SARAH AND JULIAN

Do we really believe that the reason Interpol has put out an international warrant for WikiLeaks supremo, Julian Assange, is because of alleged rape charges from Sweden? Admittedly such charges are serious but there are few alleged rapists who set Interpol's sirens blaring and fewer still whose appearance on the 'Red List' corresponds with their appearance, for entirely different reasons, across the front pages of the world's media for three consecutive days.

Interpol is merely being opportunistic, attempting to remind people that it still exists and how good its post hoc work usually is! But, fair's fair, the global police are not the only ones we might accuse of opportunism.

What about Sarah Louise Palin, poster girl of the American right and wielder of the flaming sword of righteousness? "Julian Assange has blood on his hands and should be hounded like an Bin Laden," she is reported to have said, adding that, "He is an anti-American operative." Julian Assange, incidentally, is Australian.

You know, until this outburst, I had been inclined to dislike the slippery Mr Assange and to like, for largely physical reasons, the booby Mrs Palin. I have now changed my mind but not so much because of Palin's stridency but because the material that Mr Assange's site is offering to the world, is genuinely fascinating and often, to my mind, reassuring.

I am glad, for example, that Britain, Russia and the US have been concerned about the possibility of Pakistani weapons-grade uranium getting into the wrong hands. I was equally glad to discover that, since I last thought about it, China has grown up and, at least if the information that they are bored and somewhat embarassed by North Korea is true, see themselves correctly as part of the global Real-Politik. And again I am glad to discover that Prince Andrew is both royal and random.

Have these revelations really been anything more than slightly annoying to the US? I mean they hardly add up to Bin Laden's 9/11 atrocities.