JULIAN ASSANGE NOMINATED FOR NOBEL PEACE PRIZE

Whistleblowing WikiLeaks website founder Julian Assange has been nominated for this year's Nobel Peace Prize by Norwegian parliamentarian Snorre Valen, 24, a member of Norway's Socialist Left Party. In his words: "Wikileaks have contributed to the struggle for those very values globally, by exposing (among many other things) corruption, war crimes and torture - sometimes even conducted by allies of Norway. Most recently, by disclosing the economic arrangements by the presidential family in Tunisia, Wikileaks have made a small contribution to bringing down a 24-year-lasting dictatorship."

Being nominated for the prize poses a bit of a conundrum for Assange. He is currently holed up in the UK, waiting on an extradition appeal and trying to avoid being sent to Sweden to face "rape" charges - and we will go into greater detail about this bogus accusation in a later post. In any case, Canadian editorialist Paul Sullivan describes Assange's surreal situation thusly:

"In a strange twist of what can only be called fate, Assange could either be incarcerated in Scandinavia as the lowest of the low, a sex criminal, or exalted in Scandinavia as the highest of the high, a Nobel Peace Prize winner, alongside Mother Teresa and Nelson Mandela."

Funny how things work out sometimes, isn't it?