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British police entered the Ecuadorian Embassy in London on Thursday, forcibly removing the WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange on a US extradition warrant and bringing his seven-year stint there to a dramatic close. He was arrested at 10:15 a.m. but resisted and had to restrained, leading to dramatic scenes of British police hauling him by force out of the building. After being lifted into the waiting police van, he was taken directly to a police station where he was formally arrested. He was arrested at the request of US authorities. Officers moved in after Ecuador withdrew his asylum and invited authorities into the embassy, citing Assange's bad behavior. Assange has been indicted on a single charge of conspiring to steal military secrets with Chelsea Manning, the former Army intelligence analyst who supplied thousands of classified documents to WikiLeaks. The Department of Justice said that the indictment, signed on March 6 last year and unsealed Thursday, alleges Assange conspired "to assist Manning in cracking a password" on classified Department of Defense computer systems. Assange must appear for an extradition hearing on May 2, before which he will remain in custody. The WikiLeaks founder has been holed up at the embassy since 2012, when he was granted asylum as part of a bid to avoid extradition to Sweden, where he was facing allegations of sexual assault. The Swedish case has since been dropped, but Assange feared US extradition due to his work with WikiLeaks and remained in the embassy. He has repeatedly denied any wrongdoing.
In Other News • Students at Georgetown voted to establish a reparations fund for the descendants of slaves whose sale saved the school almost 200 years ago. The measure calls for creation of a $27.20 fee per semester that every undergraduate would pay into the fund. The plan, which would generate an estimated $400,000 a year, still needs to be OK'd by the Catholic school's board of trustees because it would change tuition. Georgetown sold 272 slaves in 1838, at a time when the university was struggling with debt. Georgetown has offered a formal apology to the slaves' descendants and renamed two buildings in their honor. Reparations for slavery has been a hot topic on the campaign trail this year for Democratic presidential candidates. • In Sudan, President Omar al-Bashir has been replaced. But the military figures who engineered the coup against Bashir seem set on hanging on to power for awhile. The military dissolved the government, suspended Sudan's constitution and declared a three-month state of emergency. The military says it will also run the country for at least two years to oversee a "transition of power." • Ohio's so-called heartbeat bill is now law. Republican Gov. Mike DeWine signed the controversial bill into law yesterday. It bans abortions after a fetal heartbeat is detected, which could come as early as six weeks into pregnancy. Opponents of the law promise a court challenge, and that's just fine with many of the law's proponents, who hope it ends up at the Supreme Court. They hope it could be the case that overturns Roe v. Wade.
