The Israeli military has hit a target in Syria after a soldier in the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights sustained slight injuries by fire from the Syrian side.

On Wednesday, Tel-Aviv said two mortar shells were fired at an Israeli military post, adding, an Israeli soldier was slightly injured by shrapnel and another suffered from shock.

There have been no reports on whether the shells were fired by Syrian forces or militants fighting against the Syrian government.

On September 12, two mortar shells fired from inside Syria struck an area in the south of the Golan Heights.

An Israeli military spokesman said the mortar shells hit open ground and caused no casualties or damage.

The Israeli secret service has gone to great length to prevent the production of a documentary looking at the lives of its agents from a personal perspective. Filmmakers reportedly saw their interviews canceled under pressure from Mossad.

The TV documentary made by Amnon Levy for Channel 10 takes a focus on the lives of the family members of Mossad agents and what is described as the personal price they pay for their loved ones' secret jobs.

The film does not deal with any state secrets, but despite this the Israeli security agency has been obstructing its production, reports Haaretz newspaper.

"The report deals with the dangers of being a Mossad agent's child," Levy explained. "We talked about facial reconstruction that Mossad agents underwent as part of their change of identity, and examined if the agency used female agents as seductresses.

"At a certain point the organization began to fight us in all possible ways. At the last minute, the evening before or in the same morning of a [scheduled] interview, we received calls canceling the interview, because the interviewees were forbidden to cooperate with us."

The potential interviewees received threatening phone calls and emails from Mossad, the report says.

"My husband, who was an agent years ago, requested permission to grant an interview. The Mossad didn't grant him permission but told him that my daughter and I could be interviewed," an agent's family member told the newspaper. "We spoke about how he wasn't at home, on a completely personal level.

The Netherlands has apologized to Russia for the detention of its diplomat, which violates the Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations, the Dutch Foreign Ministry said.

The apologies came from Dutch Foreign Minister Frans Timmermans, who acknowledged that the diplomatic immunity of Russian minister-counselor Dmitry Borodin was infringed by local police.

Earlier, Dutch officials said that they would apologize only if the inquiry into the incident proved that the Vienna Convention had been violated.

Borodin said he was badly beaten by unidentified men in camouflage uniforms who forced their way into his apartment in The Hague on Saturday evening.

Russia has complained that the diplomat was then handcuffed and taken to a police station where he was held for several hours without explanation.

The Russian Embassy in the Netherlands said that his children, aged four and one, had to spend the night in a police station as well.

Borodin went on to say that the intruders didn't produce any official documents proving that they were from the police. Moreover, they ignored him when he said he was a diplomat, he said.

US Federal Reserve vice chair Janet Yellen has been picked by President Barack Obama to take over as head of America's central bank at what is widely considered to be a crucial period for the country's economy and banking industry.

The 67-year-old New Yorker will become the first woman to hold the Fed post. In May this year President Putin picked Elvira Nabiullina to head up the Russian central bank, becoming the first woman to assume this position in a G8 country

On Wednesday President Obama takes the stage with Yellen and current Fed Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke. He has been commended over his handling of the bank's strategy during the economic recession of the late 2000's, the country's worst since the Great Depression of the 1930's.

Bernanke, whose eight-year term will expire on January 31, is also credited with introducing a wide range of quantitative easing programs that helped pull the United States out of the gutter during that difficult time. Among them are, lending money to banks when the markets froze, reducing the short-term interest rate to almost zero, and buying trillions of dollars in bonds with the aim of reducing long-term borrowing rates.

Yellen was his loyal ally in the quantitative easing program, which has caused a rift between the Federal Reserve board and those voicing concern over the massive bond buying.

President Barack Obama told reporters at the White House on Tuesday that he will discuss the future of his Affordable Care Act with Republican opponents in the House of Representatives only once Congress re-opens the United States government.

At the start of the second week of a widespread government shutdown, Pres. Obama warned House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) during his Tuesday afternoon address that the White House won't negotiate the fate of the president's hallmark "Obamacare" legislation.

One week earlier, a stalemate in Congress was unable to be resolved ahead of a Tuesday morning deadline required to pass a spending bill that would have kept the government fully functioning. Republican critics of Obamacare refused to authorize any budget plan without ensuring the congressionally approved health care act would be defunded.

Obama said Tuesday that he is happy to have a conversation or negotiation with Republican leadership in the house, but such a discussion "shouldn't require hanging the threats of government shutdown or economic chaos" over American people.

"Members of Congress, and the House Republicans in particular, don't get to demand ransom in exchange for doing their job," said Obama. That job, he added, requires those elected officials to pass a budget

"No American president would deal with a foreign leader like this. Most of you would not deal with coworkers or business associates in this fashion, and we shouldn't be dealing this way here in Washington," said the president.

The federal government is shut down, we're about to hit the debt ceiling (with disastrous economic consequences), and no resolution is in sight. How did this happen?

