In an obscene development, a Monsanto executive is winning this year's "Nobel Prize of agriculture" - the prestigious World Food Prize - for creating GMOs. Receiving it legitimizes the sort of rampant genetic modification Monsanto pioneered, and helps validate a ruthless business model that impoverishes farmers and monopolizes our food.

If that wasn't baffling enough, the founder of Syngenta, the same biotech giant joining Bayer in suing Europe to keep selling bee-killing pesticides, will also win the prize - and with it, a share of the $250,000 prize money. We cannot allow this prize to legitimize frankenfoods and bee killers. The ceremony is in less than two weeks, so we need to act now.

The War on Terrorism ... or whatever.

"U.S. hopes of winning more influence over Syria's divided rebel movement faded Wednesday after 11 of the biggest armed factions repudiated the Western-backed political opposition coalition and announced the formation of an alliance dedicated to creating an Islamist state. The al-Qaeda-affiliated Jabhat al-Nusra, designated a terrorist organization by the United States, is the lead signatory of the new group." 1

Pity the poor American who wants to be a good citizen, wants to understand the world and his country's role in it, wants to believe in the War on Terrorism, wants to believe that his government seeks to do good ... What is he to make of all this?

For about two years, his dear American government has been supporting the same anti-government side as the jihadists in the Syrian civil war; not total, all-out support, but enough military hardware, logistics support, intelligence information, international political, diplomatic and propaganda assistance (including the crucial alleged-chemical-weapons story), to keep the jihadists in the ball game. Washington and its main Mideast allies in the conflict - Turkey, Jordan, Qatar and Saudi Arabia - have not impeded the movement to Syria of jihadists coming to join the rebels, recruited from the ranks of Sunni extremist veterans of the wars in Chechnya, Iraq, Afghanistan, and Libya, while Qatar and the Saudis have supplied the rebels with weapons, most likely bought in large measure from the United States, as well as lots of of what they have lots of - money.

This widespread international support has been provided despite the many atrocities carried out by the jihadists - truck and car suicide bombings (with numerous civilian casualties), planting roadside bombs à la Iraq, gruesome massacres of Christians and Kurds, grotesque beheadings and other dissections of victims' bodies (most charming of all: a Youtube video of a rebel leader cutting out an organ from the chest of a victim and biting into it as it drips with blood). All this barbarity piled on top of a greater absurdity - these Western-backed, anti-government forces are often engaged in battle with other Western-backed, anti-government forces, non-jihadist. It has become increasingly difficult to sell this war to the American public as one of pro-democracy "moderates" locked in a good-guy-versus-bad-guy struggle with an evil dictator, although in actuality the United States has fought on the same side as al Qaeda on repeated occasions before Syria. Here's a brief survey:

Afghanistan, 1980-early 1990s: In support of the Islamic Moujahedeen ("holy warriors"), the CIA orchestrated a war against the Afghan government and their Soviet allies, pouring in several billions of dollars of arms and extensive military training; hitting up Middle-Eastern countries for donations, notably Saudi Arabia which gave hundreds of millions of dollars in aid each year; pressuring and bribing Pakistan to rent out its country as a military staging area and sanctuary.

It worked. And out of the victorious Moujahedeen came al Qaeda.

The Pentagon has confirmed it will not pay death benefits to the families of troops killed in combat during the so-called government shutdown.

With Obama's recent startling admission that he won't approve any measures to partially restore suspended government payments for purely political reasons, that puts the blame for this outrage squarely on his shoulders.

"Unfortunately, as a result of the shutdown, we do not have the legal authority to make death gratuity payments at this time," said Lt. Cmdr. Nate Christensen, a Defense Department spokesman. "However, we are keeping a close eye on those survivors who have lost loved ones serving in the Department of Defense."

The House intends to vote Wednesday to restore funding for the payments.

The best compilation yet of the most controversial footage, proof that we are being lied to. This woman was murdered in cold blood. Will her family ever find justice? This footage shows that there was a second adult in the car. It also shows that her car had no front or rear damage which is odd considering she supposedly drove into concrete barriers by the White House. Why did the cops kill her when they could have just tased her? A witness came out on CNN and said that she saw the cops pull the child out of the car right before they opened fire. How can ANYONE justify this? Some could say that she broke the law but since when was the death penalty proper justice? We hope you can manage to rest in peace Miriam Carey. We're going to do our best to help you try!

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.