Its been a while since Julian Assange was in the news.

The last we heard he was making a nuisance of himself at the Ecuadorian Embassy in London, where his skateboarding and the general neglect of his adorable cat was becoming a problem.

Now, six years, nine months and 24 days after taking up residence in the embassy, Assange was dragged into the street by British police officers.

The Guardian with more:

After 2,487 days in the embassy, the 47-year-old was arrested after Ecuador revoked his political asylum and invited Metropolitan police officers inside their Knightsbridge premises, where he has stayed since 2012 to avoid extradition to Sweden over sexual assault allegations which Assange has always denied.

Later on Thursday, he was found guilty of failing to surrender to the court and faces up to 12 months in a British prison.

Ah, that explains how they managed to arrest him in the embassy.

Here’s his arrest and some background on the events leading up to it:

It doesn’t end there. Assange was arrested twice:

At a central London police station, Assange was further arrested at the request of the US seeking his extradition over allegations he conspired with former US military analyst Chelsea Manning to download classified databases in what the US justice department called “one of the largest compromises of classified information in the history of the United States”.

The battle is now on between the British government who defended the arrest over breaching bail as evidence that “no-one is above the law” and Labour and civil liberties groups who condemn America’s extradition request.

More footage of the arrest:

Which brings us to why Ecuador finally had enough of Assange. You got a bit of the story above, and earlier we mentioned that he wasn’t a very good house guest. Here’s the Daily Beast:

His dramatic expulsion from the embassy follows a year of ratcheting tension between Assange and his Ecuadorian hosts, culminating in WikiLeaks publicizing a leak of hundreds of thousands of hacked emails mysteriously stolen from the inboxes of Ecuador’s president and first lady.

It was this last move that finally set Ecuador’s government firmly against Assange, who was by then already being treated less like a political refugee than an inmate—albeit one who was free to leave at any time.

“The patience of Ecuador has reached its limit on the behavior of Mr. Assange,” Ecuador’s president, Lenín Moreno, said on Thursday.

Not a good look Assange. Not a good look.

For a recap on how Assange ended up in the embassy in the first place, go here.

[source:guardian&dailybeast]