Argentina has deposited $161m (£99m) in bond interest payments with the state-controlled Nacion Fideicomisos bank, in an effort to skirt US court rulings.

The country had previously kept its funds with US-controlled Bank of New York Mellon.

The move comes a day after a US judge ruled Argentina was in "contempt of court".

That ruling stated Argentina must repay two US hedge funds before repaying other bond holders.

"By making this deposit, Argentina confirms once again its unshakeable commitment to meet its obligations to bondholders," said Argentina's finance ministry in a statement.

Argentina is attempting to pay its bondholders in a second tranche of debt known as the Par series so as to avoid defaulting once more.

The new President of Afghanistan Ghani Ahmadzai has paved the way for US troops to stay in the country. He has signed a security deal with the US, which will see just under 10,000 American soldiers present, to help train and assist Afghan forces.

National security adviser Hanif Atmar and U.S. Ambassador James Cunningham signed the bilateral security agreement in a televised ceremony at the presidential palace, a day after Ghani was inaugurated as the new Afghan president.

"As an independent country, based on our national interests, we signed this agreement for stability, goodwill, and prosperity of the our people, stability of the region and the world," Ghani said in a speech after the signing, according to Reuters.

Aside from the 10,000 US soldiers, another 2,000 NATO troops will also boost numbers. They will stay on after the US and its allies formally end their combat mission at the end of 2012.

The news about neo-Nazi Azov Battalion keeps pouring in. In this video Ukrainian president Poroshenko decorates its members for valor.

In the first part of the video one can see Ukrainian soldiers wearing helmets with Nazi swastika and SS insignia, next to wearing Nazi Wolfsangel (wolf trap) symbol on their army coats.

Second part of the video shows Poroshenko praising neo-Nazis as Ukrainian heroes and awarding them with medals for their bravery.

We just wonder for what kind of Azov heroic deeds Poroshenko is proud of?

Is it related to neo-Nazis openly describing torture techniques, organising "human safaris", participation of foreign mercenaries or shocking revelations about tortured and killed anti-Kiev POWs?

US President Barack Obama has attended only 42 percent of his daily intelligence briefings since assuming office more than five and a half years ago, according to a new study.

The Government Accountability Institute, a watchdog non-profit organization, calculated the number of times Obama has received daily oral intelligence briefings, or the Presidential Daily Brief (PDB). The group found that as of Sept. 29, the President had attended 42.4 percent of PDBs during his first term and 41.3 percent during his second term.

The report came days after Obama told 60 Minutes that Director of National Intelligence James Clapper has "underestimated" the strength of Islamic State, the militant group currently the target of US-led airstrikes on its holdings in Syria and Iraq.

"I think our head of the intelligence community, Jim Clapper, has acknowledged that I think they underestimated what had been taking place in Syria," Obama said.

Israeli intelligence has given up to modern trends and introduced an online questionnaire for would-be spies. Unlike the businesslike CIA or MI5 web draft campaigns, Israelis are luring volunteers with mystery halo always shrouding Mossad's activities.

Mossad has become one of the last intelligence agencies in the world that vouchsafed to recruiting volunteer spies online, facilitating the induction process for those who always wanted to be a secret agent, but considered it unattainable.

The agency's online recruiting website, available in Arabic, English, French, Hebrew, Persian and Russian, looks like a creatively designed product, wrapping spy activities in bright and attractive packaging. The intelligence outlet calls on to potential candidates to "create history," make their life and "join the invisible to make the impossible."

The internet resource contains general information about Mossad, its history, directors and an initial online job application. In case a candidate is invited for an interview, there are three more detailed forms to be completed by hand: a medical confidentiality/information authorization, security questionnaire and another security questionnaire for a spouse/partner.

The promotional campaign of the Mossad recruitment site also implied production of a short video depicting the secretive activities of the agency's members, dealing with high-tech equipment such as drones and communication devices, called to inspire espionage enthusiasts to join Mossad ranks.

By Larry Birns COHA Director; Frederick B. Mills, COHA Senior Fellow and Professor at Bowie State University; and Ronn Pineo, COHA Senior Fellow and Professor at Towson University

The Washington Post editorial, "Venezuela doesn't deserve a seat on the UN Security Council," combines ad hominem attack with misinformed smears. The Post's views appear to have been formed by uncritically accepting all of the propaganda offered up by the right-wing opposition press in Venezuela.

It should be beneath the Post to denigrate the recently elected Venezuelan president, Nicolás Maduro, as an "economically illiterate former bus driver." Despite his lack of training in economics, Maduro is right that Venezuela is facing what amounts to internal economic warfare, with business hoarding, currency fraud, and contraband trading. The economic policies of Maduro, and those of former President Hugo Chávez, have certainly been experimental, even trial and error, but these policies have also reduced poverty by half and expanded access to the social goods long denied to millions of ordinary Venezuelans. These are real gains in terms of human development that are all too easily dismissed by the Post.


The Post might have mentioned that some of the "economic pragmatists" it champions are precisely those whose ideologically driven bad advice sent the global economy in its recent free fall. Deregulation of the financial sector was an epical disaster, in the United States, in Latin America, and around the world, yet orthodox economic advisors continue to call for free market solutions to any and all economic problems. This is really bad advice, and people around Latin America realize it: three-quarters of the region is governed by left-wing governments, which appropriately see a larger role for the state in guiding their economic fortunes.

As the Obama Administration prepared to bomb Syria without congressional or U.N. authorization, it faced two problems. The first was the difficulty of sustaining public support for a new years-long war against ISIS, a group that clearly posed no imminent threat to the "homeland." A second was the lack of legal justification for launching a new bombing campaign with no viable claim of self-defense or U.N. approval.

