Julian Assange extends his reservations at the Ecuadoran London embassy; China is getting really, really good at computers; and a hard and lengthy dispute against stiff opposition finally reaches its climax.

Ecuador’s foreign minister says his London embassy will continue to shelter WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange.  The Australian anti-secrecy campaigner is holed up in there to avoid extradition to Sweden on what his supporters call trumped-up sex abuse charged.  Ecuador’s Ricardo Patino says Assange could stay in there up to five years.

Moammar Ghadaffi’s son and foiled successor will go on trial in Libya in August.  So says the prosecutors in Tripoli who insist it will be a fair trial.  Saif al-Islam is facing charges of forming criminal gangs, inciting rape and illegal detentions.  He faces the death penalty in Libya, which is resisting calls from the World Court in the Hague to ship him there for war crimes charges.

Nelson Mandela’s wife is thanking the world for its good thoughts for the ailing 94-year old former political prisoner and South African President.  The anti-apartheid hero spent a 10th day in the hospital with a lung infection, although reports leak out that he’s consistently improving.  Machel Mandela expressed the family's gratitude for the support “from South Africans, Africans across the continent, and thousands more from across the world ... to lighten the burden of anxiety; bringing us love, comfort and hope.”

China just keeps moving up in the world.  The National University of Defense Technology unveiled the world's fastest supercomputer, almost twice as fast as the previous US record holder.  The Tianhe-2 uses Intel processors to perform 33,860 trillion calculations per second for complex work such as modeling weather systems, simulating nuclear explosions and designing jet planes.

Another mayor of a major Canadian city is in trouble.  This time, Montreal Mayor Michael Appleton was arrested as part of a broader investigation into construction deals involving Mafia-linked figures and a public official who recently committed suicide.  Corruption investigations have rocked towns around Canada’s francophone core recently.  And Up the Saint Lawrence Seaway, Toronto’s porcine Mayor Rob Ford remains under intense scrutiny after reporters viewed a video of him smoking crack, but the video later disappeared.

US Whistleblower Edward Snowden insists he is not a spy for China.  He took part in a webchat organized by the Guardian newspaper, the recipient of his trove of information on America’s high-tech spying programs.  Although he fled to Hong Kong, he says that if he were a spy it would have made more sense to go straight to Beijing where he would have been “living in a palace, petting a phoenix (chicken) by now”.  Snowden also says any chance of him getting a fair trial back home has been destroyed by a parade of American officials who declared him a “traitor”, something he vehemently denies.

A judge in Delaware ruled that a doctor was not negligent in the case of a Delaware truck driver who underwent a penile implant procedure and ended up with an erection that lasted eight months.  44-year old trucker Dan Metzgar says he had trouble riding a motorcycle, wearing normal clothes and joining family social events.  And, “It's not something you want to bring out at parties and show to friends.”  Depends what kind of parties.  But seriously, the doctor successfully sloughed off blame on surgical staff (heh heh) who didn’t perform the implant procedure currently.  Metzgar did get a new (assumably functioning) implant from another doctor, but no pay-day for his 8 month inconvenience.