Australia Caroline Kennedy — late president John F. Kennedy’s daughter — “has been talking about this in the last few months,” Mondschein said.

“She was flagging there is a way to resolve this.”

Under the plea agreement, Assange is flying from London to Saipan, capital of the Pacific US territory of Northern Mariana Islands, for a Wednesday morning court appearance.

He is expected to be sentenced to five years and two months in prison, with credit for the same amount of time spent behind bars in Britain — allowing him to return to his native Australia.

The United States did not want to drop the charges, Mondschein said.

– ‘Winds were shifting’ –

“They wanted him to plead guilty and they had to figure out how to do that without being in the United States,” he added.

“With that all said, it is not a fully done deal. It appears they have come to a plea deal but if there is anything we have learned in this long saga now, we should not make assumptions and see where we land in 24 to 48 hours.”

The tide shifted strongly in Assange’s favour after Prime Minister Anthony Albanese was elected in May 2022 and made his release a priority, said a diplomat who did not want to be named so that they could speak freely.

Assange and his family had been advised previously that he should plead guilty and strike a deal because it would be difficult for the United States to drop the charges, said the diplomat, who worked on the case several years ago.

“The political winds were shifting and that also played a role in convincing people in the US that this had to be dealt with more urgently than it would have otherwise,” the diplomat told AFP.

Assange is expected to be sentenced to five years and two months in prison, with credit for the same amount of time spent behind bars in Britain — allowing him to return to his native Australia. — Image: ©AFP

Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese has repeatedly called for an end to Assange’s legal ordeal, saying: “Enough is enough”.

The country’s parliament even passed a motion this year with the prime minister’s support, calling for Assange to be allowed to return to his family.

The government had been working “behind the scenes diplomatically” with the US administration to advocate for his release, said Emma Shortis, senior researcher in international and security affairs at The Australia Institute thinktank.

– ‘Clear threat’ –

“I think part of the reason this has happened today is because it was becoming a significant issue for the relationship,” Shortis told AFP, notably since London, Washington and Canberra agreed on a nuclear-powered submarine pact, AUKUS.

“To be told fairly consistently that Australia’s relationship with the United States is based on shared democratic values served the argument that the AUKUS submarine deal is critical to that relationship,” Shortis said.

“And then to have the Assange case alongside that, with its clear threat to international free speech rights, was just really irreconcilable.”

Johan Lidberg, head of journalism at Monash University, noted that US President Joe Biden had let slip in April that his administration was “considering” an Australian request to drop the Assange prosecution.

“I think the momentum just built to a point where both sides — both Australia and the US, partly with the aid of the intermediary of the UK — were trying to find a way out of it,” Lidberg said.

All sides were seeking to back out of “this stalemate that wasn’t really going anywhere — and no one was really benefiting from it.”

WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange stops in Bangkok on his way to a US court and later freedom

A plane believed to be carrying WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange arrived in Bangkok on Tuesday. Assange will plead guilty to a felony charge in a deal with the U.S. Justice Department that will allow him to walk free and resolve a long-running legal saga that spanned multiple continents and centered on the publication of a trove of classified documents. Assange left a British prison on Monday and will appear later this week in the U.S. federal court in the Northern Mariana Islands, a U.S. commonwealth in the Western Pacific. He’s expected to plead guilty to an Espionage Act charge of conspiring to unlawfully obtain and disseminate classified national defense information, the Justice Department said in a letter filed in court.

He’s expected to plead guilty to an Espionage Act charge of conspiring to unlawfully obtain and disseminate classified national defense information, according to the U.S. Justice Department in a letter filed in court.

Assange is expected to return to his home country of Australia after his plea and sentencing. The hearing is taking place in Saipan because of Assange’s opposition to traveling to the continental U.S. and the court’s proximity to Australia, prosecutors said.

The guilty plea, which must be approved by a judge, brings an abrupt conclusion to a criminal case of international intrigue and to the U.S. government’s yearslong pursuit of a publisher whose hugely popular secret-sharing website made him a cause célèbre among many press freedom advocates who said he acted as a journalist to expose U.S. military wrongdoing. Investigators, in contrast, have repeatedly asserted that his actions broke laws meant to protect sensitive information and put the country’s national security at risk.

RELATED COVERAGE


Timeline of the Assange legal saga over extradition to the US on espionage charges

A look at Julian Assange and how the long-jailed WikiLeaks founder is now on the verge of freedom


Stella Assange told the BBC from Australia that it had been “touch and go” over the past 72 hours whether the deal would go ahead but she felt “elated” at the news. A lawyer who married the WikiLeaks founder in prison in 2022, she said details of the agreement would be made public once the judge had signed off on it.

“He will be a free man once it is signed off by a judge,” she said, adding that she still didn’t think it was real.

She told Britain’s PA news agency that the flight was costing Assange $500,000 and they would start a fundraising campaign to help pay for it.

Kristinn Hrafnsson, editor-in-chief of WikiLeaks, said the deal for Assange came about after the growing involvement of Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese.

“This is the result of a long, long process which has been going on for some time. It has been a tough battle, but the focus now is on Julian being reunited with his family,” Hrafnsson told the PA news agency. “The most important thing is that Julian is free and he is finally able to enjoy the big blue sky.”

In a statement posted on the social media platform X, WikiLeaks said Assange boarded a plane and departed Monday after leaving the British prison where he has spent the last five years. WikiLeaks applauded the announcement of the deal, saying it was grateful for “all who stood by us, fought for us, and remained utterly committed in the fight for his freedom.

Albanese told Parliament that an Australian envoy had flown with Assange from London.

