Julian Assange Is Free

"Julian's freedom is our freedom," Wikileaks said in a statement about its founder.

Julian Assange, the founder of Wikileaks, is reportedly free after pleading guilty to violating US espionage laws. The plea deal will allow him to return to Australia, his home country. After seeking refuge in Ecuador's embassy, Assange was placed in London’s Belmarsh top security jail in 2019, where he remained ever since. Now, he is reportedly leaving the UK and travelling to a hearing on the island of Saipan in the Northern Mariana Islands. He will not face new jail time.

Wikileaks was behind the largest security breach of its kind in US military history, when in 2010 it released hundreds of thousands of classified documents on the States’ role in Afghanistan and Iraq, The Guardian reported. Assange was indicted with former US military intelligence analyst Chelsea Manning, who was also charged under the Espionage Act. Chelsea Manning was imprisoned for seven years, with one year in solitary confinement. Her 35-year sentence was commuted by President Obama.

Assange’s case was a watershed moment in the debate on protecting whistleblowers and their freedom of speech. Edward Snowden, who was the whistleblower exposing the United States’ National Security Agency’s surveillance over the whole world, remains exiled in Russia where he sought asylum. “WikiLeaks published groundbreaking stories of government corruption and human rights abuses, holding the powerful accountable for their actions. As editor-in-chief, Julian paid severely for these principles, and for the people's right to know… Julian's freedom is our freedom,” Wikileaks said in a statement.

Delhi Is in a Climate Emergency

To cope with severe heat, the capital city needs water that it doesn’t have.

Last week, Delhi recorded its highest minimum temperature in 55 years, at 35.2 degree Celsius. Though the city expects a respite from the heat with rain, temperatures crossed 40 degree Celsius again today. The unprecedented heat has worsened the city’s water crisis. Aam Aadmi Party minister Atishi reportedly just ended a five-day hunger strike in protest of the government’s negligence over Delhi’s water scarcity, with members of the party requesting the Prime Minister to release water from the neighbouring state of Haryana. 613 million gallons per day (MGD) out of a total of 1,005 MGD comes to Delhi from Haryana; but ministers have said that Haryana has withheld 100 MGD.

So far, the death toll due to relentless heatwaves in the capital stands at 277. According to TOI, 154 patients were classified as “brought dead” to hospitals. “This is an unprecedented heatwave. In my 13 years of working here, I don’t remember signing a death certificate for heat stroke. This year, I’ve signed several,” Ajay Chauhan of the Ram Manohar Lohia Hospital (RMLH), told the BBC, from India’s first heat-stroke emergency ward. Dileep Mavalankar, a public health specialist, told The Guardian that the government did little to prepare the public, despite the Indian Meteorological Department issuing heatwave warnings.

The water crisis, then, compounds the crisis exponentially, speaking to the lack of preparedness for a climate emergency. “Due to severe heat this year, a huge water crisis has arisen in Delhi. The city has not witnessed such hot weather in the last decade, due to which, the people of Delhi are craving every drop of water,” the AAP said in a letter to the Prime Minister.

The French Are At it Again

Protestors are threatening to defecate in a river to stop the Olympics.

There’s nothing like a good old Parisian protest to bring an international event to its knees. When months of river water testing showed high levels of bacteria and sewage contamination were met with relative government inaction, fed up Parisians threatened a mass defecation protest to stop the Summer Olympics. According to CBS news, they’re trending the hashtag #JeChieDansLaSeineLe23Juin, or "I sh*t in the Seine on June 23,” after President Macron and other politicians promised to swim in the Seine to prove it is safe. "We are confident that we will swim in the Seine this summer," International Olympic Committee executive Christophe Dubi said.

They are no longer confident they will swim in the Seine this summer. For one, the politicians cancelled their planned swim in the Seine, and Paris organisers are still unable to confirm swimming events in the river with less than a month to go before the Olympics.