Assange’s arrest ‘dark moment for press freedom’: Snowden

MOSCOW (AA): US whistleblower Edward Snowden on Thursday called the arrest of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange “a dark moment for press freedom”. “Images of Ecuador’s ambassador inviting the UK’s secret police into the embassy to drag a publisher of –like it or not- award-winning journalism out of the building are going to end up in the history books. Assange’s critics may cheer, but this is a dark moment for press freedom,” Snowden said in a Twitter message.

Meanwhile, Russian broadcaster RT’s editor-in-chief Margarita Simonyan told journalists in Moscow that Assange had predicted his arrest. “He told me, ‘you will see, Washington will replace the Ecuador’s president, someone will come in his place who will agree to deny me political asylum. After that I will be extradited from the U.K. to Sweden and from there to the US’,” Simonyan quoted Assange as saying.

Earlier, Assange was arrested from the Ecuador’s Embassy in London after the South American country withdrew his diplomatic asylum on Thursday. Assange has been holed up at the Ecuadorian embassy located in Knightsbridge, central London, for nearly seven years after claiming diplomatic asylum in June 2012 after being wanted by Swedish prosecutors for questioning over various alleged sexual offenses. Sweden since dropped the charges against him, but Assange remains in the embassy fearing extradition to the US on charges over WikiLeaks’ release of sensitive US government files.

“The U.K. will continue to hold full EU membership as well as its obligations during the extension,” she said. May said she wants the U.K. to leave the EU as soon as possible. “The EU has agreed that, if the withdrawal agreement is passed before the end of October, it will be able to leave,” she said. “So if it can be passed in the first three weeks of May, the UK will be able to leave on 1 June,” she added.

May said what has been agreed tonight in Brussels would allow the U.K. to leave before the end of June. She added that the “choices we now face are stark and the timetable is clear”, urging British MPs to “press on at pace with our efforts to reach a consensus”. “I do not pretend the next few weeks will be easy or that there is a simple way to break the deadlock in Parliament,” she added.

May had asked last week for an extension up to June 30 in a letter to Tusk, seeking a further short extension to the departure date. The U.K. was set to leave the EU on March 29. But after failing three times to secure her deal in the House of Commons, May was given an extension by the EU until April 12. In a 2016 referendum, British voters decided to leave the bloc after a more than 40-year-long membership.