Buildings are reflected in the window as WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange is taken from court, where he appeared on charges, Wednesday May 1, 2019 of jumping British bail seven years ago, in London. (AP Photo/Matt Dunham, File)

“Regardless of the views that people have about Mr. Assange’s activities, the case has dragged on for too long,” Albanese said. “There’s nothing to be gained by his continued incarceration and we want him brought home to Australia,.”

The deal ensures that Assange will admit guilt while also sparing him from additional prison time. He had spent years hiding in the Ecuadorian Embassy in London after Swedish authorities sought his arrest on rape allegations before being locked up in the United Kingdom.

Assange is expected to be sentenced to the five years he has already spent in the British prison while fighting extradition to the U.S. to face charges, a process that has played out in a series of hearings in London. Last month, he won the right to appeal an extradition order after his lawyers argued that the U.S. government provided “blatantly inadequate” assurances that he would have the same free speech protections as an American citizen if extradited from Britain.

Assange has been heralded by many around the world as a hero who brought to light military wrongdoing in Iraq and Afghanistan. Among the files published by WikiLeaks was a video of a 2007 Apache helicopter attack by American forces in Baghdad that killed 11 people, including two Reuters journalists.

But his reputation was also tarnished by rape allegations, which he has denied.

The Justice Department’s indictment unsealed in 2019 accused Assange of encouraging and helping U.S. Army intelligence analyst Chelsea Manning steal diplomatic cables and military files that WikiLeaks published in 2010. Prosecutors had accused Assange of damaging national security by publishing documents that harmed the U.S. and its allies and aided its adversaries.

The case was lambasted by press advocates and Assange supporters. Federal prosecutors defended it as targeting conduct that went way beyond that of a journalist gathering information, amounting to an attempt to solicit, steal and indiscriminately publish classified government documents.

The plea agreement comes months after President Joe Biden said he was considering a request from Australia to drop the U.S. push to prosecute Assange. The White House was not involved in the decision to resolve Assange’s case, according to a White House official who was not authorized to speak publicly about the case and spoke to The Associated Press on condition of anonymity.

Assange made headlines again in 2016 after his website published Democratic emails that prosecutors say were stolen by Russian intelligence operatives. He was never charged in special counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia investigation, but the inquiry laid bare in stark detail the role that the hacking operation played in interfering in that year’s election on behalf of then-Republican candidate Donald Trump.

During the Obama administration, Justice Department officials mulled charges for Assange but were unsure a case would hold up in court and were concerned it could be hard to justify prosecuting him for acts similar to those of a conventional journalist.

The posture changed in the Trump administration, however, with former Attorney General Jeff Sessions in 2017 calling Assange’s arrest a priority.

Assange’s family and supporters have said his physical and mental health have suffered during more than a decade of legal battles.

Assange took refuge in the Ecuadorian Embassy in London in 2012 and was granted political asylum after courts in England ruled he should be extradited to Sweden as part of a rape investigation in the Scandinavian country. He was arrested by British police after Ecuador’s government withdrew his asylum status in 2019 and then jailed for skipping bail when he first took shelter inside the embassy.

Although Sweden eventually dropped its sex crimes investigation because so much time had elapsed, Assange had remained in London’s high-security Belmarsh Prison during the extradition battle with the U.S.
___

Tucker reported from Fort Pierce, Florida, and Durkin Richer from Washington. Associated Press writers Colleen Long in Washington, Napat Kongsawad and David Rising in Bangkok, Jill Lawless and Brian Melley in London and Rod McGuirk in Melbourne, Australia, contributed to this report.

Australian leaders cautiously welcome expected plea that could bring WikiLeaks founder Assange home

Australian lawmakers have cautiously welcomed developments that WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange will plead guilty to a felony charge in a deal with the U.S. Justice Department that will allow him to walk free and resolve a long-running legal saga that spanned multiple continents and centered on the publication of a trove of classified documents

BY ROD MCGUIRK
 June 25, 2024

MELBOURNE, Australia (AP) — Australian leaders cautiously welcomed an expected plea agreement that could set free Julian Assange, who was pursued for years over WikiLeaks’ publication of a trove of classified documents.

Prime Minister Anthony Albanese said on Tuesday there was nothing to be gained by keeping the Australian incarcerated.

A plane thought to be carrying Assange landed Tuesday in Bangkok as he heads to the Northern Mariana Islands, a U.S. commonwealth in the Pacific midway between Australia and Japan, where he is expected to appear in a U.S. federal court Wednesday local time.

He is expected to plead guilty to an Espionage Act charge of conspiring to unlawfully obtain and disseminate classified national defense information, the U.S. Justice Department said in a letter filed in court.

Assange is expected to return to Australia if a judge accepts the plea agreement.

Public support for Assange has grown in Australia during the seven years he has spent avoiding extradition to the United States by hiding in the Ecuadorean Embassy in London and later during his five years in Belmarsh Prison.

Albanese has been lobbying since his government was elected in 2022 for the United States to end its prosecution of Assange, and his plight was seen as a test of the prime minister’s leverage with President Joe Biden.

Albanese had been a senior minister in a center-left Labor Party government that in 2010 staunchly backed U.S. criticisms of WikiLeaks’ classified information dumps. But Assange has breached no Australian law.

Albanese told Parliament that Australian High Commissioner to the U.K. Stephen Smith had flown with Assange from London.

“The government is certainly aware that Australian citizen Mr. Julian Assange has legal proceedings scheduled in the United States. While this is a welcome development, we recognize that these proceedings are crucial and they’re delicate,” Albanese told Parliament.

“Regardless of the views that people have about Mr. Assange’s activities, the case has dragged on for too long. There’s nothing to be gained by his continued incarceration and we want him brought home to Australia,” Albanese added.

