In fairness, Theresa May never said what would happen if she lost 13 seats.
But here we are.
The Conservative Party has 317 seats in the House of Commons: even allowing for the 7 Sinn Féin MPs who never take their seats, the Tories are five seats short of a majority.
Labour, the SNP, the Liberal Democrats, Plaid Cymru, and the Green Party, have between them got 314 seats.
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Filed under Brexit, EU referendum, GE 2017, GE2015, Scottish Politics
It surely cannot be the case that Assange can rely on his own refusal to go to Sweden to escape answering the allegations. However, this does seem to be the case.
It would seem that, in the circumstances, any charge will require an investigation to close; and, in turn, for an investigation to close requires there to be an interview with the suspect. David Allen Green, lawyer & legal blogger
Leo Rosten in The Joys of Yiddish defines chutzpah as
“gall, brazen nerve, effrontery, incredible ‘guts’, presumption plus arrogance such as no other word and no other language can do justice to”.
Famously, Rosten defines the term chutzpah as
“that quality enshrined in a man who, having killed his mother and father, throws himself on the mercy of the court because he is an orphan”.
The Oxford English Dictionary will need to add a new definition to chutzpah: Julian Assange.
In Swedish legal procedure, to be charged with a crime you have to be interviewed by the police. Julian Assange has now permanently evaded being charged with sexual assault in Sweden by the following series of actions.
First, Assange left Sweden.
Julian Assange had applied for residency in Sweden on 18th August 2010. On 31st August 2010 he was questioned by the police and told of the accusations: the investigation was re-opened. Assange left Sweden on 27th September 2010, and went to the UK. He did not return. On 18th October 2010, the Swedish Migration Board denied Assange a residency permit: Assange was still in the UK.
On 18th November 2010, the Stockholm District Court approved a request to detain Julian Assange for “questioning on suspicion of rape, sexual molestation and unlawful coercion”. Marianne Nye, the Swedish Director of Prosecution, told the court that Assange he has “not been available for questioning”.
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Filed under Unanswerable Questions, Women
Tomorrow, Julian Assange is invited to speak on human rights and diplomatic asylum, via weblink from his room in Knightsbridge, at a UN event for permanent representatives to the UN General Assembly.
From Live on RT, which is to broadcast the event:
Julian Assange will address permanent representatives to the UN General Assembly at a high-level talk on the legal and ethical legitimacy of diplomatic asylum. RT has exclusive rights to broadcast the event live from the UN headquarters in New York. [Note: this will be at 8:30pm in New York, so half an hour into Thursday morning in London.]
Among those joining Assange for the panel discussion at the 67th General Assembly Debate on Wednesday will be Ricardo Patino, Foreign Affairs Minister of Ecuador, and Baher Azmy, the Legal Director of the Center for Constitutional Rights.
Filed under Justice
Consistently, since her original “Dear Interpol” letter in the Huffington Post in December 2010, Naomi Wolf has been the most high-profile self-identified feminist to argue that Assange did not rape or sexually assault either of the two women. In February 2011 she wrote a much-cited essay Something Rotten in the State of Sweden: 8 Big Problems with the ‘Case’ Against Assange. She’s been outspoken in interviews and at parties – Naomi Wolf slams feminists’ response to the Assange rape prosecution (Thursday, 17th November 2011).
She’s been cited with relief from Cory Doctorow to Reuters:
Even well-known feminist Naomi Wolf criticized the international judicial hunt for Assange, writing that she personally knew “1.3 million guys” with similar complaints made against them by women.
But she had never faced an interview like Mumsnet, yesterday lunchtime (Thursday 6th September) Nor did she seem to be aware that Mumset had launched a campaign in March this year:
called We Believe You, and it has two simple aims. First, we want to shine a spotlight on the prevalence of rape and sexual assault in women’s lives; then, we want to pull apart the many myths surrounding rape, which make so many women feel that they will not be believed if they report this crime.
To all those women, we say: we believe you.
Mumsnet interviewed Naomi Wolf, and it didn’t go as Wolf wanted.
Not even in the questions being posted before Naomi Wolf arrived.
Filed under Women
No, of course it wasn’t the 8:12 offical start of the Olympic Games.
It was the news that Paul Chambers had been acquitted.
Over two and a half years ago, on 6th January 2010, Paul Chambers – then a trainee accountant – tweeted
Crap! Robin Hood airport is closed. You’ve got a week and a bit to get your shit together otherwise I’m blowing the airport sky high!!
The tweet was noticed a week later by a manager at Robin Hood airport, who realised it wasn’t a credible threat but reported it to his managers. (In the whole trail of actions, this part was the one action I found reasonable: looking out for mentions of your workplace on social media and passing it on to management if it’s in any way unusual is a perfectly reasonable thing to do.) His managers also realised it wasn’t a credible threat, but contacted the police anyway. Why? Who knows. Some jobsworth decided.
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Filed under Justice
Edinburgh Eye 