Jailed Assange to fight extradition

A BRITISH judge sent Julian Assange to jail yesterday, denying bail to the WikiLeaks founder who vowed to fight efforts to extradite him to Sweden in a sex-crimes investigation.

A WikiLeaks spokesman said the flow of secret US diplomatic cables would not be affected by Assange’s legal troubles, nor by the group’s increasingly rocky finances as both Visa and MasterCard cut off funding methods.

“This will not change our operation,” Kristinn Hrafnsson said. To underline the point, WikiLeaks released a dozen new diplomatic cables, its first publication in more than 24 hours, including the details of a NATO defence plan for Poland, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania that prompted an indignant response from the Russian envoy to the alliance.