More than 100 medical doctors co-signed a letter released Tuesday urging the Australian government to prevent jailed WikiLeaks publisher Julian Assange from dying in a U.K. prison.

Addressed to Australian Minister for Foreign Affairs Marise Payne, the letter is the latest in a series sent by a growing number of doctors concerned about Mr. Assange remaining held at Belmarsh Prison in London pending efforts by the Department of Justice to have him extradited him to the U.S.

Mr. Assange, a 48-year-old Australian native, has been jailed at Belmarsh since April after spending the previous several years confined to the Ecuadorian Embassy in London. He is wanted in the U.S. for charges related to soliciting and publishing classified material through his WikiLeaks website, and he faces decades behind bars if extradited and found guilty.

More than 60 doctors wrote the British government last month asking that Mr. Assange be transferred out of Belmarsh to a teaching hospital to receive medical treatment. Dozens more signed on to a follow-up letter sent several weeks later, and the latest plea to Ms. Payne has swelled to include the names of 104 practicing and retired medical professionals from a number of countries.

As Australian Minister for Foreign Affairs, you have an undeniable legal obligation to protect your citizen against the abuse of his fundamental human rights, stemming from US efforts to extradite Mr. Assange for journalism and publishing that exposed U.S. war crimes, the doctors wrote in the latest letter.

Mr. Assange requires assessment and treatment in an environment that, unlike Belmarsh prison, does not further [destabilize] his complex and precarious physical and mental state of health, the doctors continued, adding that Australia should negotiate his release from behind bars and allow him to be hospitalized in his home country.

The doctors cite Nils Melzer, the United Nations special rapporteur on torture, who has repeatedly raised concerns about Mr. Assanges well-being since visiting him in May and has attested that that Aussie has displayed all symptoms typical of prolonged exposure to psychological torture and should be released.

Unless the U.K. urgently changes course and alleviates his inhumane situation, Mr. Assanges continued exposure to arbitrariness and abuse may soon end up costing his life, Mr. Melzer said last month.

These are extraordinary and unprecedented statements by the worlds foremost authority on torture, the doctors told Ms. Payne. Should Mr. Assange die in a British prison, people will want to know what you, Minister, did to prevent his death.

Spokespeople for Ms. Payne did not immediately return messages requesting comment.

A spokesperson for the British government told The Washington Times earlier this month that it is unfounded and wholly false to say that Mr. Assange has been subjected to torture while jailed in the U.K.

Mr. Assange has been charged by the Justice Department with conspiracy to commit computer hacking and multiple violations of the U.S. Espionage Act related to running WikiLeaks. He has argued that he acted as a journalist.

Extradition proceedings are currently scheduled to start in February 2020.

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Julian Assange case: More than 100 doctors ask Australia to intervene on his behalf - Washington Times

Forbes reporters and our extended network of expert contributors produced more than 500,000 stories in the 2010s, inspiring and informing at scale so that we leave the decade as one of the largest and most trusted news sources in the world. Among all that journalism, several hundred pieces legitimately moved markets and dominated news cycles. And among those, a few dozen already stand out as classics.

Curating the best of the best wasnt easythere were a solid 50 stories on the short list. While I have the familiarity that comes with having a direct hand in almost all of them, I consulted several colleagues for balance, feedback and perspective. In the end, every story below shared two traits: impact (several created change and won awards, and they averaged 850,000 online readers) and sweeping storytellingcreating a future road map for historians of the 2010s.

Without further ado, in chronological order:

By Andy Greenberg | November 2010

Until Greenberg got him to sit for a Forbes cover story in 2010, Julian Assange was not on the mainstream radar. He would spend most of the decade a wanted man, holed up in the Ecuadorian embassy in London. The forces he unleashed with WikiLeaks set in motion the kind of disruption and destabilization that previous generations of anarchists could only have dreamed of. Mission accomplished.

