Julian Assange is an unappealing character, “to put it mildly”, says Fintan O’Toole in The Irish Times. The WikiLeaks founder has voiced support for French far-right firebrand Marine Le Pen and clearly has an appalling attitude towards women. But that doesn’t mean we should ignore the British court ruling last week that he can be extradited to America on espionage charges. He published half a million secret documents revealing that the US military covered up the killing of 15,000 Iraqi civilians. Any journalist offered that sort of information doesn’t just have a right to publish it, they have a “duty”.

Has the tide turned against wokeness? There are certainly signs of a backlash, says Ed West in his Substack newsletter. A recent “parental revolt” against critical race theory in schools saw the election of a Republican governor in Virginia. “But the fact that wokeness is very unpopular doesn’t mean that it won’t win.” The US civil rights movement was not widely liked at the time: in 1964, only 16% of Americans said mass demonstrations had helped the cause of racial equality, while 74% said they had hurt it. But just a generation later, Martin Luther King was the closest thing America had to a patron saint.