The WikiWeek: January 14, 2011
THE CABLES ASIA/PACIFIC Xi Jinping, China’s president-in-waiting, lashes out at “well-fed foreigners.” U.S. diplomats worry that Nepal could “become another Burma.” Uzbek officials party with Tashkent mafia wives. The U.S. government is still looking for Soviet plutonium in Kazakhstan. EUROPE/CAUCASUS U.S. diplomats wanted to bail out Iceland in 2008 to counter Russian influence. ...
THE CABLES
ASIA/PACIFIC
Xi Jinping, China’s president-in-waiting, lashes out at “well-fed foreigners.”
U.S. diplomats worry that Nepal could “become another Burma.”
Uzbek officials party with Tashkent mafia wives.
The U.S. government is still looking for Soviet plutonium in Kazakhstan.
EUROPE/CAUCASUS
U.S. diplomats wanted to bail out Iceland in 2008 to counter Russian influence.
The Vatican vetoes a Holocaust memorial.
Iceland, surprisingly, is not a seething hotbed of terrorism.
Armenia has a problem with distracted driving.
THE NEWS
Julian Assange’s lawyers argue that extraditing their client to the United States could land him in Guantánamo Bay, or lead to his execution. Meanwhile, Assange settles into new digs in London, and hires a PR firm.
Maybe Zimbabwe’s attorney general won’t go after Morgan Tsvangirai after all. The Guardian concedes that it played down its own role in releasing the cable that got him in trouble.
Alleged Assange source Pfc. Bradley Manning is still in jail. WikiLeaks is contributing $15,000 to his legal defense, and a Los Angeles Times editorial blasts his “inhumane imprisonment.”
U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, in the Middle East on a post-WikiLeaks “apology tour,” tells reporters, “I think I will be answering concerns about WikiLeaks for the rest of my life.”
The U.S. Justice Department demands that Twitter hand over WikiLeaks-related records. Twitter doesn’t budge.
Anonymous continues to hack in solidarity with WikiLeaks.
Singapore’s foreign minister says he’ll be “more guarded in our communications with U.S. diplomats” after WikiLeaks.
A Dutch newspaper says it has 3,000 unreleased WikiLeaks cables it got from a Norwegian newspaper.
The White House Office of Management and Budget issues a new memo (PDF here) on post-WikiLeaks information management.
A Swiss banker who helped WikiLeaks is charged with coercion and violating banking secrecy laws.
THE BIG PICTURE
Is Tunisia the first WikiLeaks revolution? (A young Tunisian’s take here. Here’s the cable that started all the trouble.)
Portrait of the hacker as a young man.
Assange: China, not the United States, is WikiLeaks’ “technological enemy.”
Even WikiLeaks feels the need to opine on the Gabrielle Giffords shooting.
Why American journalists aren’t sticking up for Assange.
A lot of people seem convinced Assange has the dirt on News Corp.’s Rupert Murdoch — though he’s only really claiming to have some U.S. State Department cables that mention him.
How WikiLeaks is like Glenn Beck.
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