WikiLeaks gets a new address after being left homeless

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PARIS - WikiLeaks, the whistle-blower website that released about 250,000 United States diplomatic cables, battled to stay online on Friday after attacks on its servers forced it to change the name of its main website.

It now has a Swiss domain name, wikileaks.ch, after the American company EveryDNS stopped hosting the website wikileaks.org late Thursday. EveryDNS said cyber attacks on the site threatened the rest of its network.

The new Swiss domain name does not mean that the WikiLeaks website itself has moved to Switzerland. The domain name points to servers based in Sweden, France, and elsewhere.

WikiLeaks uses sites in multiple countries to distribute information and its Swedish server host, Bahnhof, confirmed that the website had been hit by a cyber attack just before it leaked the classified US diplomatic cables.

Since it began releasing the information on Nov 28, WikiLeaks has been the subject of so-called denial of service attacks, where hackers attempt to overwhelm a website with repeated requests for data.

Amazon.com, the Seattle-based online retailer, dropped the site earlier this week from its web hosting platform, according to WikiLeaks. Amazon said that by hosting content for which it does not own or control the rights, WikiLeaks was in breach of its terms of service.

Meanwhile, Britain's four-year military stewardship of the troubled Afghan province of Helmand has been scorned by President Hamid Karzai, top Afghan officials and the United States commander of North Atlantic Treaty Organization troops, according to the latest batch of leaked cables.

The British operation was also criticised for its failure to establish security in the town of Sangin and connect with ordinary Afghans.

The cables further revealed widespread suspicion of high-level corruption in the Afghan government and Iran's growing influence in Afghanistan. Tehran reportedly finances senior politicians and even allegedly trains Taliban militants.

The cables also highlighted the anger among America's allies when they discovered that the US military was charging a 15 per cent handling fee on hundreds of millions of dollars being raised internationally to build up the Afghan army. Agencies