August 17th 2012.

Today was a sad day for anyone who doesn’t believe in the Loch Ness monster. George Edwards, a local Loch Ness tour guide, has taken what he believes to be “the best picture ever taken” of the fabled creature supposedly lurking in the dark murky depths of Scotland’s most famous tourist attraction. The photograph, from what I’ve seen of it, wouldn’t even make the status of convincing fake and the fact that this tripe turned up in my daily news feed angered me slightly, especially when considering that there was much greater trouble afoot roughly 1,560 miles away..

But if Russia is to be part of this larger zone of peace it cannot bring into it its imperial baggage. It cannot bring into it a policy of genocide against the Chechens, and cannot kill journalists, and it cannot repress the mass media.

Zbigniew Brzezinski

If that speech sounded optimistic back when it was first vocalized I cannot say, but after seeing what has happened to a certain Russian punk band these past few months it certainly sounds optimistic now.
Pussy Riot first made the news back in February after staging a performance of their latest single “Putin lights up the fires” at the Christ the Savior Cathedral in Moscow which lasted almost a minute until they were forcibly removed by guards and fled the scene. Russian authorities rounded up three of the seven members and charged them with “Hooliganism.”

The trial lasted several laborious months and ended with the defendants being found guilty today on August 17th. What on earth must these people be thinking? Two years each was the final verdict, two years for blasphemy and what the judge described as “devilish dancing.”

Can we honestly say we possess freedom of speech?

Julian Assange was granted asylum by the Ecuadorian government and is now hopelessly waiting for the British government to make the next move in an attempt to extradite him to Sweden on charges of sexual assault which Assange denies. Haunting the many corridors of the Ecuadorian embassy like a lost soul. Helpless.

With the British coalition plotting its next phase in Operation: Julian a-gone One must wonder what is going through the mind of that mysterious silver-haired Aussie. There seems to be nowhere left he can run, by violating the conditions of his bail and seeking asylum from the Ecuadorian embassy he has left himself no other option than to sit and wait until the last moment when he can raise the wiki-signal and have a silver helicopter appear on the horizon for one last daredevil run for the border.

It is not the charges of sexual assault in Sweden that scared him, mind. He claims the sex was consensual and that the claims are politically motivated, which given the activities Assange seems to take part in during his spare time isn’t exactly floating outside the realm of possibility. No. What really seems to make the hair stand up on the back of Julian’s neck is the thought that if he gets to Sweden they could easily hand him over to the big bad US where he would be treated like a dog and held captive as an “Enemy Combatant” or Terrorist. But he is neither of these things.

When you look at it closely, what has he actually done? He uploaded some files to his own website that showed a damning view of the dark underbelly of the American government. He didn’t sell the files off to the highest bidding country so technically it wouldn’t count as espionage and any nation that claims to uphold freedom of speech is going to have a hard time pinning a charge like that under circumstances like these, But what we can be certain of is that they want him. Any act of trying to remove him forcibly could fatally injure relations between the three countries and also would make any claim of freedom of the press or freedom of speech completely invalid in the eyes of the public and maybe even the world.

I agree with what Assange and Wikileaks stand for but there must come a point where sticking it to the man only works if the outcome is in your favour, this does not appear to have happened.

Lady Gaga vists Julian Assange for dinner at Ecuadorian embassy