The US secretary of state, Hillary Clinton, today gave the administration's first public reaction to the leaking of thousands of confidential diplomatic documents, describing it as an attack not only on the US but the international community.

The nuclear-powered aircraft carrier USS George Washington and its escorts are heading for the waters off the Korean peninsula, in the aftermath of the flare-up between North and South Korea. This is very much gunboat diplomacy 21st Century-style.

Ukrainians will be able to visit Israel without visas beginning on February 9, RFE/RL's Ukrainian Service reports. Ukrainian Foreign Ministry spokesman Oleksandr Dikusarov told journalists that all citizens with a passport will be able to visit Israel for 90 days without a visa. Israelis will enjoy the same visa-free travel privileges to Ukraine.

Six countries declined invitations to the December 10 Nobel Peace Prize ceremony for jailed Chinese dissident Liu Xiaobo after an unprecedented campaign by China to sabotage attendance, the Norwegian Nobel Committee told Reuters.

Up to 950 Canadian troops will train Afghan army recruits from 2011 to 2014, maintaining a particular focus on solving the "huge problem" of low literacy levels, Defense Minister Peter MacKay said on Tuesday.

Some of the first-hand accounts of British Prime Minister David Cameron's visit to China last week did not come in the form of media reports or in postings on news portals, but in a microblog by the British embassy in Beijing, the The Beijing News daily reported Sunday.

Hillary Clinton, genuinely funny and admiration-generating in a stint this week with two of Australia's broadcast comics, Hamish and Andy...Barack Obama, at the University of Indonesia in Jakarta, making a speech about democracy in Indonesia, and a reprise on last year's appeal to Islam -- but also daring to talk a little bit in the Bahasa Indonesia ("language of Indonesia") he heard around him as a child.

It’s a colossal shame that presidential life has no magic rewind button, for if it did—and we could whirr ourselves back to June 2009—we’d have had Barack Hussein Obama skip Pharaonic old Cairo, city of the ghastly Hosni Mubarak and a tightly coiled hatred of the West, and deliver his first major speech to a Muslim nation in Indonesia...