A black day for the crusading website Wikileaks:
The anonymous whistleblower website Wikileaks, which has been a thorn in the side of governments and big business for three years, has shut down temporarily because it has run out of money.
The document repository, founded by an Australian living in East Africa, has been the catalyst for countless front-page stories around the world.
It has exposed serious business and political corruption and sparked a political scandal in Australia when it published the federal government’s secret blacklist of banned websites.
In a message posted on the site, founder Julian Assange appealed for donations from the public, saying he had received hundreds of thousands of pages relating to “corrupt banks, the US detainee system, the Iraq war, China, the UN and many others” but did not have the resources to release them.