
Forty British Royal Marines Reserve (RMR) Commandos from RMR Merseyside are heading back to the Falkland Islands next week 25 years on from the original South Atlantic conflict.

Former French finance minister Dominique Strauss-Kahn was selected September 28 as the new Managing Director of the IMF. The IMF Executive Board said it selected Strauss-Kahn, 58, by consensus to succeed Rodrigo de Rato for a five-year term beginning November 1.

Officers from the United Nations Standing Police Capacity will undergo two weeks of training in transitional justice and other aspects of peacekeeping at the top police leadership centre in the United Kingdom from 8-19 October ahead of deployment to their first mission, revealed senior UN Police officers in New York.

Iran's president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and a delegation of 35 officials arrived Thursday morning in La Paz for a half day visit to Bolivia as part of Teheran's policy to break increasing international isolation, which is welcomed by left leaning regimes in the region anxious to counterweight United States influence.

The Brazilian Lower House Foreign Affairs Committee begun this week to consider the official documents of Venezuela's incorporation to Mercosur, a long delayed process with still an arduous path ahead before its final approval and which has irritated relations between Caracas and Brasilia.
Iran strongly rejected on Thursday Argentine President Nestor Kirchner's claim that the country failed to cooperate in a probe of a 1994 terror bombing in Buenos Aires which left hundreds dead and maimed.
The free trade pact between the United States and Peru won bipartisan support in a crucial Congressional committee this week signaling that some opposition Democrats will be receptive to new trade deals as long as they call on other nations to adhere to international labor and environmental standards.
Current Chilean Ambassador to the United Nations, Heraldo Muñoz, confirmed this week that, in the run up to the Iraq war, the U.S. government made clear to Chile that it risked jeopardizing the Free-Trade Agreement (FTA) between the two countries if it did not support a second resolution in the UN Security Council favoring the U.S. invasion of Iraq.

Standing before the United Nations General Assembly one day after an historic meeting on climate change, the President of Brazil proposed convening in 2012 a summit on the environment, exactly two decades after the landmark international conference met there to produce the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC).

Chile and Uruguay are the least corrupt countries in Latinamerica based on the annual Corruption Perceptions Index (CPI) by Transparency International released Wednesday. At the opposite extreme figures Haiti, Venezuela and Ecuador, with Brazil and Argentina in between.