- Lady Gaga had dinner last night with Julian Assange at the Ecuadorian embassy in London. Now there is a couple that makes some sort of sense in this crazy, mixed-up world.
- The New Yorker Festival this weekend brought out Lena Dunham, if that was any sort of surprise.
- Good job Read More
Poor Julian Assange … even his bowel movements are being censored.
The WikiLeaks founder was granted asylum in Ecuador today, after two months holed up in the the country’s British embassy, where he was avoiding the long arm of Sweden’s justice system. (Britain, understandably, is not happy about this.)
Despite the good news for Mr. Assange, a tweet from the official WikiLeaks account took offense at The New York Times’s coverage of the story, which, it claims, “alleges that Mr. Assange neglected to flush a tiolet” [sic] even once the whole time he was in the embassy.
“We’re not joking.”
They’re not? Because search as we might, we couldn’t find a single reference to toilets in the entire NYT piece from last night, or in any of its follow-up articles. We were about to chalk it up to a misread (after all … “tiolet”) on WikiLeaks’ part, until a Google News search revealed that the original article did mention Toilet-gate: Read More
Patch Adams, MD, the clown doctor portrayed by Robin Williams in the eponymous 1998 film, has joined several dozen prominent figures of the American Left in asking Ecuadorian President Rafael Correa to grant WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange political asylum.
“The ‘crime’ that he has committed is that of practicing journalism,” states the letter, delivered to the Embassy of Ecuador in London yesterday by American advocacy group Just Foreign Policy. Read More
Head Wikileaker and house arrestee Julian Assange has been pondering a run for the Australian Senate. Before you even quirk an eyebrow at the prospect of a “Senator Assange,” note that a recent survey by Australian Labor Party pollsters indicates Mr. Assange could garner nearly 25% of the vote. Agence France-Presse reports members of “the left-wing Greens party were most likely to be pro-Assange, with 39 percent saying they would vote for him.” Read More
Anthony LaPaglia, once the star of TV’s Without a Trace, is to star in an Australian TV movie called Underground, about Julian Assange. This ripped-from-the-headlines tale features Mr. LaPaglia as a detective attempting to thwart a young hacker, Rachel Griffiths as that hacker’s mother, and one Alex Williams as the hacker himself–one Julian Assange. Read More
Wikileaks will hold a press conference Monday at 12 p.m. in London to discuss its “Global Intelligence File.” The “File,” which the whistle-blowing site claims comprises over 5 million Anonymous-hacked emails from Texas-based Stratfor, contains a great deal of what appears to be highly sensitive information regarding Stratfor’s sources, how they pay sources and their operating techniques in general. One document circulated among Stratfor staff in 2007 may be of particular interest to the company’s customers, as its plain-spoken language appears to reflect an internal attitude toward Stratfor clientele as well as several federal agencies that was obviously never intended for public consumption. It also implies (perhaps jokingly) that Stratfor was willing to do extralegal work to covertly gather information. Read More
On a conference call yesterday, Al Jean, executive producer of The Simpsons, spoke about Julian Assange’s cameo on the upcoming 500th episode. “Obviously, he’s a controversial figure and that was discussed before we agreed to let him do it,” said Mr. Jean. (The Simpsons‘ corporate cousins at Fox News have aired a call for Read More
Last week, Michael Bloomberg attended a press conference for the 100th episode of Gossip Girl. “I just don’t see how Blair could marry Prince Louis when she’s clearly in love with Chuck,” said the New York mayor, who apparently had nothing bigger on his plate to worry at that moment, such as the allegations of rape made against Greg Kelly, the son of his police Commissioner Ray Kelly, or the NYPD head’s own cameo in an anti-Muslim training video for NYPD recruits.
“I just wish that Nate and Vanessa had been able to work things out … but, again, I’m just a casual fan,” he added. Read More
After claiming that Julian Assange: The Unauthorized Autobiography was published in Britain last week “in breach of contract, in breach of confidence, in breach of my creative rights and in breach of personal assurances,” Julian Assange has gone so far as to post his correspondence with his publisher, Jamie Byng of Canongate. Read More
Arnold Schwarzenegger is publishing a memoir with Simon & Schuster. Scheduled for publication in October 2012, the tentative title is Total Recall (total cringe.) [NYT]
After his memoir hit bookstores in Britain this morning, Julian Assange accuses his British publisher, Canongate, of “old-fashioned opportunism and duplicity.” His American publisher, Knopf, announced the cancellation of his contract yesterday. [The Bookseller] Read More
