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WikiLeaks chief could see charges, US court filing suggests
WASHINGTON — The Justice Department inadvertently named Julian Assange in a court filing in an unrelated case that suggests prosecutors have prepared charges against the WikiLeaks founder under seal.
Assange’s name appears twice in an August court filing from a federal prosecutor in Virginia, who was attempting to keep sealed a separate case involving a man accused of coercing a minor for sex.
In one sentence, the prosecutor wrote that the charges and arrest warrant “would need to remain sealed until Assange is arrested in connection with the charges in the criminal complaint and can therefore no longer evade or avoid arrest and extradition in this matter.” In another sentence, the prosecutor said that “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.”
Any charges against Assange could help illuminate the question of whether Russia
It was not immediately clear why Assange’s name was included in the document, though Joshua Stueve, a spokesman for the Eastern District of Virginia — which had been investigating Assange — said, “The court filing was made in error. That was not the intended name for this filing.”
The Washington Post reported late Thursday, citing people familiar with the matter, that Assange had indeed been charged. The Associated Press could not immediately confirm that.
It was not immediately clear what charges Assange, who has been holed up for years in the Ecuadorian Embassy in London, might face.
But recently ousted Attorney General Jeff Sessions last year declared the arrest of Assange a priority. Special counsel Robert Mueller has been investigating whether Trump campaign associates had advance knowledge of Democratic emails that were published by WikiLeaks in the weeks before the 2016 election and that U.S. authorities have said were hacked by Russia. Any arrest could represent a significant development for Mueller’s investigation into whether the Trump campaign
Barry Pollack, a lawyer for Assange, told the AP earlier this week that he had no information about possible charges against Assange.
In a new statement, he said, “The news that criminal charges have apparently been filed against Mr. Assange is even more troubling than the haphazard manner in which that information has been revealed. The government bringing criminal charges against someone for publishing truthful information is a dangerous path for a democracy to take.”
The filing was discovered by Seamus Hughes, a terrorism expert at the Program on Extremism at George Washington University, who posted it on Twitter hours after The Wall Street Journal reported that the Justice Department was preparing to prosecute Assange and said, “To be clear, seems Freudian, it’s for a different completely unrelated case, every other page is not related to him, EDVA just appears to have assange on the mind when filing motions to seal and used his name.”
Assange, 47, has resided in the Ecuadorian Embassy for more than six years in a bid to avoid being extradited to Sweden, where he was wanted to sex crimes, or to the United States, whose government he has repeatedly humbled with mass disclosures of classified information.
The Australian ex-hacker was once a welcome guest at the Embassy, which takes up part of the ground floor of a stucco-fronted apartment in London’s posh Knightsbridge
Any criminal charge is sure to further complicate the already tense relationship.
Ecuadorian officials say they have already cut off the WikiLeaks founder’s internet, saying it will be restored only if he agrees to stop interfering in the affairs of Ecuador’s partners – notably the United States and Spain. Officials have also imposed a series of other restrictions on Assange’s activities and visitors and – notably – ordered him to clean after his cat.
With shrinking options — an Ecuadorian lawsuit seeking to reverse the restrictions was recently turned down — WikiLeaks announced in September that former spokesman Kristinn Hrafnsson, an Icelandic journalist who has long served as one of Assange’s lieutenants, would take over as editor-in-chief.
WikiLeaks has attracted U.S. attention since 2010, when it published thousands of military and State Department documents from Army Pvt. Chelsea Manning. In a Twitter post early Friday, WikiLeaks said the “US case against WikiLeaks started in 2010” and expanded to include other disclosures, including by contractor Edward Snowden.
“The prosecutor on the order is not from Mr. Mueller’s team and WikiLeaks has never been contacted by anyone from his office,” WikiLeaks said.
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Associated Press writer Raphael Satter in Paris contributed to this report.
