Mr. Assange is to return to court Jan. 11 for an extradition hearing. The judge said if he absconded, Mr. Assange would make supporters, including director Michael Moore, look "naive, foolish and deceitful."...
The Huffington Post's Naomi Wolf is publishing some interesting articles regarding the rape charges, too.
...I started working (click here) as a counselor in a UK center for victims of sexual assault in my mid-twenties. I also worked as a counselor in a battered women's shelter in the US, where sexual violence was often part of the pattern of abuse. I have since spent two decades traveling the world reporting on and interviewing survivors of sexual assault, and their advocates, in countries as diverse as Sierra Leone and Morocco, Norway and Holland, Israel and Jordan and the Occupied Territories, Bosnia and Croatia, Britain, Ireland and the united States....
I worry the women's lives have been completely disrupted at some level and their safety is a concern.
...The fantasy is that somehow this treatment (click here) -- a global manhunt, solitary confinement in the Victorian cell that drove Oscar Wilde to suicidal despair within a matter of days, and now a bracelet tracking his movements -- is not atypical, because somehow Sweden must be a progressively hot-blooded but still progressively post-feminist paradise for sexual norms in which any woman in any context can bring the full force of the law against any man who oversteps any sexual boundary.
Well, I was in Norway in March of this year at a global gathering for women leaders on International Women's Day, and heard extensively from specialists in sex crime and victims' rights in Sweden. So I knew this position taken by the male-dominated US, British and Swedish media was, basically, horsesh-t....
