sweden

Things are going to get really interesting now:

WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange is to be extradited to Sweden to face allegations of rape and sexual assault. Assange will appeal, his legal team confirmed. If this is unsuccessful, he will be extradited to Sweden in 10 days.

Delivering his ruling at a hearing at Belmarsh magistrates court in London, the chief magistrate Howard Riddle systematically dismissed each of the defence's arguments against Assange's extradition.

Assange's legal team had disputed that Swedish prosecutor, Marianne Ny, had the authority to issue a European arrest warrant, but the judge ruled that she did possess this authority and the warrant issued was valid.

I wonder if Assange will be releasing the secret key to his “insurance” file soon? He has threatened to do just that and this file has all the world’s leaders on edge.

As I’ve said countless times before; our nation is falling way behind in the world of internet communications. The latest international rankings now has the U.S. in 26th place when it comes to internet speed:

When South Koreans tested their wired broadband connections over the past 30 days, they found an average downstream speed of 34.14M bps (bits per second), according to the Net Index, which was introduced on Tuesday by Ookla, the creator of Speedtest. That was several times the worldwide average of 7.67M bps and 100 times as fast as the 340K bps downstream speed in Sudan, the lowest average out of 152 ranked countries.

Latvia (24.29M bps), the Republic of Moldova (21.37M bps), Japan (20.29M bps) and Sweden (19.78M bps) rounded out the top five countries for downstream broadband. The U.S. was ranked 26th in the world, with an average downstream speed of 10.16M bps. Upstream rankings were similar, with South Korea leading at 18.04M bps and the U.S. in 27th place with 2.21M bps. The world average was 2.10M bps.

This also doesn’t count penetration and price. The U.S. has some of the highest cost internet and still has large portions of the country without access to broadband. It’s really hard for us to compete in a 21st century economy with 20th century technology. If we don’t wake up soon, it will be too late and too costly to recover.