This story has been updated to clarify in first paragraph that the court filing suggested prosecutors had prepared charges against Assange
Eric Tucker, The Associated Press
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What is ‘productivity’ and how can we improve it
From the Fraser Institute
Earlier this year, a senior Bank of Canada official caused a stir by describing Canada’s pattern of declining productivity as an “emergency,” confirming that the issue of productivity is now in the spotlight. That’s encouraging. Boosting productivity is the only way to improve living standards, particularly in the long term. Today, Canada ranks 18th globally on the most common measure of productivity, with our position dropping steadily over the last several years.
Productivity is the amount of gross domestic product (GDP) or “output” the economy produces using a given quantity and mix of “inputs.” Labour is a key input in the production process, and most discussions of productivity focus on labour productivity. Productivity can be estimated for the entire economy or for individual industries.
In 2023, labour productivity in Canada was $63.60 per hour (in 2017 dollars). Industries with above average productivity include mining, oil and gas, pipelines, utilities, most parts of manufacturing, and telecommunications. Those with comparatively low productivity levels include accommodation and food services, construction, retail trade, personal and household services, and much of the government sector. Due to the lack of market-determined prices, it’s difficult to gauge productivity in the government and non-profit sectors. Instead, analysts often estimate productivity in these parts of the economy by valuing the inputs they use, of which labour is the most important one.
Within the private sector, there’s a positive linkage between productivity and employee wages and benefits. The most productive industries (on average) pay their workers more. As noted in a February 2024 RBC Economics report, productivity growth is “essentially the only way that business profits and worker wages can sustainably rise at the same time.”
Since the early 2000s, Canada has been losing ground vis-à-vis the United States and other advanced economies on productivity. By 2022, our labour productivity stood at just 70 per cent of the U.S. benchmark. What does this mean for Canadians?
Chronically lagging productivity acts as a drag on the growth of inflation-adjusted wages and incomes. According to a recent study, after adjusting for differences in the purchasing power of a dollar of income in the two countries, GDP per person (an indicator of incomes and living standards) in Canada was only 72 per cent of the U.S. level in 2022, down from 80 per cent a decade earlier. Our performance has continued to deteriorate since 2022. Mainly because of the widening cross-border productivity gap, GDP per person in the U.S. is now $22,000 higher than in Canada.
Addressing Canada’s “productivity crisis” should be a top priority for policymakers and business leaders. While there’s no short-term fix, the following steps can help to put the country on a better productivity growth path.
- Increase business investment in productive assets and activities. Canada scores poorly compared to peer economies in investment in machinery, equipment, advanced technology products and intellectual property. We also must invest more in trade-enabling infrastructure such as ports, highways and other transportation assets that link Canada with global markets and facilitate the movement of goods and services within the country.
- Overhaul federal and provincial tax policies to strengthen incentives for capital formation, innovation, entrepreneurship and business growth.
- Streamline and reduce the cost and complexity of government regulation affecting all sectors of the economy.
- Foster greater competition in local markets and scale back government monopolies and government-sanctioned oligopolies.
- Eliminate interprovincial barriers to trade, investment and labour mobility to bolster Canada’s common market.
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COP29 was a waste of time
From Canadians For Affordable Energy
The twenty-ninth edition of the U.N. Climate Change Committee’s annual “Conference of the Parties,” also known as COP29, wrapped up recently, and I must say, it seemed a much gloomier affair than the previous twenty-eight. It’s hard to imagine a more downcast gathering of elitists and activists. You almost felt sorry for them.
Oh, there was all the usual nutty Net-Zero-by-2050 proposals, which would make life harder and more expensive in developed countries, and be absolutely disastrous for developing countries, if they were even partially implemented. But a lot of the roughly 65,000 attendees seemed to realize they were just spewing hot air.
Why were they so down? It couldn’t be that they were feeling guilty about their own hypocrisy, since they had flown in, many aboard private jets, to the Middle Eastern petrostate of Azerbaijan, where fossil fuels count for two-thirds of national GDP and 90% of export revenues, to lecture the world on the evils of flying in planes and prospering from the extraction of oil and natural gas. Afterall, they did the same last year in Dubai and there was no noticeable pang of guilt there.
