Julian Assange has been released from prison under a plea deal that will see him walk free. The US Justice Department agreed to drop 18 charges against the WikiLeaks founder on the condition that he plead guilty to one count of violating the Espionage Act. The 52-year-old, who has spent five years at HMP Belmarsh and seven years before that hiding in the Ecuadorian embassy in London, will return to his native Australia. A Chinese lunar probe has returned to Earth with the first ever samples from the dark side of the moon. The Chang’e-6 spacecraft landed in the Inner Mongolia desert this morning after a two-month mission on the moon’s unexplored far side, during which it collected material that included a 2.5-million-year-old volcanic rock. Pet rabbits are “getting stoned on lettuce”, says the Daily Star. Although commonly fed to bunnies, the salad leaf contains high levels of lactucarium – or “lettuce opium” – which gets the pets high. It’s a case of “Drugs Bunny”.

Farage’s views on Russia are far from outlandish

“An appeaser, a disgrace, an apologist for Putin, an insult to Ukraine.” Nigel Farage has been called lots of things since saying Nato and the EU bore some responsibility for Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, says Simon Jenkins in The Guardian. Yet his argument – that the West provoked Moscow by extending Nato membership to countries bordering Russia – is by no means crazy. After the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, newly liberated Russians told us explicitly: “you have won but do not push Moscow too far”. The veteran Kremlin expert George Kennan warned the West not to revel in its victory, as it would hand power to belligerent rightwingers. Moscow’s then leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, “pleaded with Nato” not to extend its membership to nations on his border – a request that was verbally agreed to by the US and others.

Within a decade, Nato was negotiating with potential new members in the Baltics and the Black Sea. It’s true that, ultimately, “the West behaved with care”. It effectively ignored Moscow’s brutality in Chechnya and its annexation of Georgian territory in 2008; it declined to get involved when Russia reoccupied Crimea and invaded Ukrainian Donbas in 2014; and it never seriously contemplated admitting Ukraine to Nato. Despite this, Putin still chose to attack Ukraine. So “if there was some historic validity in Farage’s charge of provocation, it is surely spent by now”. But it’s ludicrous to suggest that his views are outlandish. And wherever you come down on the issue, the Reform leader is “clearly arguing for peace”. Heaping insults on him helps no one.

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John Caudwell, the billionaire founder of Phones 4U, made headlines last week by switching allegiance from the Tories to Labour. But I’m not sure why anyone takes him seriously, says Dominic Lawson in the Daily Mail. This is a man who once told an interviewer “I don’t crave materialistic things” while sitting aboard his 240ft superyacht. (He has separately boasted about his 43,000 sq ft Mayfair mansion, with a lavish ballroom, car-stacker lift and 20,000 sheets of gold leaf.) Caudwell said last year he was “beyond shocked and horrified” that Rishi Sunak had abandoned Boris Johnson’s net zero targets – not long after tweeting footage of his helicopter at his country house, calling it an “amazing time-saver for commuting”. Oh, and he backed Liz Truss for the Tory leadership. The 71-year-old says he’ll try to influence Labour wherever he can. “God help us if they listen.”

Stand-up comedy is being transformed by TikTok, says Brian Logan in The Guardian. Crowd work, where the comic asks someone in the audience a question and riffs on their answer, used to form only a small part of the performance. But it’s “increasingly the main draw”. Short clips of these interactions do particularly well on social media, and don’t spoil the surprise of scripted material for live audiences. US comedian Matt Rife was a jobbing stand-up when he started posting audience participation clips two years ago. “He now has 18 million TikTok followers, a recent Netflix special and sells out arena dates worldwide.”

“It’s only Adam and Eve, you know”

The gladdest sight of a lacklustre May was “Charles Dance emerging naked and magnificent, like Botticelli’s Venus, from the sea on Formentera”, says Rowan Pelling in UnHerd. A devotee of the Hampstead men’s pond, the 77-year-old is a splendid advertisement for both wild swimming and naturism. We Brits should get our kit off more. The (mostly) nude swimming club I belong to in Cambridge is “the most democratic place” in our rarefied university city, which has one of the largest gaps between rich and poor in the entire country. When you’re stark bollock naked, “there’s nothing much to separate a biotech entrepreneur from a postman”.

I cherish the greeting older British members habitually utter when they bump into each other outside the basking-bodied lawns: “Excuse me! I didn’t recognise you with your clothes on.” We have our rules – no getting in and out of the water while punts are passing, much to the disappointment of tourists. But mostly we are bonded by the primal urge to immerse every inch of our skin in wild water and have our soul cleansed sub-aqueously. In Britain the desire to be naked is generally seen as a “harmless form of eccentricity”. We love streakers at sports matches and laugh whenever the “naked rambler” Stephen Gough is arrested. But more than that, the idea of “nakedness as a form of spiritual good” was championed a few centuries ago by William Blake and his wife Catherine. The duo startled the artist’s benefactor Thomas Butts, who found them sitting naked in their garden in Lambeth. “Come in!” said Blake. “It’s only Adam and Eve, you know.”

Years ago, I interviewed Donald Sutherland for the Observer magazine, says Angela Levin in The Spectator, and afterwards he invited me up to his hotel room. When I told him we weren’t going to have sex, he looked at me very seriously, then burst out laughing. “Why don’t you want to go to bed with me?” From then on, we were great friends. One night years later he rang me at home at 2am. “I know it is the middle of your night and I am very sorry but is anything the matter?” he asked. “I’ve got a bad feeling that something has gone wrong for you.” I was stunned. I had married too young, and made a mistake, and that very evening I had told my husband it was over.

American journalists take themselves incredibly seriously, says Gerard Baker in The Times. My favourite story is how the editor of The New York Times reacted on 9/11. As the full extent of the attacks became clear, the first thing he did was call in his top team to work out what they would do “if the paper itself were the next target”. Yes, really. In his mind it was plain that after the Pentagon, the Capitol (where the plane that went down in Pennsylvania was heading) and the World Trade Center, the next objective of the terrorists would of course be “the offices of The Most Important Newspaper in The Entire World”.

It’s Dutch prime minister Mark Rutte, who is about to become Secretary General of Nato. The 57-year-old is a “man of habits”, says Foreign Policy. Every year, he rents the same simple holiday house with family members, and for the past three decades he has spent a few days each year in New York “with the same friend, staying in the same cheap hotel in Chinatown, eating in the same restaurants”. At home in The Hague, where he has lived alone in the same modest house with the same furniture for 30 years, he always has coffee in the same café then goes to buy groceries from the same supermarket. And at 10 am every Sunday morning he goes to a sports club to meet friends. “Again, always the same ones.”