By Steven Bertoni | September 2011

The first time I met Sean Parker, he thanked me. Why? Bertonis profile is far from a valentine, revealing the polymath in all his warts and quirks. But before that, the world knew him only as depicted by Justin Timberlake in The Social Network, a portrayal that even Mark Zuckerberg admitted did factual injustice to Parker. This is the first story I edited upon my return to Forbes and proved to be the prototype for dozens of definitive profiles of the decades great innovators (enough to merit a book).

By Victoria Barret | March 2012

Among all the entitled Silicon Valley bros, Barret found an Iranian immigrant who got into the tech game by selling rugs to tech honchos and wound up with a $50 million fortune. If someone has suggested this as a plot for HBOs Silicon Valley, it would have been rejected as too farcical.

By Richard Behar | June 2012

Its hard enough to do a story on an American oil company and its partners in the Russian mob, who were running roughshod over an entire region. Its another thing to get the central character on the phone (Alexey Veiman, mob nickname: The One Who Wears Glasses) to chat. Behar is a great reporter, and this story, a finalist for the Loeb Awards (the Pulitzers of business journalism), made a difference: within a day of our story publishing, Veiman was fired. In less than a year, Hess had sold off its Russian business entirely.

"That list is how he wants the world to judge his success or his stature," said one of the prince's former lieutenants. "It's a very big thing for him."

By Kerry A. Dolan | March 2013

Dolan, who leads our Wealth Team, noticed a curious pattern: The stock price of Prince Alwaleeds Kingdom Holdings always seemed to spike right before Forbes calculated its annual Billionaires list. By proving that wasnt a coincidence and unraveling an all-time case of narcissism, Dolan won the Overseas Press Club Award for best international business reporting in a magazine.

By Kerry A. Dolan and Rafael Marques de Morais | August 2013

When Forbes confirmed Isabel dos Santos, the daughter of the longtime Angolan president, as Africas first woman billionaire, her homeland took it as a point of pride, disseminating the news as a point of national pride. In reality, Dos Santos represents a blueprint for how to loot a country, which Dolan and local reporter Marques de Moraiswho has been jailed while trying to get the truth out about Angolareveal in painstaking detail. This story won the Gerald Loeb Award for foreign reporting.

By Andy Greenberg | August 2013

Bitcoin, the Dark Web and drug sales. In the middle of the decade, it was entirely plausible to create a sophisticated drug-dealing exchange, helmed by someone known to no one (in terms of actual identity) and at the same time known to all (with a wink to Princess Bride fans) as the Dread Pirate Roberts. Incredibly, Greenberg got the Silk Road mastermind (two months later identified as Ross Ulbricht and now facing a double life sentence) to share his story, at the same time demonstrating the emerging power of the anonymous Web.

By Steven Bertoni and Caleb Melby | September 2013

Its not the most urgent story we ran this decade. But this profile of Stewart Stewie Rah Rah Rahr is surely our most entertaining and one of the most telling, a cautionary tale of what happens when someone comes into unlimited money, with little moral compass to go with it. Its a party that turns into a train wreckcomplete with guns, sex tapes and a cameo from Donald Trump.

"There are very few people in the world who get to build a business like this," Evan Spiege said in 2014. "I think trading that for some short-term gain isn't very interesting."

By J.J. Colao | January 2014

That a 23-year-old turns down a $3 billion offer is pretty much the perfect story for the 2010s. Even better: Snapchats Evan Spiegel has proven right so far, with a public company worth $21.8 billion. This piece defines a decade ruled by young entrepreneurs, But maturity issues still crop up. After this story came out, Spiegel took to Twitter to deny a key, cocky detail, sharing an exchanged email that seemed to back him up. But then Colao produced an audiotape confirming Spiegels smack talk, and the second half of the email, which Spiegel had clipped, undermined his denial.

By Parmy Olson | February 2014

After Jan Koum, a Ukrainian immigrant who came to America with his mother, agreed to sell WhatsApp to Facebook for $19 billion, he took the contract to the welfare office where he once collected food stamps, signed it on the doorand WhatsAppd the picture to Forbes. Koum almost never talks publicly. Olson spent 18 months getting him to share his story with our readers. Its arguably the greatest rags-to-riches saga in American history, told with verve and color within hours of the deals announcement.

