 Hello and welcome to People's Dispatch. I'm Zoe and you're watching Around the World in 8 Minutes, where we bring you news from working class and popular movements from across the globe. For our first story, we head to the United States, when Atlanta City Council passed a resolution to shut down the Atlanta City Detention Center, ACDC, and to repurpose the facility for community development activities on May 20th. Last year, Atlanta's mayor, Keisha Lance Bottoms, called for the closing of ACDC, citing the declining number of inmates and the increase in costs to operate the center. The shutdown comes as a result of months of unyielding pressure from members of the community, as well as advocacy groups mobilized under the Close the Jail ATL Communities Over Cages campaign. The supporters of the resolution said that it is no longer economically feasible to keep the jail functioning, which costs the city nearly $32 million annually. A report by WABE Radio highlighted that despite having the capacity to house 1,300 inmates, the jailhouse is an average of only 150 inmates at any given day. At the same time, despite being costly, the detention center is very poorly maintained. Reports by Project South and Georgia Detention Watch say that on several occasions, inmates have been denied basic human resources like hygienic food and water and have been subjected to intense physical and mental abuse by their correctional officers. Close the jail activists argue that instead of ensuring public safety for all citizens, the facility is being wrongfully used to imprison and abuse people of color. The majority of those detained in ACDC are serving sentences for minor misdemeanors like traffic and city ordinance violations. The activists believe that such violations can be easily addressed by handing out citations to or according to court instead. The Close the Jail campaign spearheaded by Women on the Rise, an organization constituted by women who have been formally incarcerated or otherwise impacted by the U.S. criminal, legal and immigration system, as well as the Racial Justice Action Center. The women are joined by allies from across the country in their fight against the criminalization and incarceration of marginalized communities, starting with the closure of this jail. Until recently, the facility was divided into two sides. The city side, where offenders from Atlanta were detained, and the immigration's custom enforcement side, where immigrants awaiting deportation were detained. Much like on the city side, detainees in the ice side were also subjected to multiple violations of international human rights and detention standards. Among other things, the detained immigrants were denied adequate access to legal services and information, fundamental due process rights, necessary medication, and were often arbitrarily objected to solitary confinement. In September 2018, Bottom signed an executive order refusing to accept any new detainees of the ice and closing the ice side. She stated that she was horrified at the treatment of immigrants in the country, especially the separation of children from their families and refused to be complicit in it. Aside from the closure of the jail, Monday's resolution also calls for the constitution of a task force to evaluate alternative uses for the facility. Activists told the Atlanta Journal Constitution that they hope the jail will be transformed into a wellness and freedom center that will provide residents with one-stop-shop for employment, healthcare, and childcare assistance in the coming years. Next, we look at the violent crackdown by the police on activists in Morocco commemorating the death anniversary of Mustafa el-Hamsaoui. On May 16th, youth and student activists held a vigil in the city of Geneva, Morocco to commemorate the forced disappearance and assassination of iconic youth leader Mustafa el-Hamsaoui in 1993. Police tried to prevent the protesters from carrying their banners and chanting their slogans and violently attacked them when they continued with their mobilization. Several protesters were taken to the hospital, including Khalidja Asil, whose ankle was fractured by police violence. Asil is a national leader of the youth sector of the Democratic Way, a Marxist party in Morocco, and a member of the Moroccan Association for Human Rights. The Democratic Way denounced the repression of the vigil as barbaric. Every year, activists hold actions to remember the fighting spirit and struggle of Mustafa el-Hamsaoui, an important figure in the contemporary Moroccan left. El-Hamsaoui was a leader of the National Association of Unemployed Graduates in Morocco, and on May 16th, 1993, he was kidnapped, tortured, and beaten. This led to his eventual death at the police station in Henifra. The truth behind his brutal assassination was never revealed, and the struggle for truth in the case continues today. El-Hamsaoui was an important leader in the struggle against unemployment, precariousness, and social exclusion. Today, 26 years after his death, unemployment, labor precarity, and economic insecurity continue to be pressing issues in Morocco. According to the High Commission for Planning, at the end of 2017, the overall unemployment rate was 10.2 percent, while the figure among young people aged 15 to 24 was 26.5 percent, and for the urban population, the average unemployment rate was at 42.8 percent. State repression and persecution of social and left movements is also still a central issue. What also remains true today is the will of the people in working class in Morocco to fight for their rights, for economic security, and for deep transformations in society, in spite of the brutally repressive state. In our last story, we look at the latest chapter in the witch hunt against Julian Assange. On Thursday, the United States Department of Justice announced that it is filing 17 new charges against WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange over various counts of espionage. The new charges will prosecute Assange for violating the U.S. Espionage Act for publishing and circulating classified materials regarding U.S. war crimes in Afghanistan, Iraq, and elsewhere. The charges against Assange together carry a total maximum prison sentence of 175 years, which the U.S. federal prosecutors are pursuing in his indictment. In a tweet, the official handle of WikiLeaks stated that this is madness. It is the end of national security journalism and the First Amendment. The charges include, among other things, the accusation that Assange has repeatedly encouraged sources with access to classified information to steal it and provide it to WikiLeaks to disclose. The sources here specifically refer to Chelsea Manning, a former intelligence analyst for the U.S. Army, who has leaked troves of classified documents and official cables to Assange between 2010 and 2011. Assange published these classified cables as sets of digital dumps on WikiLeaks, most prominent of which were the Iraq war logs and the Afghan war diary. Assange's prosecution has raised concern from across the political divide. This is the very first time that the government is prosecuting a publisher for the very act of publishing under the Espionage Act. In past cases of Espionage, only the act of leaking by a government official was prosecuted and not the publisher. Talking to MSNBC about the recent escalation of the WikiLeaks prosecution by the Trump administration, Jamil Jaffer of the Night First Amendment Institute at the Columbia University said, It really does cross a new frontier. He added that this is really what free speech and free press advocates have been worrying about. U.N. Special Rapporteur on freedom of opinion and expression David Kaye also echoed this sentiment. Regardless of what you think about WikiLeaks or Julian Assange, an Espionage Act prosecution can only turn out badly for freedom of press in this country, said Kaye in a tweet. American Civil Liberties Union's speech, privacy and technology project director Ben Weisner also commented on the unprecedented nature of the prosecution. This is an extraordinary escalation of the Trump administration's attack on journalism and a direct assault on the First Amendment. It establishes a dangerous precedent that can be used to target all news organizations that hold the government accountable by publishing its secrets. That's all we have time for in this episode of Around the World in 8 Minutes. For more such stories, please do visit our website, peoplesdispatch.org, and follow us on YouTube, Facebook and Twitter.