Foreign Minister Penny Wong acknowledged the advocacy of a range of lawmakers on Assange’s behalf, including delegates of the Bring Julian Assange Parliamentary Group who traveled to Washington last year with a letter signed by 60 Australian lawmakers calling for the prosecution to end.

Wong said Albanese had led the Australian effort, personally raising Assange with Biden and British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak.

“We want to see Mr. Assange reunited with his family in Australia,” Wong told the Senate.

Wong also revealed that Assange has rejected Australia’s offer of consular visits for years until April last year when Smith made the first of his several prison visits.

Australia had argued there was a disconnect between the U.S. treatment of Assange and U.S. Army intelligence analyst Chelsea Manning, a WikiLeaks source. Then-U.S. President Barack Obama commuted Manning’s 35-year sentence to seven years, which allowed her release in 2017.

U.S. Secretary of State Anthony Blinken pushed back against Albanese’s position during a visit to Australia last year, saying Assange was accused of “very serious criminal conduct” in publishing a trove of classified U.S. documents more than a decade ago.

Support for Assange crossed political party lines in Australia.

Opposition lawmaker and Assange supporter Barnaby Joyce, a former deputy prime minister, said the plea deal was an encouraging development.

“We’ve just got to be still cautious, still cautious on how this proceeds because the end has not arrived,” Joyce told reporters in Australia’s Parliament House. He said Assange should not prosecuted because be committed no offense in the United States.

“If you ask me do I think what he did was morally correct? No, it wasn’t,” Joyce said. “But the issue for me is extraterritoriality.”

Opposition spokesman on foreign affairs Simon Birmingham also welcomed the apparent end to the prosecution.

“We have consistently said that the U.S. and U.K. justice systems should be respected,” Birmingham said on social media.

A motion that called for the U.S. and Britain to bring the “matter to a close so that Mr. Assange can return home to his family in Australia” was supported by 86 lawmakers including Albanese in the 151-seat House of Representatives in February.

Assange’s mother, Christine Assange, said the plea deal “shows the importance and power of quiet diplomacy.”

“I am grateful that my son’s ordeal is finally coming to an end,” she said in a statement.

His father John Shipton used a radio interview with Australian Broadcasting Corp. in Melbourne to thank his son’s supporters.

“It looks as though Julian will be free to come back to Australia and my thanks and congratulations to all his supporters in Australia who made it possible and of course Prime Minister Anthony Albanese,” Shipton said.

Julian Assange’s wife and mother of his two children, Stella Assange, was in Sydney awaiting for her husband’s return to Australia.

She posted on social media an image of her talking to her husband on FaceTime and with the Sydney Opera House in the background. She said he was speaking from London’s Stansted Airport before leaving the U.K.

Julian Assange’s lawyer Geoffrey Robertson likened the case to the government-to-government negotiations behind a plea deal in 2007 that enabled Australian al-Qaida supporter David Hicks to be repatriated from the U.S. naval base at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba. He was captured in Afghanistan in 2001 by the U.S.-backed Northern Alliance as a suspected enemy combatant.

“It was much tougher with Assange because the Pentagon was so determined to punish him,” Robertson told ABC. “In the end, I think partly because Mr. Biden wanted to clear this off his desk in an election year ... it has been resolved.”

Julian Assange was living in the Ecuadorian Embassy in 2013 when he made failed bid for election to the Australian Senate as a candidate for the short-lived WiliLeaks Party.

Timeline of the Julian Assange legal saga over extradition to the US on espionage charges


 WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange arrivies at Belmarsh Magistrates’ Court in London, Feb. 7, 2011. Assange will plead guilty to a felony charge in a deal with the U.S. Justice Department that will free him from prison and resolve a long-running legal saga over the publication of a trove of classified documents. (AP Photo/Kirsty Wigglesworth, files)

This will allow him to walk free and resolve a long-running legal saga that spanned multiple continents and centered on the publication of a trove of classified documents.

Assange left a high-security London prison where he was in custody since 2019, after spending seven years in self-exile in the Ecuadorian Embassy in London.
Here is a look at key events in the long-running legal saga:

— 2006: Assange founded WikiLeaks in Australia. The group begins publishing sensitive or classified documents.

— 2010: In a series of posts, WikiLeaks releases almost half a million documents relating to the U.S. wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

— August 2010: Swedish prosecutors issue an arrest warrant for Assange based on one woman’s allegation of rape and another’s allegation of molestation. The warrant is withdrawn shortly afterward, with prosecutors citing insufficient evidence for the rape allegation. Assange denies the allegations.

— September 2010: Sweden’s director of prosecutions reopens the rape investigation. Assange leaves Sweden for Britain.

— November 2010: Swedish police issue an international arrest warrant for Assange.

— December 2010: Assange surrenders to police in London and is detained pending an extradition hearing. The High Court grants Assange bail.

— February 2011: A district court in Britain rules Assange should be extradited to Sweden.

— June 2012: Assange enters the Ecuadorian Embassy in central London, seeking asylum, after his bids to appeal the extradition ruling fail. Police set up an around-the-clock guard to arrest him if he steps outside.

— August 2012: Assange is granted political asylum by Ecuador.

— July 2014: Assange loses his bid to have an arrest warrant issued in Sweden against him canceled. A judge in Stockholm upholds the warrant alleging sexual offenses against two women.

— March 2015: Swedish prosecutors ask to question Assange at the Ecuadorian Embassy.

— August 2015: Swedish prosecutors drop investigations into some allegations against Assange because of the statute of limitations; an investigation into a rape allegation remains active.

