A foreign spy agency led a 2008 cyber attack on US military computer systems, a top Pentagon official said, shedding light on what he called the most significant breach of American military cyber security.

A little over three years ago, Efraim Diveroli was a precocious 22-year-old arms dealer celebrating landing what must be one of the more extraordinary pieces of business to come out of the war in Afghanistan: the sale for $300m (£195m) of 40-year-old Chinese bullets to the American military. Yesterday, he was cooling his heels in a Florida jail cell after being arrested with just a few hundred rounds of ammunition in the back of his car.

Wikileaks founder Julian Assange resurfaced yesterday to dismiss as a smear a false rape claim that led to a warrant for his arrest being issued over the weekend then dropped just hours later. But as he remained under investigation in Sweden over a separate allegation of sexual molestation, one of his accusers gave her side of the story to a Swedish newspaper.

Swedish prosecutors today defended their handling of a rape allegation against the founder of WikiLeaks.

WikiLeaks will soon publish its remaining 15,000 Afghan war documents, despite warnings from the US government, the organization's founder said Saturday.

One can only wish Robert Gates well in his latest effort to bring America's military spending under control. If they are approved by Congress – a very big if – the cuts the US Defence Secretary is outlining, notably the elimination of an entire military command and a thinning of the Pentagon's bloated parallel army of private contractors, will save around $20bn annually over the next five years. Set against the current defence budget of some $700bn a year, the reduction is less than breathtaking. But it is a step in the right direction.

Robert Gates, the US Defence Secretary, faces a fierce political battle after announcing cuts in America's military spending of $100bn over the next five years, at the cost of thousands of outsourced civilian contracting jobs, and the elimination of an entire military command.

The US defence department is unable to account for almost $9bn taken from Iraqi oil revenues for use in reconstruction, according to an official audit released yesterday.

This action comedy began life as a sketch on Saturday Night Live that spoofed a 1980s TV series, MacGyver, about a mullet-headed special agent who preferred not to use a gun.

Afghanistan, often dismissed in the West as an impoverished and failed state, is sitting on $1 trillion of untapped minerals, according to new calculations from surveys conducted jointly by the Pentagon and the US Geological Survey.

A team of US geologists and Pentagon officials has discovered vast mineral wealth in Afghanistan, conceivably enough to turn the scarred and impoverished country into one of the world's most lucrative mining centres, The New York Times reports.

It has the ingredients of a spy thriller: an American military analyst turned whistleblower; 260,000 classified government documents; and rumours that the world's most powerful country is hunting a former hacker whom it believes is about to publish them.