I have been thinking about this quite a lot over the last few days and indeed had some exchanges with a former Swedish judge, and two things are very puzzling.

What, realistically, is the difference between the likelihood of extradition from Sweden to the US or the UK to the US. We know the UK treaty is very pro-US. My gut feeling was originally that Assange might well be safer in Sweden.

Second - if the CIA was going to fit Assange up, you'd have thought they could have come up with something less iffy and debatable. This almost convinces me that the Swedish allegations are unlikely to be a US fit-up.

Spinning off from that I thought Assange's speech this afternoon was well assembled. I subscribe to the view that the US's treatment of Bradley Manning is vengeful and torturous. But it was a condition of his asylum that he make no political utterance. The speech looked political to me. And I gather that there is a dialogue going on between Ecuador and Sweden. I wonder what the next move will be.