The WikiWeek: December 10, 2010

THE CABLES

AFRICA

Pharmaceutical companies, oil multinationals — who isn’t screwing up Nigeria?

Did an Italian oil company buy off Uganda’s security minister?

Zimbabwe’s miserable diamond mines are worse than you thought.

American diplomats thinks Eritrea’s Isaias Afwerki is an “unhinged dictator.”

Libya’s regime is “essentially thuggish.”

The Sudanese government doesn’t even know who’s bombing it anymore.

Guinea’s ousted president had plenty of enemies.

ASIA

Selling in Burma: North Korean nuclear expertise, beloved British soccer teams.

China’s next leaders love Oklahoma.

CENTRAL ASIA/CAUCASUS

Azerbaijan’s caviar business is more dangerous than you think.

The U.S.-Russia “reset” is keeping the Obama administration from arming Georgia.

EUROPE

Serbia blames Russia for their failure to catch fugitive war criminal Ratko Mladic.

Who was behind the Estonian cyberattacks?

Spanish President Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero is “inexperienced but probably manageable.”

It’s impossible to get anything done in Ukraine without the mob.

Serbian government officials are worried that Kosovo is headed toward partition.

LATIN AMERICA

Hugo Chávez’s sandwich of the people.

Brazil is suspicious and conspiratorial about the United States, and its incoming president is “stubborn” and a “workaholic.”

U.S. embassy officials in Honduras were not exactly sad to see Manuel Zelaya go.

MIDDLE EAST

Hosni Mubarak: Tehran is out to get Egypt.

Ain’t no party like a Saudi Halloween party.

Saudi Arabia’s foreign minister has some bad ideas for how to fight Hezbollah.

Vladimir Putin once told Bob Gates that Iran was Russia’s biggest threat.

Yemen’s government uses U.S. and British counterterrorism resources to fight its own battles.

Is Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s Achilles heel wearing a soccer cleat?

Ahmadinejad apparently has a ninja army.

THE NEWS

Julian Assange’s friends: Brazil’s Lula, the United Nations’ Navi Pillay, some Swedes with a crazy mountain fortress (above).

Lebanon’s al-Akhbar, which acquired its own cache of State Department cables under mysterious circumstances, gets hacked.

Pakistan’s media, unsatisfied with WikiLeaks’ deluge of cables, makes up its own.

The State Department says it had nothing to do with PayPal cutting off WikiLeaks.

This is not a great time to be in the Australian government.

Iranian diplomats are idiots.

Al Jazeera is not so thrilled about appearing in the WikiLeaks cables.

Ten people who’d rather not be famous right now.

WikiLeaks hands out a list of U.S. critical infrastructure.

Assange is moved to a segregation unit.

THE BIG PICTURE

Where exactly is the line between journalist and enemy of the state these days? Even Assange doesn’t seem to know what he is.

The WikiLeaks cables show the myth of American influence in Pakistan.

The case for prosecuting Assange for espionage.

Is it really so terrible is WikiLeaks makes the U.S. government explain its incursions on other nations’ sovereignty?

WikiLeaks may have thwarted the world’s governments, but it can’t hide from the Internet’s favorite memes.