More than 1.1 billion new $100 bills have been put into quarantine while officials search for a solution to a printing problem that has rendered some of the bills unusable, an official familiar with the situation said Monday.

Originally scheduled for a February 2011 release date, the bills were the first run of a high-tech note designed to combat counterfeiting by including a 3-D security ribbon.

The Federal Reserve first acknowledged an issue with the bills in October, but did not specify the scope of the problem.

Former whistleblower and independent MP Andrew Wilkie has issued a scathing attack against the Prime Minister's handling of the WikiLeaks affair.

Mr Wilkie says Julia Gillard is showing contempt for the rule of law by failing to give Australian WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange the presumption of innocence.

Mr Assange was arrested by British police on Tuesday in response to a Swedish warrant on alleged sex crimes and faces possible extradition.

Mark Arbib was first elected to the Senate for New South Wales in 2007.

Foreign Affairs Minister Kevin Rudd says it is "water off a duck's back" that the former US ambassador to Australia described him as a "control freak" who made significant blunders.

A long list of key facilities around the world that the US describes as vital to its national security has been released by Wikileaks.

The US State Department in February 2009 asked all US missions abroad to list all installations whose loss could critically affect US national security.

The list includes pipelines, communication and transport hubs.

Several UK sites are listed, including cable locations, satellite sites and BAE Systems plants.

This is probably the most controversial document yet from the Wikileaks organisation.

WikiLeaks suffered the most serious blow in its struggles with corporate and official America yesterday when PayPal, the payments processing company, suspended the organisation's account. The move will have a major impact on WikiLeaks' ability to collect donations.

TITLE: Party at the Ambassador's

HIM: I can tell you, dear, there is not a word about him on Wikileaks...

HER: Poor man...

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The cables portray Mr. Putin as enjoying supremacy over all other Russian public figures, yet undermined by the very nature of the post-Soviet country he helped build.

Even a man with his formidable will and intellect is shown beholden to intractable larger forces, including an inefficient economy and an unmanageable bureaucracy that often ignores his edicts.

In language candid and bald, the cables reveal an assessment of Mr. Putin’s Russia as highly centralized, occasionally brutal and all but irretrievably cynical and corrupt. The Kremlin, by this description, lies at the center of a constellation of official and quasi-official rackets.