UNITED KINGDOM

September 15.  Central Criminal Court, London.

The panic is palpable. No one is making any effort to hide it now as the EU’s chief negotiator on Brexit, Frenchman Michel Barnier, began his telephone calls to EU leaders to intervene in the talks with Britain – which are quickly heading towards a no deal Brexit and the UK resorting to WTO rules at the end of the year.

Having had a coronavirus scare towards the end of last week, necessitating a brief suspension of proceedings for September 11, the extradition proceedings for Julian Assange resumed with Eric Lewis.  The chairman of the board of Reprieve, who has cut his teeth on representing Afghan detainees in US custody and those in Guantánamo, has not been shy in arguing against the extradition of Assange to the United States.  In 2019, he warned in The Independent that one

I received the following  article from V.T., whose email accompanying it was addressed to me with the subject header "Boom!" Curious, I opened it […]
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Germany
On December 11, 1941, four days after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, Germany declared war on the United States.

Wednesday, 2 September, all German TV channels, mainstream media were focused unilaterally on the alleged Novichok poisoning of Russian opposition critic, Alexei Navalny. This “breaking-news” poison discovery was made in Germany two weeks after he has been flown from Tomsk in Siberia to Moscow, when he fell ill on the plane and the airliner had to return to Tomsk for an emergency landing.

Among the phrases that are guaranteed to trigger right-wing backlash are “global governance” and “world government.” However, when it comes to appointing foreign citizens to high government posts, conservative governments are at the forefront of such “global governance.” When British Prime Minister Boris Johnson appointed former Australian Prime Minister (and fellow right-winger) Tony Abbott as an official adviser to the British Board of Trade, including a role in advising on the United Kingdom’s Brexit implementation, alarms were triggered in London and Canberra.

The recent U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit vindicated the contractor-turned-whistleblower, Edward Snowden, by ruling that the National Security Agency’s blanket data collection was unlawful and likely unconstitutional.

The third day of extradition proceedings against Julian Assange at the Old Bailey resumed on the point of politics.  Assange as a figure of political beliefs; Assange as a target of the Trump administration precisely for having them.  The man sketching the portrait was Paul Rogers, Emeritus Professor of Peace Studies at Bradford University.

The use and misuse of George Orwell’s truth-telling is so widespread that we can easily miss his intended meaning. For example, with perfect (Orwellian) irony, the BBC has a statue of Orwell outside Broadcasting House, bearing the inscription: