United States President Joe Biden was with Japan’s Prime Minister Fumio Kishida when asked what he was doing regarding Australia’s request that the WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange be returned to Australia.

Assange, who has spent five tormenting years in Belmarsh Prison in London, is battling extradition to the US on 18 charges, 17 tenuously and dangerously based on the US Espionage Act of 1917.

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The words that followed which heartened the publisher’s supporters were: “We’re considering it.”

No further details have been supplied.

To these crumbs came this reaction from Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese on ABC’s News Breakfast: “We have raised on behalf of Mr Assange, Australia’s national interest, that enough is enough, that this needs to be brought to a conclusion, and we’ve raised it at each level of government in every possible way.”

When pressed on whether this was merely an afterthought from the president, Albanese responded with the usual........

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