Julian Assange has been charged in the US. Let’s take a look at why this is happening. What’s in the News with stories on government waste times two, feeding the homeless, sterilizing women, secession news, and Big Brother. And Yet Another Bad Cop on a cop killing a security guard doing his job. This episode is brought to you by ZenCash, now known as Horizen, a cryptocurrency that infuses privacy, anonymity, and security, done right. Also, brought to you by SmartCash, an easy to use, fast, and secure cryptocurrency that supports everyday use for everyday transactions.

 

WHAT’S RUSTLING MY JIMMIES

This story broke as an accident, albeit an accident caused by government incompetence, but it is apparent now that the United States Justice Department is filing criminal charges against the WikiLeaks founder, Julian Assange

The disclosure came in a filing in a case unrelated to Assange. Assistant U.S. Attorney Kellen S. Dwyer, urging a judge to keep the matter sealed, wrote, “due to the sophistication of the defendant and the publicity surrounding the case, no other procedure is likely to keep confidential the fact that Assange has been charged.” Later, Dwyer wrote the charges would “need to remain sealed until Assange is arrested.”

Dwyer is also assigned to the WikiLeaks case. People familiar with the matter said what Dwyer was disclosing was true, but unintentional. On Thursday evening, Seamus Hughes, the deputy director of the Program on Extremism at George Washington University who is known for scrubbing court filings, posted about the apparent error on Twitter — which first brought it to the attention of reporters. Some people believe this was a simple copy and paste error and that the Assange indictment was used as a template for the unrelated case.

 

WHAT’S IN THE NEWS

In government waste news, the US Postal Service lost $3.9 billion last year, while UPS and FedEx are doing well.

In who would feed the homeless news, a coordinated wave of Kansas City Health Department inspectors simultaneously shut down large picnics across the city Sunday that were serving food to homeless and hungry people. 

In socialist Canada news, indigenous women were being kept from seeing their newborn babies until they agree to sterilization. 

In more government waste news, a new report from Brown University is aiming to provide a close estimate of the cost of the overall cost to the US government of its myriad post-9/11 wars and assorted global wars on terror. The estimate is that $5.933 trillion has been spent through fiscal year 2019. 

In secession news, a Spanish audit office has ordered former Catalan leader Artur Mas and nine others to repay 4.9 million euros (5.6 million dollars) of public money spent on a non-binding independence ballot in 2014. 

In Big Brother news, the US Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) have hidden an undisclosed number of covert surveillance cameras inside streetlights around the country, federal contracting documents reveal. 

 

AND YET ANOTHER BAD COP

When police arrived after reports of a shooting over the weekend at a bar outside Chicago, witnesses say Jemel Roberson, a 26-year-old security guard who worked there, had already subdued the alleged assailant in the parking lot, pinning him to the ground.

Adam Harris, who was at Manny’s Blue Bar in Robbins at the time of the incident on Sunday, told WGN-TV that Roberson was holding “somebody on the ground with his knee in his back, with his gun in his back” when officers from neighboring Midlothian got there early Sunday.

Midlothian Police Chief Daniel Delaney said that’s when one of his officers “encountered a subject with a gun” and shot him, according to a statement given to the media. But the “subject” was Roberson, not the suspect in the bar shooting.