Donald Trump in his Trump Organization headquarters in Manhattan.

By Randall Lane | September 2015

While the rest of the world has spent four years learning about Donald Trumps tenuous relationship with the truth, Forbes has experienced this for decades. The president, more than any American tycoon, has held a multi-decade obsession with his place on The Forbes 400. Spending nearly two hours with him in 2015 as he geared up for his quixotic, historic run for the White House (watch for the appearance by the pope) allowed me to unspool an untold history of exaggerations, charms and lies that emerges as a prescient prism.

By Matt Drange and Ryan Mac | June 2016

Who was behind the mysterious money funding the wrestler Hulk Hogans legal trench warfare against the soon-to-be-defunct gossip site Gawker, and why? Mac and Drange scored one of the big business scoops of the decade by revealing that it was none other than Peter Thiel, whod made billions through PayPal, Facebook and Palantirand harbored a fatal vendetta. A real-life whodunnit.

By Matthew Herper and Michela Tindera | October 2016

John Kapoor built a $2.1 billion fortune from the opioid fentanyl, which was hailed by markets and some doctors as a wonder drug. Thats before Herper and Tindera exposed how Kapoor pushed the legal and ethical limits to get the drug into the systems of people who didnt need it. Three years later, he was convicted of racketeering.

"It's hard to overstate and hard to summarize Jared's role in the campaign," said billionaire Peter Thiel, the only significant Silicon Valley figure to publicly back Trump. "If Trump was the CEO, Jared was effectively the chief operating officer."

By Steven Bertoni | November 2016

After Donald Trump shocked the world on Election Day, there was a land grab for credit. Over the next few days, Jared Kushner sat down with Forbes and discussed his role in the Trump campaign for the first time, revealing the secret data operation run with Brad Parscale that proved the difference-maker. Its a story that been cited constantly over the past four yearsthe Cambridge Analytica profiling, the gaming of Facebook and Russias efforts to influence the election all started with Kushners revelations regarding his war room.

By Dan Alexander | June 2017

In a masterpiece of reporting, Alexander systemically demonstrates how Eric Trump, at the direction of his father, the future president, shifted money that was supposed to go to help kids with cancer to the Trump Organization. Following this story, New Yorks attorney general announced an investigation, and Alexanders work won a Deadline Club award for best business feature.

By Dan Alexander | November 2017

Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross has outlasted pretty much every cabinet secretary in the Trump Administrationdespite (or maybe because?) Forbes caught him in an outright lie. Follow-up stories also showed a disturbing pattern of deceit, conflicts of interest and alleged theft.

"Social media is an amazing platform," Jenner said. "I have such easy access to my fans and my customers."

By Natalie Robehmed | July 2018

After this story came out, the world spent the better part of a week arguing over what it means to be self-made. We were even trolled by Dictionary.com. As easy as it is to mock the greater Kardashian plan, Kylies path to becoming the youngest ever self-made billionaire (as confirmed eight months later) perfectly illustrates how fame and followers can now be directly monetized at scale.

By Angel Au-Yeung | July 2019

Bumblehas changed the way people date and mate by empowering women to make the first move and give them a safer environment. How ironic then that Au-Yeung uncovered a pattern of tax avoidanceand misogynyat the headquarters ofBumbles corporate engine, overseen byBumbles majority owner, Russian billionaire Andrey Andreev. An instant classic amid the #MeToo Movement, and like all the best stories, it produced results: Four months after Au-Yeungs story, Andreev sold his stake in Bumble to Blackstone.

The incredible American sagas of Sara Blakely and Shahid Khan. Early deep dives into Instagrams Kevin Systrom, Spotifys Daniel Ek, Oculus Palmer Luckey and Minecrafts Markus Persson. The culture issues at Papa Johns. The rise of the liberal arts degree in techand the fall of Aubrey McClendon. The emergence of the sharing economy, as seen through Airbnb, and the emergence of big data as Big Brother, via Palantir.

And so many moreenough to excite me about the stories to be told by Forbes in the 2020s.

