Russia is sending armed troops to Syria amid escalating violence there, United States military officials told NBC News Friday, in a move certain to frustrate Western efforts to put pressure on the regime of President Bashir Assad. - Moscow has sent a ship carrying a small contingent of combat forces to guard Russia’s deep-water port and military base at the Syrian city of Tartus, the US officials said. The U.S. officials also said Russia has not sent additional attack helicopters to the Syrian government, but replacement parts for the Russian helicopters the Syrians are already flying. It comes after the conflict was declared by France on Wednesday to be a full-blown civil war. The head of the U.N. observers in Syria said Friday a recent spike in bloodshed is derailing the mission to monitor and defuse more than a year of violence and could prompt the unarmed force to pull out.

Andre Pshenichnikov, an Israeli who immigrated from the former Soviet Union, was arrested by the IDF after living for two months in the Dheishe Refugee Camp near Bethlehem and kept in detention for eight days at the police station in the settlement of Kiryat Arba.

He told his police interrogators that he wants to break all ties with Israel, to give up his Israeli citizenship and obtain a Palestinian citizenship instead. Eventually he was released under restrictive conditions and banned from entering the "A" areas of the West Bank pending the end of legal proceedings against him. He was indicted for having entered these "A" areas which Israelis are forbidden to do under military orders. During some of the proceedings at the Jerusalem Magistrates' Court and District Court, representatives of the prosecution asserted that Pshenichnikov had joined the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) but eventually withdrew that charge. Regarding the indictment filed against him, Pshenichnikov is represented by Attorney Andre Rosenthal of Jerusalem. Andre Pshenichnikov, 23, was born in Tajikistan, then part of the Soviet Union. As a child his family moved to Russia. He came to Israel at the age of 13, enlisted in the IDF Signal Corps, after completing three years of mandatory military service, served an additional year and a half under conditions of a career soldier.

Pakistan renews call on the United States to apologize for the US-led forces’ killing of 24 Pakistani soldiers last year. - Speaking to reporters in the Afghan capital Kabul on Thursday, Pakistani Foreign Minister Hina Rabbani Khar said Islamabad will not consider reopening the border crossings used to transfer supplies to the US-led forces deployed in Afghanistan, Reuters reported. From October 2001 to November 2011, Pakistani routes used to serve as the main passageways for the transfer of supplies to the NATO forces. Islamabad closed the border crossings after the Pakistani soldiers were killed in the US-led aerial assaults on two checkpoints on the Afghan border on November 26. Khar said the country will keep the crossings closed unless the US makes an unconditional apology for the attacks and reassures Pakistan that such incidents will never happen again.

Sorry state: Residents from Camden, New Jersey, linger out-
side a deserted discount store

Lined with stores closed down long ago, sad-looking homes and deserted properties they are America's 'forgotten streets'. But one artist is forcing people to take a closer look at the often ignored places hit with financial struggles over the years. Using Google Street View, Doug Rickard was able to capture images from states all over the U.S including Michigan, California, Arkansas and New Jersey - without ever leaving his own home. Using the internet tool, California-born Rickard roamed America's streets for snapshots of run-down neighbourhoods. The thought-provoking images paint a stark picture of the places stuggling to get by following the economic recession.

When Google Street View was launched in 2007, the search engine set out to capture every corner of the country. It sent out cars – each with nine directional cameras mounted on its roof – to every street in the United States. The cameras provided a 360 degree image of the surroundings from a height of around 8.2 feet. Millions of streets were captured by the project, providing a snapshot of America’s neighbourhoods and residents going about their lives.

Rickard trawled through thousands of cities and back roads looking for images that show the bleakness of the country’s 'forgotten' places. He then re-photographed the images in his studio as they appear on the computer screen, giving some of the pictures the impression they have been painted. The detached nature of the camera gives a feeling of alienation throughout the series of coloured photographs, entitled A New American Picture. Many feature the haunting, blurring effect employed by Google to anonymise individuals’ faces. The collection contains images from areas battered by recent crises including Detroit, Michigan and New Orleans, Louisiana. The pictures show loan figures skulking past shabby buildings and through empty parking lots. In others, people are pictured loitering outside closed-down shops in the middle of the day, while children play on grey, abandoned streets.