USA - Barclays Plc, Bank of America Corp, Citigroup Inc and 10 other banks were accused in a lawsuit of conspiring to manipulate ISDAfix, a benchmark used to set rates for interest rate derivatives and other financial instruments. The Alaska Electrical Pension Fund sued yesterday in Manhattan federal court, claiming the banks colluded to set ISDAfix at artificial levels that allowed them to manipulate payments to investors in the derivatives. The banks’ actions affected trillions of dollars of financial instruments tied to the benchmark, the pension fund said. The banks communicated using electronic chat rooms and other means of private communication, typically submitting identical rate quotes beginning at least in 2009, the Alaska fund said.

INDIA/PAKISTAN - Rescue teams are battling to retrieve hundreds of thousands of people stranded by damaging floods in India and Pakistan. The province of Punjab, where rivers are bursting their banks, is the worst-hit area in Pakistan. In Indian-administered Kashmir, the capital Srinagar is submerged with many residents waiting for rescue on rooftops. One week of flooding has left at least 280 people dead in both countries. Army and air force troops worked overnight to rescue marooned residents, officials in Indian-administered Kashmir said. There are fears that heavy rains and flooding could spread south to Pakistan's Sindh province over the next week.

UK - The Scots are on the verge of an act of self-mutilation that will trash our global identity. Right: it’s time to speak for Britain. If these polls are right, then we are on the verge of an utter catastrophe for this country. In just 10 days’ time we could all be walking around like zombies – on both sides of the Scottish border.

UK - The first Scottish referendum poll to see a Yes vote take the lead since the start of 2014 has unnerved traders, seeing sterling tumble. Growing momentum for the pro-independence campaign has alarmed investors, who until now had not believed there was more than an outside chance of a Yes win. “Until recently the polls showed a done deal”, said Michael Saunders, head of European economics at Citi. Valentin Marinov of Citi said that there is a “clear risk of further downside correction”, as sterling could drop further still. Confidence in the pound has been knocked, as a Yes vote "could easily derail the UK economic recovery", said Deutsche Bank analysts.

EUROPE - Despite unveiling a package of interest rate cuts and a new stimulus scheme, the ECB has failed to prevent a "collapse" in euro area investor confidence. A key gauge of euro area confidence saw a "collapse" this month, as efforts to revive the currency bloc failed to excite investors. Falling to its lowest level in over a year, both components of the Sentix Investor Confidence index - assessing the current situation and investors’ six-month expectations - were both in negative territory. The headline reading dropped to 2.7 to -9.8 in September, while analysts had expected to see just a slip in confidence, to 2.0. Sebastian Wanke, senior analyst at Sentix, said that “this constellation signals a renewed recession for the eurozone”. Eurozone growth ground to a halt in the second quarter, statiscians confirmed on Friday.

EUROPE - A new controversy over Germany's austerity dictate has flared up on the eve of the Wales NATO summit. At the occasion of a high-ranking meeting last week, the President of the European Central Bank (ECB) Mario Draghi, characterized Berlin's austerity policy as fatal. However, the German chancellor immediately rejected his call for a change. The French minister of the economy was forced to resign, because of his public criticism of the austerity dictates, which, since the beginning of the year have aggravated the crisis in France.

MIDDLE EAST - Violent turmoil in the Middle East could indirectly lead to millions of people starving from food shortages, research suggests. Scientists have found that the highest concentration of wild crop plants needed to produce new food varieties lie in an area known as the Fertile Crescent. However, this area is also at the centre of a number of civil wars that are placing valuable crop species at risk of extinction. The Fertile Crescent is an ancient area of fertile soil arcing around the Arabian desert from Jordan, Palestine, Israel, Syria, Lebanon, Turkey and ending in Iraq and Iran. It has the largest diversity of 'crop wild relatives' (CWRs) - species closely related to our crops which are needed to create future 'super crop' varieties. These wild relatives of crops grow naturally outside mainstream agriculture and possess a number of useful traits including drought tolerance, yield improvement, and resilience to pests and diseases.

