Episode 709
Julian Assange
Fri, 2019-Apr-12 02:10 UTC
Length - 4:10
Direct Link
Welcome to popular Wiki of the Day where we read the summary of a popular Wikipedia page every day.
With 740,104 views on Thursday, 11 April 2019 our article of the day is Julian Assange.
Julian Paul Assange (; born Julian Paul Hawkins; 3 July 1971) is an Australian computer programmer and the founder and director of WikiLeaks. He is currently in police custody in London after having been arrested on 11 April 2019 by the Metropolitan Police Service for breaching his bail conditions in December 2010. Immediately before his arrest, he had been under the protection of Ecuador as an asylum seeker, and had been living in the Ecuadorian Embassy in London since 2012.
Assange founded WikiLeaks in 2006 and came to international attention in 2010 when WikiLeaks published a series of leaks provided by Chelsea Manning. These leaks included the Collateral Murder video (April 2010), the Afghanistan war logs (July 2010), the Iraq war logs (October 2010), and CableGate (November 2010). Following the 2010 leaks, the federal government of the United States launched a criminal investigation into WikiLeaks and asked allied nations for assistance. In November 2010, Sweden issued an international arrest warrant for Assange. He had been questioned there months earlier over allegations of sexual assault and rape. Assange denied the allegations, and said that he would be extradited from Sweden to the United States because of his role in publishing secret American documents. Assange surrendered to UK police on 7 December 2010 but was released on bail within 10 days. Having been unsuccessful in his challenge to the extradition proceedings, he breached his bail in June 2012 and absconded. He was granted asylum by Ecuador in August 2012 and remained in the Embassy of Ecuador in London until his arrest in April 2019. Assange has held Ecuadorian citizenship since 12 December 2017. Swedish prosecutors later dropped their investigation into the rape accusation against Assange; they applied to revoke the European arrest warrant in May 2017. The London Metropolitan Police indicated that an arrest warrant was in force for Assange's failure to surrender himself to his bail. During the 2016 Democratic Party presidential primaries, WikiLeaks hosted emails sent or received by candidate Hillary Clinton from her private email server when she was Secretary of State. The Democratic Party, along with cybersecurity experts, claimed that Russian intelligence had hacked the e-mails and leaked them to WikiLeaks; Assange consistently denied any connection to or cooperation with Russia in relation to the leaks, and stated the Clinton campaign was stoking "a neo-McCarthy hysteria."Ecuadorian President Lenín Moreno said on 27 July 2018 that he had begun talks with British authorities to withdraw the asylum for Assange. UK police entered the London embassy at the invitation of the Ecuadorian ambassador and arrested Assange on 11 April 2019.
This recording reflects the Wikipedia text as of 02:10 UTC on Friday, 12 April 2019.
For the full current version of the article, see Julian Assange on Wikipedia.
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This has been Brian. Thank you for listening to popular Wiki of the Day.
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