Continued here:
The 18 Greatest Forbes Stories Of The Decade - Forbes

Terrence Malicks A Hidden Life: An Austrian farmers lonely defiance of the Nazis By Fred Mazelis 24 December 2019

Terrence Malicks latest film, the tenth in the course of his lengthy career, is in some ways a return in theme and style to earlier work. Like The Thin Red Line (1998), A Hidden Life deals with the horrors of militarism and war.

The new film also utilizes a more accessible narrative style than recent Malick efforts, as it tells the story of Franz Jgersttter (1907-1943), an Austrian farmer who refused military service because he would not take the oath of allegiance to Adolf Hitler. After a brief trial, Jgersttter was executed in Berlin, less than two years before the defeat and collapse of Hitlers Third Reich.

A Hidden Life was inspired by a volume of Jgersttters letters and writings from prison, edited by his biographer Erna Putz.

This is promising subject matter for film treatment, and there are moments in which the impact of the Nazi dictatorship on ordinary people, as well as the aptness of this episode from the Second World War in todays political climate, find dramatic expression. It must be said, however, that these are outweighed by the kind of mystical-religious outlook that has infused most of Malicks films, which substitute metaphysical abstraction and supra-historical morality for a concrete examination of social reality. A Hidden Life, factually accurate as far as it goes, simply ignores crucial issues raised by the Franz Jgersttter story.

While it proceeds with the sort of spectacular and at times almost dreamlike cinematography for which Malick is well known, A Hidden Life also has occasionally semi-documentary elements. It opens with black-and-white newsreel footage of Hitler, then juxtaposes the images of dictatorship with the idyllic mountain village of St. Radegund, where Jgersttter (August Diehl) and his wife Franziska (Valerie Pachner) live a seemingly perfect life. Three young daughters join the family in quick succession, and the household also includes Jgersttters widowed mother and Franziskas sister. The year is 1939. Austria has been annexed by Hitler the year before, and war has begun with the Nazi invasion of Poland.

It does not take long before the Jgersttters serene existence is brutally disrupted. The devoutly Catholic Austrian peasant is increasingly disturbed by the changes that have overtaken his neighbors and the village as a whole. The mayor has become a militant Nazi, inveighing against foreigners and other imagined threats. Jgersttter begins to make his feelings known and refuses to return the Nazi salute. Villagers react with fury, and the family is shunned. Neighbors spit at Jgersttter and his wife when they pass.

After a period of military training, Jgersttter returns home to a joyful reunion, but the family remains ostracized and threatened. The story then reaches a climax, after Jgersttter is called up for military service and immediately arrested when he refuses to take the formal oath to the Fuhrer.

Much of what follows is taken up with the drawn-out process leading to Jgersttters death. His correspondence with Franziska, read in voice-over, relates part of the story. Before his arrest, he is seen receiving counsel from such figures as his local pastor and later the Catholic bishop in the region. His mother and sister-in-law are anxious and angry over the consequences the family will face owing to Jgersttters stubborn refusal to take the oath.

Everyone, with the exception of his wife, urges him to compromise, to give in, in the face of certain death for him and ruin for his family. Jgersttter is unmoved. After his arrest, and later transport to Tegel prison in Berlin, he also rejects similar advice from his appointed defense counsel. The end comes with the guillotine, on August 9, 1943.

As with other Malick films, A Hidden Life is characterized at times by the minimal use of dialogue. Much of it passes quickly, in brief and interrupted conversations, almost as if the viewer is eavesdropping on the hidden life. The cast of the film is almost entirely German. Jgersttter and his wife, and occasionally other characters where necessary, speak in English that is very lightly accented, while the background conversation in the village, and the interactions with villagers and later with Nazi officials, occur in German. The unusual combination works, for the most part. The imagery and technique are also impressive, as with other films by Malick.

The strongest element of A Hidden Life is its depiction of a man who refuses to go along with the descent into fascist barbarism. It must be said, in a very limited but nonetheless significant way, that the persecution of Jgersttter calls to mind the vicious treatment to which Julian Assange and Chelsea Manning have been subjected because of their exposure of imperialist war crimes.