A supporter of Julian Assange, with a poster of the WikiLeaks founder, joins other protesters to block a major road in front of Westminster Magistrates Court in London, Thursday, May 2, 2019. (AP Photo/Frank Augstein)

— October 2015: Metropolitan Police end their 24-hour guard outside the Ecuadorian Embassy but say they’ll arrest Assange if he leaves, ending a three-year police operation estimated to have cost millions.

— February 2016: Assange claims “total vindication” as the U.N. Working Group on Arbitrary Detention finds that he has been unlawfully detained and recommends he be immediately freed and given compensation. Britain calls the finding “frankly ridiculous.”

— September 2018: Ecuador’s president says his country and Britain are working on a legal solution to allow Assange to leave the embassy.

— October 2018: Assange seeks a court injunction pressing Ecuador to provide him basic rights he said the country agreed to when it first granted him asylum.

— November 2018: A U.S. court filing that appears to inadvertently reveal the existence of a sealed criminal case against Assange is discovered by a researcher. No details are confirmed.

— April 2019: Ecuadorian President Lenin Moreno blames WikiLeaks for recent corruption allegations; Ecuador’s government revokes Assange’s asylum status. London police haul Assange out of the Ecuadorian Embassy and arrest him for breaching bail conditions in 2012, as well as on behalf of U.S. authorities.

— May 2019: Assange is sentenced to 50 weeks in prison for jumping bail in 2012.

— May 2019: The U.S. government indicts Assange on 18 charges over WikiLeaks’ publication of classified documents. Prosecutors say 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.

— November 2019: Swedish prosecutor drops rape investigation.

— May 2020: An extradition hearing for Assange is delayed during the COVID-19 pandemic.

— June 2020: The U.S. files a new indictment against Assange that prosecutors say underscores Assange’s efforts to procure and release classified information.

— January 2021: A British judge rules Assange cannot be extradited to the U.S. because he is likely to kill himself if held under harsh U.S. prison conditions.

— July 2021: The High Court grants the U.S. government permission to appeal the lower court’s ruling blocking Assange’s extradition.

— December 2021: The High Court rules that U.S. assurances about Assange’s detention are enough to guarantee he would be treated humanely.

— March 2022: Britain’s Supreme Court refuses to grant Assange permission to appeal against his extradition.

— June 2022: Britain’s government orders the extradition of Assange to the United States. Assange appeals.

— May 2023: Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese says Assange should be released and “nothing is served” by his ongoing incarceration.

— June 2023: A High Court judge rules Assange cannot appeal his extradition.

WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange gestures on the balcony of the Ecuadorian embassy prior to speaking, in London, Friday May 19, 2017. (AP Photo/Matt Dunham, File)

— Feb. 20, 2024: Assange’s lawyers launch a final legal bid to stop his extradition at the High Court.

— March 26, 2024: Two High Court judges in London give U.S. authorities three more weeks to submit further assurances, including a guarantee that Assange won’t get the death penalty, before deciding whether they will grant him a new appeal against his extradition.

— May 20, 2024: The two High Court judges rule that Assange can mount a new appeal based on arguments about whether he will receive free-speech protections or be at a disadvantage because he is not a U.S. citizen. The date of the hearing has yet to be determined.

— June 24, 2024: The U.S. Justice Department says in a letter filed in court that, under a deal with the agency, Assange will be allowed him to walk free in return for pleading guilty to an Espionage Act charge of conspiring to unlawfully obtain and disseminate classified national defense information.

SYLVIA HUI
Hui, based in London, reports on UK news for The Associated Press with particular interest in foreign and social affairs and human rights.

Assange set to be freed after pleading guilty to US espionage charge

Issued on: 25/06/2024 - 

WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange is due to plead guilty on Wednesday to violating US espionage law, in a deal that will end his imprisonment in Britain and allow him to return home to Australia, ending a 14-year legal odyssey.

01:53   Video by: FRANCE 24

Julian Assange expected to return to Australia

Issued on: 25/06/2024 - 

France 24 correspondent in Washington DC Fraser Jackson explains the deal by which Assange is expected to plead guilty to one espionage charge and return him his freedom.

01:38 Video by: Fraser JACKSON

Julian Assange: Australia wants WikiLeaks founder back

DW    FEB. 15, 2024

Following years of legal battles against Julian Assange, Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese says that "enough is enough." The WikiLeaks founder is facing extradition to the US from the UK.

Assange's arrest and extradition have sparked worldwide protests

Image: Alexander Bogatyrev/ZUMA Press/picture alliance


Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese on Thursday called for the release of Julian Assange of legal pursuit by US and UK authorities.

The 52-year-old WikiLeaks founder, who is an Australian citizen, has been trapped in legal limbo for years after releasing a raft of top secret US documents on war in Iraq and Afghanistan in 2010. He is currently being held in London but is facing extradition to the US on charges of espionage.

"People will have a range of views about Mr. Assange's conduct," Albanese told parliament.

"But regardless of where people stand, this thing cannot just go on and on and on indefinitely."
Australian parliament calls for Assange to be returned home

The WikiLeaks founder will head to the UK's High Court of Justice next week in an attempt to appeal his extradition.

On Wednesday, the Australian parliament passed a motion calling for Assange to be returned to his home country. The motion had been put forward by independent Australian lawmaker Andrew Wilkie and supported by the prime minister.

The motion called on the US and UK to bring the "matter to a close so that Mr. Assange can return home to his family in Australia."

Assange's brother Gabriel Shipton (right) welcomed the motion put forward by lawmaker Andrew Wilkie

 (left)Image: Mick Tsikas/AAP Image/AP/picture alliance

Assange's brother Gabriel Shipton welcomed the motion which came "at a crucial time," saying that the free speech activist could be extradited to the US as soon as next week.

