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posted by janrinok on Tuesday November 15 2016, @12:23AM   Printer-friendly
from the times-they-are-a'changing dept.

WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange is finally being questioned by prosecutors more than six years after he was first accused of rape in Sweden.

Ingrid Isgren, Sweden's deputy chief prosecutor, arrived at the Ecuadorian Embassy this morning, according to The Guardian, ending a stalemate which began in 2012 when the South American nation offered Assange political asylum on the grounds that he faced political persecution from the United States.

Assange claims that the rape accusations, which he denies, are part of a plot to extradite him to the United States that would swing into action were he to answer prosecutors' questions in the Scandinavian country.

The interview suggests some forward movement is being made in the diplomatic deadlock between Ecuador and Sweden regarding the arrangements for Swedish prosecutors to talk to Assange in the embassy.


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  • (Score: 4, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday November 15 2016, @03:25AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday November 15 2016, @03:25AM (#426838)

    > Is there any actual evidence that those two actually caused Trump to win?

    Is there any actual evidence that "someone better" would have mattered?

    Look, its a plausible theory. The numbers are looking like relatively few democrats switched parties. Rather she simply didn't get the turnout of the "obama coalition." Obama didn't even get the turnout of the obama coalition in 2012, but she got even less (despite being on track to get more votes than he got in 2012). The non-stories from wikileaks and comey, that the mainstream media who "love" clinton breathlessly reported but barely analyzed, could easily have repressed turnout by a couple of percentage points.

    It certainly wasn't the only cause. As the saying goes: just because you won doesn't mean that you did everything right, and just because you lost doesn't mean you did everything wrong. Maybe Sanders would have won, or maybe he would have been creamed just as badly but from another direction. He did have vulnerabilities that Clinton never attacked during the primary - like the way the college his wife ran went bankrupt because of over-expansion that she initiated. Or their multiple houses. Who knows what else Trump would have used to attack him? The Obamacare price hikes - despite being a non-issue for most Obamacare buyers because of income-based subsidizes - were a potent campaign point for Trump that would have worked on Sanders too.

    Or maybe there never was an "obama coalition" - that his election, like his Nobel Peace Prize, was more about not being Bush and that after 8 years of a democrat in the whitehouse lots of people were inclined to vote for a republican no matter what.

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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday November 15 2016, @08:07AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday November 15 2016, @08:07AM (#426896)

    Is there any actual evidence that "someone better" would have mattered?

    Mattered, yes. Mattered enough to move the votes, that requires another earth to make an actual experiment.

    But when we have democrats telling us they disliked Hillary enough to vote for Trump, AND republicans telling us they disliked Trump enough to vote for Bernie, That has got to matter.

  • (Score: 2) by TheRaven on Tuesday November 15 2016, @10:04AM

    by TheRaven (270) on Tuesday November 15 2016, @10:04AM (#426908) Journal

    Is there any actual evidence that "someone better" would have mattered?

    Yes. Opinion polls throughout the primaries showed that the Democrats had only one candidate who wasn't a long way ahead of Trump: Clinton. The others all had a significant lead, Clinton was ahead by a statistically insignificant margin.

    Add to that, Trump managed to get about as many votes as the last two Republican Presidential candidates and only slightly more than John Kerry in 2004. In contrast, Obama got 10M and 5M more votes than Clinton in the last two elections. A lot of people who voted for Obama simply couldn't be bothered to turn up to vote for Clinton. She wasn't a lesser of two evils by enough of a margin to matter.

    --
    sudo mod me up
  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday November 15 2016, @03:42PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday November 15 2016, @03:42PM (#427002)

    Or maybe there never was an "obama coalition" - that his election, like his Nobel Peace Prize, was more about not being Bush and that after 8 years of a democrat in the whitehouse lots of people were inclined to vote for a republican no matter what.

    and he was black