There are also some scenes, including a few interactions with fellow inmates in the Tegel prison yard, that evoke the kind of antiwar feeling effectively depicted in The Thin Red Line. On the other side, the outbursts of nationalism and chauvinism, while left quite general in the film, recall the contemporary eruption of fascistic rhetoric and policies, not just in the Trump presidency but also in various countries around the world.

This is very limited, however. For the most part, A Hidden Liferemains on the amorphous, metaphysical plane that has dominated most of Malicks recent films. Unlike Assange and Manning, Jgersttter has nothing to say about the concrete political situation. A major theme, left unstated but nonetheless present, is a fear of modernity, of urban life. Rural life is depicted as paradise on earth. Some of the early scenes are absurdly exaggerated. Jgersttter and his wife inhabit a romantic world of their own. Their family is a perfect one. Franziska is called on for little more than saintly behavior, and Jgersttter is Christlike in his sacrifice. This is no doubt intentional on the filmmakers part, contrasting the idyllic hamlet with the spiritual pollution of the city, from which the Nazis have emerged to destroy the peaceful existence of St. Radegund.

The other side of the Christian goodness of the Jgersttters is the generally sheep-like obedience of their neighbors. Good and evil are abstractly presented, and evil is victorious. The view of the masses of the population is a pessimistic one, seeing them as always susceptible to ignorance and demagogy.

You cant change the world, Jgersttter is told. What difference would it make? if he goes to his death, asks another who urges him to surrender. We all have blood on our hands, a third declares. But Franz is mute. His silence is all the testimony required. He does not say we dont all share responsibility, or that we can change the world. All he can do is offer himself up as a martyr.

At the same time, the films title and the final passage in George Eliots classic novel Middlemarch (1871-1872) from which it comes, and which appears on screen at its end, hint at the possibility of a broader and less pessimistic theme. The growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs, Eliot wrote. In other words, this kind of life, though not widely known, has led to the growing good of the world. The key lies not in the relationship between the individual and God, but between the individual and the rest of humanity.

Eliot believed firmly in attempting to change the world. In the 1840s, she turned away from the evangelical religion of her youth and, as we noted on the WSWS in 2009, began to read everything, including French writerssuch as Rousseau, the utopian socialist Saint-Simon, and the scandalous novelist George Sandwho shocked even some of her new progressive friends. In March 1848, she [Eliot] welcomed the outbreak of the French Revolution and expressed contempt for the overthrown ruler, Louis-Philippe. She declined to sentimentalize over a pampered old man when the earth has its millions of unfed souls and bodies.

Eliot eventually translated into English a landmark work, German philosopher Ludwig Feuerbachs Das Wesen des Christentums (The Essence of Christianity), originally published in 1841. Several decades later, Frederick Engels observed that the work had placed materialism on the throne again Nothing exists outside nature and man, and the higher beings our religious fantasies have created are only the fantastic reflection of our own essence.

The realist, socially oriented ideals of Eliot and Middlemarch are not effectively dramatized by Malicks film. The reason lies in part in the directors choice of subject, a man who has little to do with the world and simply wants to be left alone. A very different look at the lives of civilians during the Third Reich has appeared in the past year, in the television drama Charit at War, available on Netflix. Set in Berlin between 1943 and 1945, the series does not provide an overall analysis of the period, but its characters are concretely engaged in the midst of the devastation of war. The resulting drama is connected to history in a way that A Hidden Life is not.

Writing about Tree of Life (2011), a weaker film, we noted on the WSWS that Malick had the obvious ability to capture individual images and suggest by intimate and intense visual means various ephemeral mental states, but that the truly innovative filmmaking of our time would need to join these elements to a far greater awareness of social processes and historical laws and to a far deeper immersion in life, not as a schema, but as it is actually lived.

2019 has been a year of mass social upheaval. We need you to help the WSWS and ICFI make 2020 the year of international socialist revival. We must expand our work and our influence in the international working class. If you agree, donate today. Thank you.

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