The solution to both problems was found in the wholesale concoction of a brand new terror threat that was branded "The Khorasan Group." After spending weeks depicting ISIS as an unprecedented threat - too radical even for Al Qaeda! - administration officials suddenly began spoon-feeding their favorite media organizations and national security journalists tales of a secret group that was even scarier and more threatening than ISIS, one that posed a direct and immediate threat to the American Homeland. Seemingly out of nowhere, a new terror group was created in media lore.

The unveiling of this new group was performed in a September 13 article by the Associated Press, who cited unnamed U.S. officials to warn of this new shadowy, worse-than-ISIS terror group:

While the Islamic State group [ISIS] is getting the most attention now, another band of extremists in Syria - a mix of hardened jihadis from Afghanistan, Yemen, Syria and Europe - poses a more direct and imminent threat to the United States, working with Yemeni bomb-makers to target U.S. aviation, American officials say.

At the center is a cell known as the Khorasan group, a cadre of veteran al-Qaida fighters from Afghanistan and Pakistan who traveled to Syria to link up with the al-Qaida affiliate there, the Nusra Front.

But the Khorasan militants did not go to Syria principally to fight the government of President Bashar Assad, U.S. officials say. Instead, they were sent by al-Qaida leader Ayman al-Zawahiri to recruit Europeans and Americans whose passports allow them to board a U.S.-bound airliner with less scrutiny from security officials.

AP warned Americans that "the fear is that the Khorasan militants will provide these sophisticated explosives to their Western recruits who could sneak them onto U.S.-bound flights." It explained that although ISIS has received most of the attention, the Khorasan Group "is considered the more immediate threat."

The sudden reversion of Washington to a 'war on terror' pretext for intervention in Syria has confused western audiences. For three years they watched 'humanitarian intervention' stories, which poured contempt on the Syrian President's assertion that he was fighting foreign backed terrorists. Now the US claims to be leading the fight against those same terrorists.

But what do Syrians think, and why do they continue to support a man the western powers have claimed is constantly attacking and terrorising 'his own people'? To understand this we must consider the huge gap between the western caricature of Bashar al Assad the 'brutal dictator' and the popular and urbane figure within Syria.

If we believed most western media reports we would think President Assad has launched repeated and indiscriminate bombing of civilian areas, including the gassing of children. We might also think he heads an 'Alawi regime', where a 12% minority represses a Sunni Muslim majority, crushing a popular 'revolution' which, only recently, has been 'hijacked' by extremists.

The central problem with these portrayals is Bashar's great popularity at home. The fact that there is popular dissatisfaction with corruption and cronyism, and that an authoritarian state maintains a type of personality cult, does not negate the man's genuine popularity. His strong win in Syria's first multi-candidate elections in June dismayed his regional enemies, Israel, Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Turkey; but it did not stop their aggression.

Syrians saw things differently. Bashar was thought to maintain his father's pluralist and nationalist tradition, while modernising and holding out the promise of political reform. Opinion polls in Syria had shown major dissatisfaction with corruption and political cronyism, mixed views on the economy but strong satisfaction with stability, women's rights and the country's independent foreign policy. The political reform rallies of 2011 - countered by pro-government rallies and quickly overshadowed by violent insurrection - were not necessarily anti Bashar.

The Syrian Muslim Brotherhood and other sectarian Islamist groups did hate him, along with the secular state. Yet even these enemies, in their better moments, recognised the man's popularity. In late 2011 a Doha Debates poll (created by the Qatari monarchy, a major backer of the Muslim Brotherhood) showed 55% of Syrians wanted Assad to stay.

At least three people have been killed in a bomb attack in Peshawar in northwest Pakistan, officials say. Nine others were injured in the blast which took place in the morning near the city's railway station.

Officials said a convoy of the paramilitary Frontier Corps (FC) was the apparent target. Peshawar has borne the brunt of militant attacks in recent years but violence has dropped dramatically since a military offensive in June.

If the convoy is confirmed as the target it would be the first major attack on the military in Peshawar since the assault was launched against militants in their stronghold of North Waziristan.

The BBC's M Ilyas Khan in Islamabad says grenade attacks and targeted killings have already resumed in the city. Peshawar police chief Ijaz Khan told the media that 45kg of explosives had been packed in a vehicle which was remotely exploded.

Mushtaq Ghani, information minister for Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province of which Peshawar is the capital, said a woman was among the three dead in the blast.

Television pictures showed the charred and twisted frame of an Frontier Corps vehicle which was still on fire. Reports said one FC soldier was among those killed.

The dead woman was said to be travelling in an auto-rickshaw which was also hit by the explosion, and parts of its engine were strewn across the road.

The Ecuadorean president said that the new Obama-sponsored leadership centers are an obvious plan to intervene in democratic Latin America countries
Ecuador's President Rafael Correa criticized on Saturday a new U.S. government plan to intervene and weaken Latin American governments.

Correa said that Obama's intention to create six innovation centers for educating new "leaders" in Latin America, Sub-Saharan Africa, Middle East, and Asia, was clearly intended to interfere with Latin American countries.


"What they want is to intervene in Venezuela, Bolivia, Ecuador, because they say we attack freedom of speech; but go and see for yourselves who are the owners of media in United States," said Correa.

On Tuesday President Barrack Obama said that his government will support civil society in countries where freedom of speech and association are threatened by the governments.


"We're creating new innovation centers to empower civil society groups around the world," said Obama during his speech in a plenary session of the Clinton Open Initiative. "Oppressive governments are sharing worst practices to weaken civil society. We're going to help you share the best practices to stay strong and vibrant."


President Correa hit back "This is part of the conservative restoration: the insolent announcement of intervention in other countries." He added "Let us live in peace and respect the sovereignty of our countries."