Julian Assange, founder and spokesman of the secret-spilling website WikiLeaks, turned himself in to British
Assange now faces questioning in relation to accusations by two women in Sweden whose various claims include having sex with him that was not fully consensual. After appearing at the City of Westminster Magistrate's Court in London on Tuesday afternoon, Assange was refused bail, and he said he will fight extradition to Sweden. He has not been formally charged with any crime and denies any wrongdoing. Assange's arrest comes as WikiLeaks faces mounting pressure on several fronts. Yesterday, Swiss bank PostFinance issued a statement announcing that it had frozen $41,000 in an account set up as a legal defense fund for Assange. The bank said it took action because Assange had claimed Geneva as his domicile when opening the account, but this had proved incorrect and he could not show that he is a Swiss resident.
WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange has "for his own safety" been moved to a segregation unit of the London prison where he is being held pending extradition to Sweden, one of his lawyers said Friday.
"The prison authorities are doing it for his own safety, presumably," lawyer Jennifer Robinson told AFP.
She said the 39-year-old Australian was moved to the segregation unit of Wandsworth prison in southwest London on Thursday, two days after he was taken to the jail.
The lawyer complained that Assange "does not get any recreation, he has difficulties getting phone calls out, he is on his own."
"Obviously we are trying to prepare a legal appeal and he has difficulties hand writing, so it would be much easier in order to assist us in the preparation if he had a laptop," Robinson said.
She declined to elaborate on why he had difficulties writing.
Robinson said Assange was in "very good" spirits but he was "frustrated" that he could not answer the allegations that WikiLeaks was behind cyber attacks launched on credit card firms which have refused to do business with the website.
"He told me he is absolutely not involved and this is a deliberate attempt to conflate WikiLeaks, which is a publishing organisation, with hacking organisations which are not."
Assange was refused bail by a judge in London on Tuesday after being arrested on a warrant issued by Sweden, where prosecutors want to speak to him about allegations of rape and sexual molestation made by two women.
He is due to appear in a London court again next Tuesday, when his case will be argued by Geoffrey Robertson, a high-profile British-Australian human rights lawyer.
Now Dagens Nyheter says about WikiLeaks deserters plan to start new site,- The new site, which will also feed sensitive leaks to international news organisations, is expected to go live on Monday but will have to compete with hundreds of WikiLeaks mirrors which have been set up in the aftermath of the Cablegate leaks.Anonymous Wikileaks supporters mull change in tactics - Attacks against Amazon were called off late on 9 December and re-directed towards net payments firm Paypal.
Analysis suggests the earlier attacks were made more effective by the involvement of hi-tech criminals.
At the same time one wing of the activist group suggested ditching the attacks and doing more to publicise what is in the leaked cables.
