Hillary Clinton and Manouchehr Mottaki, the Iranian foreign minister, may have been seated at the same dinner table in the centre of the imposing ballroom of the Ritz-Carlton hotel in the Bahraini capital but they seemed to be worlds apart.

Government should be transparent by default, secret by necessity. Of course, it is not. Too much of government is secret. Why? Because those who hold secrets hold power. Now WikiLeaks has punctured that power. Whether or not it ever reveals another document -- and we can be certain that it will -- Wikileaks has made us all aware that no secret is safe. If something is known by one person, it can be known by the world.

Julian Assange’s website has attracted both flak and praise for leaking US diplomatic thinking. But some argue that Uncle Sam’s assessments are a fair reflection of what really goes on in Africa, writes Lee Mwiti.

There's more to the WikiLeaks dispatches than leaks. Look behind them, at the writers, and you see the loyal rearguard of America: an imperial power in retreat.

The National Portrait Gallery's succumbing to pressure to remove a video from an art exhibit is highly disappointing. Worse than disappointing are the politicians and self-appointed censors who are pressing the gallery to dismantle the entire exhibit and are using the controversy to threaten the museum's public funding.

As the latest WikiLeaks revelations have shown, when diplomatic cables are made public they are often far from diplomatic. In fact, they aren't even good journalism.

The recent release of Aung San Suu Kyi from house arrest, after deeply flawed elections that allowed the military in Myanmar, also known as Burma, to tighten its half-century-long grip on the country, raises numerous political questions: What comes next for her? Will the ruling junta engage her newly reconstituted National Democracy Party? Will other political prisoners be freed?

The release of US diplomatic cables by WikiLeaks contains some serious stuff: US diplomats have been trying to steal the credit card numbers of top UN officials, Saudi Arabia is putting pressure on the US to attack Iran, Iran has obtained advanced long-range missiles from North Korea. Other cables are not so earth-shaking, but they nonetheless reveal personalities and events that are comical, surprising, or just plain weird. Here's our top five.