Syria (and Beyond) LiveBlog: More of the "New Normal"

Protest last night in the Qosour section of Homs in Syria

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1810 GMT: Earlier today we reported on the beating and abduction of Syria's leading political cartoonist Ali Farzat (see 1301 GMT) by pro-regime gunmen. A website features his work and latest news about him.

1805 GMT: Claimed video of Yemeni regime reinforcements heading towards the capital Sana'a from Hodeidah, but being blocked by opposition tribesmen:

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WikiLeaks CyberWar Update: Is Amazon UK Down?

UPDATE 13 DECEMBER: Amazon says a hardware failure, rather than an attack, took down its European sites for about 45 minutes on Sunday night.

A spokeswoman said, "The brief interruption to our European retail sites earlier today was due to hardware failure in our European datacenter network and not the result of a DDOS attempt."

UPDATE 2145 GMT: All Amazon sites in Europe are back on-line.

UPDATE 2140 GMT: Amazon is now reporting "Performance Issues" with Amazon Simple Notification Service (Ireland) and Amazon Simple Queue Service (Ireland).

UPDATE 2120 GMT: It is reported that the outage is because Amazon Data Services for Europe, based in Dublin, is down.

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WikiLeaks: A Guide to EA's Coverage This Week

Analyses

1. An EA exclusive on Afghanistan: "US Embassy Protects Contractor Over Hiring of Child Prostitutes"

2. We take apart dramatic headlines to evaluate, "Does Shell Really Have a Grip on Nigeria's Government?"

2. Josh Mull carries out a reality check: "Journalism is Not an Attack, WikiLeaks is Not Warfare"

Features and Documents

1. How the release of the documents turned into a CyberWar: "Now MasterCard's A Casualty" and "Visa, MasterCard Sites Still Offline"

3. One of our favourite strange-but-true moments: "Iran: The Regime's Ninja Assassins?"

4. A look at one of the more unusual diplomatic incidents in the cables: "Europe, Ahmadinejad, and the Worst Inauguration Protest Ever"

Audio

Scott Lucas offers an introduction to WikiLeaks and the issues over the documents in an interview with BBC West Midlands.

WikiLeaks CyberWar Update: Visa, MasterCard Sites Still Off-Line

For earlier updates, see Wednesday's story....

UPDATE 1640 GMT: Tweet of the Day. State Department spokesman P.J. Crowley has tweeted, as the Department opens World Press Freedom Day, "No country believes in press freedom more than the United States. We practice what we preach."

UPDATE 1555 GMT:  WikiLeaks has issued a statement:  "These denial of service attacks are believed to have originated from an internet gathering known as Anonymous. This group is not affiliated with WikiLeaks. There has been no contact between any Wikileaks staffer and anyone at Anonymous. WikiLeaks has not received any prior notice of any of Anonymous’ actions.  Wikileaks spokesman Kristinn Hrafnsson said: 'We neither condemn nor applaud these attacks. We believe they are a reflection of public opinion on the actions of the targets.'”

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