"That means all the ties to his family, his lifeline that are keeping him alive inside that prison will be cut off and he'll be lost into a horrific prison system in the United States," Shipton said.

Why does the US want to extradite Julian Assange?

Assange is accused of publishing around 700,000 classified documents, starting in 2010, that shed a light on the US secrets about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The Australian sought refuge in the Ecuadorian embassy in London where he stayed for seven years to avoid extradition to Sweden on charges of sexual assault which were later dropped.

He was eventually kicked out of the embassy and was arrested; he has been held in London's high-security Belmarsh Prison since 2019.

US prosecutors have said Assange helped US Army intelligence analyst Chelsea Manning steal and leak the classified diplomatic and military documents.

Manning was sentenced to 35-years in prison, but her sentence was commuted to just seven by former President Barack Obama, allowing her to be released in 2017. She was however rearrested in 2019 and stayed behind bars for another year for her refusal to testify in a case involving Julian Assange.

ab/dj (AFP, AP)

Who is Julian Assange, the controversial founder of WikiLeaks?

Julian Assange, who is expected to return home to Australia a free man this week after years of fighting against extradition to the US on spying charges, is for some a fearless campaigner for press freedom. But for others, the 52-year-old Australian was reckless with classified information, possibly endangering human sources.


Issued on: 25/06/2024 - 

Protesters hold placards in support of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange outside the High Court in London, Monday, May 20, 2024. 

© Kin Cheun, AP

By FRANCE 24


Assange is the figurehead of the whistleblowing website that exposed government secrets worldwide, notably the explosive leak of US military files related to wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

He has spent more than a decade either in custody or holed up in Ecuador's London embassy, trying to avoid extradition – first to Sweden to answer allegations of rape, and then to the United States.

Assange is expected to plead guilty this week to violating US espionage law, after which he is due to be sentenced to 62 months of time served and return to Australia.

Born in Townsville, Queensland, in 1971, Assange had a peripatetic childhood and claims to have attended 37 schools before settling in Melbourne.

As a teenager, he discovered a talent for computer hacking, which brought him to the attention of the Australian police, but he admitted most of the charges levelled against him, for which he paid a fine.

Assange launched WikiLeaks in 2006 with like-minded activists and IT experts.

"We are creating a new standard for a free press," Assange told AFP in August 2010.
Embassy asylum

His legal battles began the same year, soon after he published revelations from classified documents about US military campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan. Rape allegations in Sweden then followed, which he denied.

He was in Britain when Sweden sought his extradition. Ecuador granted him political asylum and let him into its London embassy.

Assange lived in a small apartment in the embassy for seven years from 2012, exercising on a treadmill and using a sun lamp to make up for the lack of natural light. He compared his predicament to living in a space station.

His lengthy stay in the mission ended, however, after a new government in Quito turned him over to British police in April 2019. He was arrested for jumping bail and jailed.
Stella Assange speaks to FRANCE 24's Benedicte Paviot

00:52

Swedish prosecutors dropped their rape investigation in 2019, saying that despite a "credible" account from the alleged victim there was insufficient evidence to proceed.

But US authorities charged him with violating the US Espionage Act.

He has since been held at Belmarsh high-security prison in London during a protracted legal battle to decide if he should be extradited.

Assange is scheduled to appear in court in the Northern Mariana Islands, a US possession in the Pacific, where he will plead guilty to a single count of conspiracy to obtain and disseminate national defense information in exchange for his freedom, ending his years-long legal drama.

The announcement comes just two weeks before Assange had been scheduled to appear in court in Britain to appeal against a ruling approving his extradition to the United States.

Russia claims

Assange's backers, including the Chinese dissident artist Ai Weiwei and the late fashion designer Vivienne Westwood, claimed the charges were politically motivated.

They have repeatedly raised concerns about the physical and mental toll of his prolonged incarceration.

Nils Melzer, UN special rapporteur on torture, said the "progressively severe suffering inflicted" on Assange through his detention was tantamount to torture.

Assange was initially supported by human rights groups and newspapers that worked with him to edit and publish the US war logs.

Evidence included a leaked video showing a US military Apache helicopter firing on and killing two journalists and several Iraqi civilians on a Baghdad street in 2007.

But many were horrified when WikiLeaks dumped unredacted documents online, including the names of informants. Assange fell out spectacularly with his media partners.

US lawyers have conceded that while they were "aware" of sources who disappeared after WikiLeaks published their names, they cannot prove that their disappearance was the result of being "outed by WikiLeaks".

Questions also mounted over Assange's relationship with Russia.

Special prosecutor Robert Mueller's probe into interference in the 2016 US presidential election won by Donald Trump found that Russians "appeared" to have hacked Democrat Hillary Clinton's campaign, and then "publicly disseminated those materials through various intermediaries, including WikiLeaks".

Assange is the father of two boys with his wife Stella, whom he met when she worked on his case. They married in Belmarsh in March 2022.

(FRANCE 24 with AFP)

DW BACKGROUNDER

Julian Assange: Saint or sinner?

Matthias von Hein

DW

January 2, 2021

The court of public opinion remains undecided on Julian Assange. But the fate of the WikiLeaks founder is currently in the hands of a London judge who will decide whether to extradite him to the US

Julian Assange is regarded by many as a hero who uncovered war crimes and corruption, and as the father of modern investigative journalism, having dealt with huge amounts of leaked data. But others see him as a traitor, an enemy of the state, an accomplice to Russian President Vladimir Putin, perhaps the man responsible for Donald Trump's 2016 election as president of the United States — or all of the above.

