
A group of Central American journalists recently visited the Falkland Islands for a week as guests of the Foreign Office together with Bruce Callow from the UK Costa Rica embassy. During Mr Callow wrote in his blog about the experience regarding important issues for the Falklands such as the referendum next March on the future of the Islands.

The Falkland Islands Government accounts showed a surplus of £4.297 million compared to a revised budget surplus of £2.448 million (a positive performance of £3.190 million) for the first three months of the 2012/13 financial year, according to the Financial Management Report presented this week to the Standing Finance Committee.

The Falkland Islands will have a new deep-water port facility capable of meeting the demands of all incumbent industries it was announced following this week's meeting of Executive Council (ExCo).

Argentina finally admitted that the retaining of the training frigate ARA Libertad in Ghana is not an isolated case since the so called ‘vulture’ funds have managed to impound a total of 28 assets including the presidential aircraft Tango 01, bank accounts, property and even a satellite.

Moody's lowered on Thursday Argentina's foreign-currency bond ceiling to b3 from b2 in line with bonds in local currency on growing concerns of market access for the private sector and local governments.

Brazil will renew tax cuts for local carmakers through the end of the year, President Dilma Rousseff announced this week, extending a key economic stimulus measure to help recovery in Latin America's largest economy.

Brazil Central Bank President Alexandre Tombini Tuesday said there are consistent signs that the recovery of economic growth is underway and insisted despite some market skepticism, that inflation is under control.

Chief executives of more than 80 big US corporations, including Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan and Boeing, joined forces today to pressure Congress to reduce the federal deficit with tax reform and spending cuts.

Hong Kong's central bank has intervened in financial markets again, weakening the value of its currency after it jumped in value. This follows similar moves on Sunday and pushes the total cost of intervention in the past week to 14.3bn Hong Kong dollars (1.85bn dollars).

Spanish bank Santander has said its quarterly profits fell by more than 90% after taking provisions for bad property loans in its local market. Net income fell to 100m Euros in the third quarter from 1.8bn Euros in the same period last year, it said.