The main answer, which only the most pathologically "balanced" reporting can deny, is the radicalization of the Republican Party. As Thomas Mann and Norman Ornstein put it last year in their book, It's Even Worse Than It Looks, the G.O.P. has become "an insurgent outlier - ideologically extreme; contemptuous of the inherited social and economic policy regime; scornful of compromise; unpersuaded by conventional understanding of facts, evidence and science; and dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition."

But there's one more important piece of the story. Conservative leaders are indeed ideologically extreme, but they're also deeply incompetent. So much so, in fact, that the Dunning-Kruger effect - the truly incompetent can't even recognize their own incompetence - reigns supreme.


To see what I'm talking about, consider the report in Sunday's Times about the origins of the current crisis. Early this year, it turns out, some of the usual suspects - the Koch brothers, the political arm of the Heritage Foundation and others - plotted strategy in the wake of Republican electoral defeat. Did they talk about rethinking ideas that voters had soundly rejected? No, they talked extortion, insisting that the threat of a shutdown would induce President Obama to abandon health reform.

This was crazy talk. After all, health reform is Mr. Obama's signature domestic achievement. You'd have to be completely clueless to believe that he could be bullied into giving up his entire legacy by a defeated, unpopular G.O.P. - as opposed to responding, as he has, by making resistance to blackmail an issue of principle. But the possibility that their strategy might backfire doesn't seem to have occurred to the would-be extortionists.

Even more remarkable, in its way, was the response of House Republican leaders, who didn't tell the activists they were being foolish. All they did was urge that the extortion attempt be made over the debt ceiling rather than a government shutdown. And as recently as last week Eric Cantor, the majority leader, was in effect assuring his colleagues that the president will, in fact, give in to blackmail. As far as anyone can tell, Republican leaders are just beginning to suspect that Mr. Obama really means what he has been saying all along.

New cargo planes on order for the U.S. Air Force are being delivered straight into storage in the Arizona desert because the military has no use for them, a Dayton Daily News investigation found.

A dozen nearly new C-27J Spartans from Ohio and elsewhere have already been taken out of service and shipped to the so-called boneyard at Davis-Monthan Air Force Base in Tucson. Five more are expected to be built by April 2014, all of which are headed to the boneyard unless another use for them is found.

The Air Force has spent $567 million on 21 C-27J aircraft since 2007, according to purchasing officials at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base. Sixteen had been delivered by the end of September.

The Air Force almost had to buy more of the planes against its will, the newspaper found. A solicitation issued from Wright-Patterson in May sought vendors to build more C-27Js, citing Congressional language requiring the military to spend money budgeted for the planes, despite Pentagon protests.

Congress put the brakes on the expenditure, which was the right thing to do according to government watchers such as Mike O'Hanlon of the Brookings Institute. He said the planned additional purchase would have been "simply wasting precious taxpayer money."

The military initally wanted the C-27J because it had unique capabilities, such as the ability to take off and land on less developed runways, according to Ethan Rosenkranz, national security analyst at the Project on Government Oversight. But when sequestration hit, the military realized the planes weren't a necessity, but instead a luxury it couldn't afford, he said.

"When they start discarding these programs, it's wasteful," he said.

O'Hanlon said their near-resurrection was largely due to parochialism.

"It's too bad, and a waste," he said. "I'm not sure the program was ever a white elephant, and yet given budget cuts I'm not sure it should be saved now."

The World Bank is admitting that so-called economic growth in Africa, rooted in privatization and resource extraction by foreign companies, is not benefiting the vast majority of the continent's people.

This comes from an institution has been widely criticized for pushing these very policies of 'growth.'

Despite Africa's much-vaunted 'growth' over the past decade, deep poverty and inequality are "unacceptably high and the pace of reduction unacceptably slow," reads Africa's Pulse, an analysis released Monday by the World Bank. "Almost one out of every two Africans lives in extreme poverty today," and by the year 2030, a vast majority of the world's poor will be located in Africa, the report finds.

Francisco Ferreira, Acting Chief Economist for the World Bank Africa Region, states, "Africa grew faster in the last decade than most other regions," with a steadily climbing GDP noted in the report. Yet, this so-called growth is highly dependent on relatively few commodities sold for export, including oil, metals, and minerals. "Nearly three-quarters of countries rely on three commodities for 50 percent or more of export earnings," the report reads, with countries like Angola and Nigeria depending on oil for up to 97 percent of all exports.

The Social Security Administration has begun warning the public it cannot guarantee full benefit payments if the debt ceiling isn't increased.

When asked by the public, the agency is notifying beneficiaries that "Unlike a federal shutdown which has no impact on the payment of Social Security benefits, failure to raise the debt ceiling puts Social Security benefits at risk," according to a person familiar with the agency directive.

A Russian man who participated in an anti-Kremlin protest has been convicted of "calling for mass riots" and sent for forced psychiatric treatment.

Mikhail Kosenko was one of 28 people arrested after clashes broke out between demonstrators and police at a protest on May, 6, 2012, the eve of President Vladimir Putin's inauguration for a third term.