US embassy cables: The background.

The latest batch of documents to be released by Wikileaks is made up of diplomatic messages sent from US embassies around the world.

The whistle-blowing website says it has obtained more than 250,000 cables passed between the US State Department and hundreds of American diplomatic outposts - but it has so far only published a small sample of those messages.
However, the entire archive of the reports from US diplomats out in the field has been made available to five publications - the New York Times, the Guardian in the UK, France's Le Monde, El País in Spain and Germany's Der Spiegel.
It is the third mass Wikileaks release of classified documents since the publication of 77,000 secret US files on the Afghan conflict in July, and 400,000 documents about the Iraq war in October.
Suspicion has again fallen on US Army private Bradley Manning, an intelligence analyst arrested in Iraq in June and charged over an earlier leak.
In July the US Department of State revealed he had access to the Secret Internet Protocol Router Network (Siprnet) - a system which allows government and diplomatic information to be shared.