TURKEY - Recep Tayyip Erdogan is making his mark as Turkey’s first directly elected president barely a week after taking the oath of office. The former prime minister is already shifting Turkey away from customs acquired over the nine decades since the end of the Ottoman Empire, a period in which largely secularist elites held sway. In the most symbolic break with the past, Mr Erdogan announced last week that he would not work out of the Cankaya Palace, the seat of the presidency since the era of Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, who founded the modern Turkish state. Meanwhile, Turkish newspapers report that thousands of children whose parents preferred secular institutions have been allocated places at Islamic schools. Mr Erdogan has set out a goal of “raising a religious generation” and pushed through legislation in 2012 that allowed children from the age of 10 to attend state religious schools.

AUSTRALIA - Investigative journalist Frank Walker’s Maralinga is a must-read true story of the abuse of our servicemen, scientists treating the Australian population as lab rats and politicians sacrificing their own people in the pursuit of power. During the Menzies era, with the blessing of the Prime Minister, the British government exploded twelve atomic bombs on Australian soil.

UK - A Peter Pan pantomime in Bournemouth is being used as part of a sophisticated hacking attack from Eastern Europe that is targetting thousands of British businesss. An email claiming to be a £145 invoice for nine tickets to a performance of Peter Pan at the Bournemouth Pavilion theatre contained an attachment that if opened installs a virus onto the receipent's computer. The malware, which the email claims are the tickets for the pantomime performance, captures highly sensitive personal and commericial information including passwords and is almost "undetectable" by current anti-virus software. The email has been targeted at businesses around the UK, breaching firm's electronic defences and spam filters.

RUSSIA/CHINA - It appears there is another nation on planet Earth that is becoming isolated. One by one, Russia and China appear to be finding allies willing to 'de-dollarize'; and the latest to join this trend is serial-defaulter Argentina. As Reuters reports, China and Argentina's central banks have agreed a multi-billion dollar currency swap operation "to bolster Argentina's foreign reserves" or "pay for Chinese imports with Yuan," as Argentina's USD reserves dwindle. In addition, Argentina claims China supports the nation's plans in the defaulted bondholder dispute. Having met 'on the sidelines' in Basel, Switzerland in July, Argentine and Chinese central banks agreed to a currency swap equivalent to $11 billion that Cabinet Chief Jorge Capitanich said could be used to stabilize reserves.

GERMANY - At the NATO summit in Wales, the United States and Great Britain pressured member states to fulfill the 2006 agreement to increase military spending across the alliance to at least two percent of gross domestic product (GDP). So far just five of the 28 NATO countries — the United States, France, Great Britain, Greece and Estonia — adhere to the target.

GERMANY - Conservative members of Chancellor Angela Merkel's coalition put forward a united front at the weekend against recent developments in the city of Wuppertal. Interior Minister Thomas de Maiziere said civilians wearing uniforms bearing the logo "Shariah police" could not simply start patrolling German streets. The groups reportedly hovered around sites like discotheques and gambling houses, telling passers-by to refrain from gambling and alcohol. Wuppertal's police have begun pressing charges. "Sharia law is not tolerated on German soil," de Maiziere told mass-circulation daily Bild on Saturday. "Nobody can take it upon themselves to abuse the good name of the German police."

EUROPE - The eurozone saw no growth whatsoever in the second quarter of this year, as ongoing tensions over Ukraine and weak demand weighed on output. Last month’s preliminary estimate of GDP suggested that growth was at zero, a reading that was confirmed by Eurostat on Friday. The news came a day after the European Central Bank (ECB) made 0.1 percentage point cuts to three of its interest rates, and announced a new stimulus scheme. Separate data released on Friday showed that German industrial production rose by 1.9 percent in July, on a month earlier. The reading was a "strong indication the German economy bounced back into positive growth territory after the unexpected contraction in the second quarter", said Thomas Harjes, of Barclays.

UK - The Queen is said to be privately horrified at the prospect of Scotland voting for independence from the UK. It is believed the referendum – which could make the monarch the last Queen of Scotland – dominated her discussions with Prime Minister David Cameron on his annual visit to Balmoral at the weekend. The growing panic over the break-up of the UK was fuelled by a YouGov poll which put the nationalist Yes campaign ahead by 51% to 49%. Buckingham Palace aides said the Queen had asked for daily updates on the state of the campaigns. A source said yesterday: “The Queen is a unionist, there is now a great deal of concern. If there is a Yes vote that puts us into uncharted territory constitutionally. Nothing is certain and her being Queen of Scotland is not a given.”