Daniel Domscheit-Berg, a former WIkiLeaks spokesperson, once characterized the Australian editor and publisher as "brilliant, paranoid, and obsessed with power" and accused him of turning WikiLeaks into an "ego trip" that he had "tied too closely to himself and his belligerent personality."

German magazine Der Spiegel once quoted Assange as saying: "When you are much smarter than the people around you, you develop an enormous ego — and you get the feeling that any problem can be solved if you put your mind to it."

Assange's alleged paranoia, in turn, has proven justified. Since 2010 he has been on a "Manhunting Timeline" list of US intelligence agencies, the online publication Intercept reported, citing secret documents leaked by former intelligence contractor Edward Snowden. These mention extensive intelligence operations whose goal is to investigate, stop or at least damage WikiLeaks.

Rape accusation

Just when Assange was at the pinnacle of his fame, his reputation was massively damaged for the first time. In the summer of 2010, the release of the "Collateral Murder" video made WikiLeaks a household name around the world. With the "Afghan War Diary," Assange became a recognized figure in journalism.

Then, on August 21, 2010, the Swedish tabloid Expressen reported that Assange was the subject of rape allegations. This became the basis of an investigation that would go on for years — although no official charges were ever brought against him.

The accusation came from two women who walked into a Stockholm police station. Assange, who has a reputation for promiscuity, was to have had sex with both of them during a visit to Stockholm in August 2010. One woman said he tampered with a condom during sex, while the other accused him of having sex with her while she was asleep.

Assange said he was not concerned about any proceedings in Sweden, but believed the Swedish allegations were designed to discredit him and were a pretext for his extradition from Sweden to the United States.

Günter Wallraff, a renowned German investigative journalist, told DW the accusations were a "character assassination" against Assange.

German investigative journalist Günter Wallraff has been campaigning to organize support for Assange

Image: Getty Images/A. Berry

"He has been accused of the worst thing you can accuse someone of in an enlightened society: rape," he said. The accusations against Assange were contrived to make the man who had uncovered so much a persona non grata, Wallraff believed, citing research by the UN Special Rapporteur on Torture, Nils Melzer.

Melzer, a Swiss professor of international law, speaks fluent Swedish. As such, he has been able to inspect a wealth of original documents. In an interview with the Swiss publication Republik, Melzer raised accusations against the Swedish authorities in early 2020 for the first time, arguing that evidence had been manipulated for political reasons.

Spokesman for Putin?

Criticism of supposed links to Moscow first emerged in 2012. Assange continued his journalistic work, initially under house arrest and then as a political refugee in the Ecuadorian Embassy in London because of the Swedish extradition request that was later filed.

He produced a political talk show called "The World Tomorrow" with his own company, Quick Roll Productions. The client was Russia's state-owned foreign broadcaster Russia Today. The first interview guest was Hassan Nasrallah, head of the Shiite Hezbollah in Lebanon, via video link. It was the first international interview with the controversial Hezbollah leader in six years.

But was it a scoop? In Germany, there was a barrage of criticism. The main criticism leveled at Assange was that he was too uncritical of Nasrallah.

Assange was also criticized by The New York Times and The Guardian, whose former Moscow correspondent Luke Harding called him a "useful idiot" of the Russian propaganda machine. The BBC, in turn, focused on the mediation offers Nasrallah had made for the Syrian civil war.

In 2012, Assange sought political refugee at the Ecuadorian Embassy in London

Image: REUTERS

Assange produced 12 episodes of his talk show with such diverse interlocutors as Pakistani Prime Minister Imran Khan, Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Zizek and leftist intellectual Noam Chomsky.

Trump's election aid?

In the middle of the 2016 US presidential campaign, WikiLeaks published tens of thousands of emails from Democrats, including their presidential nominee Hillary Clinton. These not only damaged Clinton's election campaign against Donald Trump, but also Assange's reputation, according to investigative reporter Wallraff.

In this case, public interest in the information was relevant, showing some of the irregular influence of the Democratic party leadership in favor of Clinton to the detriment of Bernie Sanders in the primaries.

Wallraff said accusations of Assange's closeness to Russia are undermined by WikiLeaks publications on Putin or human rights violations in Russia.

Andy Müller-Maguhn, former spokesman for the Chaos Computer Club, said he visited Assange almost every month during his time in the embassy in his capacity as chairman of the Wau Holland Foundation, which campaigns for freedom of information. Regarding Assange's stance on the US election campaign and specifically Clinton, Müller-Maguhn reports "extremely critical disputes about which comments are still in the spirit of journalism and freedom of information and when it starts to relate to personal disputes."

But Müller-Maguhn also told DW he can understand Assange's position. "Hillary Clinton has said publicly several times that he should be killed with a drone," he said. "She was secretary of state when he published the embassy dispatches in 2010, the Afghan and Iraqi war diaries. Whether this woman became president was a question of life and death for him. You can't blame him for what he did."

Clinton denied she ever made the comment about wanting to kill Assange with a drone, and media fact checkers have described the alleged remark as a rumor.

This article was originally written in German.

Jury awards $700k to Seattle protesters jailed for writing anti-police slogans in chalk on barricade

The four spent one night in jail, but they were never prosecuted.

This image taken from a Seattle Police Department body camera shows part of anti-police graffiti written in chalk on a concrete barricade outside of the East Precinct of the Seattle Police Department, Jan. 1, 2021, in Seattle. On Friday, June 21, 2024, the four protestors who were jailed for the graffiti were awarded nearly $700,000 by a federal jury who decided their civil rights had been violated. (Seattle Police Department via AP)

BY MARK THIESSEN
 June 25, 2024

Four protesters who were jailed for writing anti-police graffiti in chalk on a temporary barricade near a Seattle police precinct have been awarded nearly $700,000 after a federal court jury decided their civil rights were violated.