It’s likely that Donald Trump’s recent reelection had a lot to do with it. Living as they do in a media bubble, our governing class was completely blindsided by the American people’s decision to return their 45th president to the White House. And the fact that he won the popular vote this time made it harder to deny his legitimacy. (Note that they’ve never questioned the legitimacy of Justin Trudeau, even though his party has lost the popular vote in the past two federal elections. What’s the saying about the modern Left? “If they didn’t have double standards, they’d have no standards at all.”)
Come January, Trump is committed to (once again) pulling the U.S. out of the Paris Climate Accords, to rolling back the Biden Administration’s anti-fracking and pro-EV regulations, and to giving oil companies the green light to extract as much “liquid gold” (his phrase) as possible, with an eye towards making energy more affordable for American consumers and businesses alike. The chance that they’ll be able to leech billions in taxpayer dollars from the U.S. Treasury while he’s running the show is basically zero.
But it wasn’t just the return of Trump which has gotten the climate brigade down. After a few years on top, environmentalists have been having one setback after another. Green parties saw a huge drop off in support in the E.U. parliament’s elections this past June, losing one-third of their seats in Brussels.
And wherever they’ve actually been in government, in Germany and Ireland for instance, the Greens have dragged down the popularity of the coalitions they were part of. That’s largely because their policies have been like an arrow to the heart of those nations’ economies – see the former industrial titan Germany, where major companies like Volkswagen, Siemens, and the chemical giant BASF are frantically shifting production to China and the U.S. to escape high energy costs.
But while voters around the world are kicking climate ideologues to the curb, there are still a few places where they’re managing to cling to power for dear life.
Here in Canada, for instance, Justin Trudeau and Steven Guilbeault steadfastly refuse to consider revisiting their ruinous Net Zero policies, from their ever-increasing Carbon Tax, to their huge investments in Electric Vehicles and the mandates which will force all of us to buy pricey, unreliable EVs in just over a decade, and to the emissions caps which seek to strangle the natural resource sector on which our economy depends.
Minister Guilbeault was all-in on COP29, heading the Canadian delegation, which “hosted 65 events showcasing Canada’s leadership on climate action, nature-based solutions, sustainable finance, and Canadian clean technologies—while discussing gender equality, youth perspectives, and the critical role of Indigenous knowledge and climate leadership” and stood up for Canadian values such as “2SLGBTQI+” and “gender inclusivity.” Once again, in Azerbaijan, which has been denounced for its human rights abuses.
And no word yet on the cost of all of this – for last year’s COP28 the government – or should I say the taxpayers – spent $1.4M on travel and accommodations alone for the 633 member delegation. That number, not counting the above mentioned events, are sure to be higher, as Azerbaijan is much less of a travel destination than Dubai, and so has fewer flights in and available hotel rooms.
At the same time all of this was going on, Trudeau was 12,000 kms away in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, telling an audience that carbon taxation is a “moral obligation” which is more important than the cost of living: “It’s really, really easy when you’re in a short-term survive, [to say] I gotta be able to pay the rent this month, I’ve gotta be able to buy groceries for my kids, to say, OK, let’s put climate change as a slightly lower priority.”
This is madness, and it underscores how tone-deaf the prime minister is, and also why current polling looks so good for the Conservatives that Pierre Poilievre might as well start measuring the drapes at the PMO.
He has the Trudeau Liberals’ obsessive pursuit of Net Zero policies in large part to thank for that.
The world is waking up to the true cost of the Net Zero ideology, and leaving it behind. That doesn’t mean the fight is over – the activists and their allies in government are going to squeeze as many tax dollars out of this as they possibly can. But the writing is on the wall, and their window is rapidly closing.
Dan McTeague is President of Canadians for Affordable Energy.
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