¶ An intriguing alliance: American diplomats in Rome reported in 2009 on what their Italian contacts described as an extraordinarily close relationship between Vladimir V. Putin, the Russian prime minister, and Silvio Berlusconi, the Italian prime minister and business magnate, including “lavish gifts,” lucrative energy contracts and a “shadowy” Russian-speaking Italian go-between. Mr Berlusconi has been friends with former KGB agent Mr Putin, for more than five years and the two have held numerous bilateral meetings as well as entertained each other on holiday. Advertisement Continue reading the main story 
 
 “We’ll continue saying the bombs are ours, not yours,” Mr. Saleh said, according to the cable sent by the American ambassador, prompting one of Yemen’s deputy prime ministers to “joke that he had just ‘lied’ by telling Parliament” that Yemen had carried out the strikes. and the New York Times are set to publish the material. In July and October, The Times, the British newspaper The Guardian and the German magazine Der Spiegel published articles based on documents about Afghanistan and Iraq. The Foreign Office condemned the leak of the State Department cables but insisted that it would not damage British-US relations.
– The Obama administration’s last-ditch attempt to stop WikiLeaks from releasing its latest batch of documents didn’t work: More than a quarter-million American diplomatic cables will be made public beginning today, and the New York Times has already seen some of them. It offers a preview of what the cables reveal: A standoff between the US and Pakistan over nuclear fuel, dating back to 2007 when the US began attempting to remove highly enriched uranium from a Pakistani research reactor since it could be used in a nuclear device. Discussions between America and South Korea over what would happen if North Korea implodes and the Koreas are unified. Suspicions of Afghan government corruption, based on the fact that Afghanistan’s VP was found with $52 million in cash on a visit to the United Arab Emirates last year, and was never required to disclose where he got it or what it was for. A coordinated campaign by the Chinese government and other experts to hack Google’s systems in that country. They have also broken into other systems including American government and business computers. A close relationship between Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin and Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, including gifts exchanged and energy contracts. Berlusconi is once called “the mouthpiece of Putin” in Europe. Click here for the full article, which gives an extensive preview, or click here for more from the Telegraph, which discloses that the US once referred to Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as "Hitler."