The Jan. 1, 2021, arrests of the four followed the intense Black Lives Matter protests that rocked Seattle and numerous other cities throughout the world the previous summer in the wake of the death of George Floyd, a Black man. He was killed when a white Minneapolis police officer pressed his knee on Floyd’s neck for about 9 1/2 minutes while Floyd was handcuffed and pleading that he couldn’t breathe.

“The tensions of that summer and the feelings that were alive in the city at that time are obviously a big part of this case,” said Nathaniel Flack, one of the attorneys for the four protesters. “And what the evidence showed was that it was animus towards Black Lives Matter protesters that motivated the arrests and jailing of the plaintiffs.”

Derek Tucson, Robin Snyder, Monsieree De Castro and Erik Moya-Delgado were each awarded $20,000 in compensatory damages and $150,000 in punitive damages when the 10-person jury returned its verdict late Friday.

The lawsuit was filed in federal court against the city of Seattle and four police officers, Ryan Kennard, Dylan Nelson, Alexander Patton and Michele Letizia. The jury found the city and officers arrested and jailed the four as retaliation, and the officers acted with malice, reckless disregard or oppression denying the plaintiffs their First Amendment rights.

Email messages sent Tuesday to the Seattle city attorney’s office, Seattle police and the police guild seeking comment were not immediately returned.

On New Year’s Day 2021, the four protesters had used chalk and charcoal to write messages like “Peaceful Protest” and “Free Them All” on a temporary barricade near the police department’s East Precinct. Body cam images introduced at trial showed at last three police cruisers responded to the scene to arrest the four for violating the city’s anti-graffiti laws.

The four spent one night in jail, but they were never prosecuted.

Flack said testimony presented at trial showed police don’t usually enforce the law banning the use of sidewalk chalk. In fact, attorneys showed video of officers writing “I (heart) POLICE” with chalk on a sidewalk at another event in Seattle.

Flack said it was also unusual the four were jailed because it came during an outbreak of COVID-19 and only the most serious offenders were to be incarcerated.

“These officers were doing what they called the ‘protester exception’, which meant that if you’re a protester, if you have a certain message or a certain kind of speech that you’re putting out there, then they will book you into jail,” Flack said.

“The jury not only found that the individual officers were doing that, but that there was actually a broader practice that the city leadership knew about and was responsible for as well,” he said.

Lawyers for the plaintiffs said this should be a warning and a lesson to police officers and other government officials across the county who violate the First Amendment rights of citizens.

“This was a content-based and viewpoint-based law enforcement decision that resulted in our clients being locked up for what they had to say,” Flack said. “The important thing here is that the police cannot jail people for the content of their speech.”

Daily aspirin still popular among Americans despite risks

By Ernie Mundell, HealthDay News


Many Americans continue to take a daily aspirin despite a change of guidelines from the American College of Cardiology and American Heart Association in 2019. 

Photo by Adobe Stock/HealthDay News

For decades, millions of Americans popped a low-dose aspirin each day to lower their heart risks.

Then, accumulated data prompted the nation's two leading cardiology groups -- the American College of Cardiology and the American Heart Association -- to overturn advisories in 2019 and recommend against daily aspirin, citing a risk for bleeding that exceeded any benefit for most people.

Trouble is, many Americans aren't heeding that message and continue to take the daily pill, a new survey finds.

The survey, from a sample representing over 150 million U.S. adults, found that almost a third of heart-healthy people age 60 or older said they took a daily low-dose (81milligrams) aspirin each day in 2021.

That's about 18.5 million older Americans, said a team led by Dr. Mohak Gupta. He's a physician in internal medicine who conducted the study while at the Cleveland Clinic. He's now practicing at Houston Methodist.

Add in folks under 60 and the number rises to more than 25.6 million Americans taking daily aspirin, the researchers estimated.

Given aspirin's now dubious risk-benefit ratio for folks at average heart risk, "our findings highlight the urgent need for physicians to inquire about aspirin use, including self-use, and engage in risk-benefit discussions to reduce inappropriate use for primary prevention in older adults," the researchers said.

They published their findings Monday in the Annals of Internal Medicine.

As Gupta's team explained, data from trials published in 2018 cast doubt on prior recommendations for daily aspirin. That data instead showed a "limited benefit for primary prevention" when it came to heart issues.

"Therefore, the 2019 guidelines from the American College of Cardiology and American Heart Association discourage primary prevention aspirin use in adults older than 70 years," the team said.

Current advice from the American Heart Association (AHA) states that "because of the risk of bleeding, aspirin therapy is not recommended if you have never had a heart attack or stroke, except for certain select people."

The AHA now advises discussing your suitability for aspirin therapy first with your doctor, especially if you're over 70.

"If you're over 70, taking aspirin to prevent a first heart attack or stroke could do more harm than good," the AHA said.

There was a decline in the use of daily aspirin soon after the AHA and ACC altered their guidelines in 2019.

However, looking at 2012-2021 data from the National Health Interview Survey, Gupta's team found that "in 2021, 18.5% of adults aged 40 years or older [still] reported aspirin use for primary prevention." For those aged 60 or older, "a total of 29.7% reported primary prevention use."

About 1 in 20 (5.2%) of Americans aged 60 or older also told the survey they were using daily aspirin "without medical advice," the researchers noted.

According to the study, there does seem to be an ongoing trend among doctors to recommend that patients who take daily aspirin stop doing so.

However, the fact that so many Americans take aspirin runs counter to another important guideline change, the researchers noted.

The findings "have important implications in the context of guidelines from the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force in 2022, that also recommended against aspirin initiation for primary prevention among adults aged 60 years or older, as net harm may occur," Gupta's team wrote.

More information

Get the details on current guidelines on heart disease prevention from the American Heart Association.

Copyright © 2024 HealthDay. All rights reserved.

Simple paper-strip test might spot flu, identify strain

By Dennis Thompson, HealthDay News

A simple and inexpensive paper strip test could help diagnose a case of the flu, and even identify the influenza strain that caused it, a new study finds. 

Photo by Adobe Stock/HealthDay News

A simple and inexpensive paper strip test could help diagnose a case of the flu, and even identify the influenza strain that caused it, a new study finds.

The test can distinguish between influenza A and B -- the two main types of seasonal flu -- as well as identifying more virulent strains like H1N1 and H3N2, according to results published in the July issue of the Journal of Molecular Diagnostics.

The goal is to create a fast, accurate and cheap test that can improve outbreak response and infection care around the world, researchers said.

"Ultimately, we hope these tests will be as simple as rapid antigen tests" used to test for COVID, said co-senior researcher Cameron Myhrvold, an assistant professor at Princeton University in New Jersey.

The test uses genetically engineered enzymes to identify specific sequences of viral RNA in samples, researchers said.

The technology was first used to test for the COVID coronavirus, and later to distinguish between the Delta and Omicron variants, researchers said.

In 2022, the team began adapting the test to detect the influenza virus, with the aim of creating a screening tool that could be used in the field or in clinics rather than hospitals or high-tech diagnostic labs.

"Using a paper strip readout instead of expensive fluorescence machinery is a big advancement, not only in terms of clinical care but also for epidemiological surveillance purposes," said co-lead researcher Ben Zhang, a medical student at Harvard Medical School.

The test can be conducted at room temperature in about 90 minutes, but researchers hope to have it eventually produce results in as little as 15 minutes.

The test also can distinguish between different flu strains. This could help doctors identify strains that resist antiviral treatments like the drug oseltamivir (Tamiflu).

"Being able to tease apart what strain or subtype of influenza is infecting a patient has repercussions both for treating them and public health interventions," co-lead study author Jon Arizti-Sanz, a postdoctoral researcher at the Broad Institute of Harvard and MIT, said in a institute news release.

The researchers now are working to adapt the test so it can track avian and swine flu strains that are threatening to cross over into humans, Arizti-Sanz said.

More information

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has more about influenza.

Copyright © 2024 HealthDay. All rights reserved.

Federal judges block parts of Biden's student loan forgiveness plan



Students decorate their graduation caps during Commencement at the University of Colorado at Folsom Stadium in Boulder, Colo., on, May 9. On Monday, two federal judges separately blocked parts of President Joe Biden's plan to forgive student debt. File Photo by Pat Benic/UPI | License Photo

June 25 (UPI) -- A pair of federal judges blocked parts of President Joe Biden's student loan forgiveness plan less than a week before it was to go fully into effect.

In Missouri, U.S. District Judge John Ross on Monday blocked the Department of Education from further implementation of the the Saving on a Valuable Education plan, which aimed to lower monthly repayments and shorten the repayment period to as little as 10 years, finding the states were likely to succeed on their merits.

Ross ruled that the Biden administration "lacks the authority" to forgive loans as part of the Income-Contingent Repayment plan and that doing so would "likely harm Missouri" by decreasing the administrative fees collected by the state's High Education Loan Authority.

In Kansas, District Judge Daniel Crabtree enjoined the SAVE plan in part nationwide but decided not to undo actions already taken under the program as the states have failed to show that they would be harmed if the status quo was maintained.

The Biden administration has repeatedly sought to cancel billions of dollars in student loans and each time has been met by staunch Republican and conservative opposition.

Last summer, the Supreme Court blocked Biden's plan to offer up to $20,000 in student loan relief to millions of eligible borrowers.

In response, the White House in February announced the plan, which was to fully go into effect Monday and has already canceled some $5.5 billion in student debt held by 414,000 borrowers.

Both Kansas and Missouri followed the announcement with separate lawsuits, accusing the Biden administration of trying to illegally bypass Congress to force taxpayers to pay off the student laws of other Americans.

Kansas, leading an 11-state coalition, filed its lawsuit in late March, followed by Missouri and its seven-state coalition suing the Biden administration in early April.

Earlier this month, a judge ruled eight states of Kansas' coalition do not have standing.

The Republican attorney generals from both Missouri and Kansas issued statements celebrating their separate decisions.

"Blue collar Kansas workers who didn't go to college shouldn't have to pay off the student loans of New Yorkers with gender studies degrees," said Kansas Attorney General Kris Kobach.

Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey similarly accused Biden of attempting to "saddle working Missourians with Ivy League debt" through his plan.

"Only Congress has the power of the purse, not the president," he said. "Today's ruling was a huge win for the rule of law, and for every American who Joe Biden was about to force to pay off someone else's debt."

Education Secretary Miguel Cardona said in a statement that they are reviewing the rulings while remaining committed to fixing "a broken student loan system" and making "college more affordable for more Americans."

"We remain proud of our work providing debt relief to more than 4.75 million Americans," he said. "We will continue to provide this long-overdue relief, no matter how many times Republican elected officials and their allies try to stop us."

White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre criticized the rulings in a statement, sounding a defiant tone in saying that the administration would continue to look for ways to provide student loan relief.

"It's unfortunate that Republican elected officials and their allies have fought tooth and nail to prevent their constituents from accessing lower payments and a faster path to debt forgiveness - and that the courts are now rejecting authority that the [Education] department has applied repeatedly for decades to improve income-driven repayment plans," she said.

"Today's ruling won't stop our administration from using every took available to give students and borrowers the relief they need."